Helena and the Monkeys

One of the wonderful things about the house that Rita and her father built a dozen years ago here in the jungle south of Florianópolis, is that monkeys come to visit from time to time.  They are small monkeys, marmosets really (I think black tufted marmosets, but many distributions maps don't have that species coming that far south), and occupy more or less the ecological niche that squirrels do in the United States. but it's still pretty exciting to be sitting outside reading a book, only to hear the whistling call of a monkey and to see a family playing in the trees.

Day before yesterday, Helena saw the monkeys for the first time.  Seeing a little monkey in the trees isn't really all that easy, and you have to learn a lot about perception before you can pick out the difference between monkey-brown and tree-trunk brown, but once she learned to see them, she'll often see them before we do.  She starts by staring, then shouts, and then claps three or four times in a row.  And strangely enough, the monkeys seem to like Helena Iara as much as she likes them.  They have come back many more times recently than they ever did before.

So of course... Helena and I had to talk about Darwin as we swung on the hammock and looked into the jungle this morning.  I explained a little bit about the theory of evolution, about the finches of the Galápagos and moths in England during the industrial revolution, but mostly I told her about how mad people got, and many continue to be, about Darwin's argument that man is a primate, that Helena's monkey friends are also her very, very distant cousins.

I think the problem is basically this: many people want to think that we are different from the animals in our essence, in something that precedes us, something given by God.  I argued to Helena that it's actually the reverse: if we are different from animals, it isn't because of what someone (God, providence) did to us, but what we do, what we create.  The difference between men and animals comes after, because of what we do, not what we are.