The Ape’s Reflection? 373research on extending his life. Dr. Obispo discovers that the third earl of Gonister in Eng-
land had lived several centuries without any signs of aging, apparently by ingesting carp
guts. Archival records showed that he had fathered children when he was over 100 years
old. (This is a science fiction novel, remember!). Dr. Obispo seduces the millionaire’s mis-
tress (modeled on Hearst’s real mistress, actress Marion Davies), and the millionaire acci-
dentally kills the scientist’s assistant in a jealous rage. He and Dr. Obispo have to flee the
law, so they run to England and try to find out what happened to the third earl of Gonister.
Finally, they break into his castle, and in the basement they find him, still alive and over
300 years old—all grown up to become an adult ape. I’ve spoiled the punch line for an
excellent novel, but it’s worth reading for the richness of detail and the amazing ironies that
Huxley was so great in capturing.
In recent years, even more startling breakthroughs have occurred in molecular genetics.
For centuries, the scientific community was deeply racist, and treated non-white people as
inferior, or even a different species from white people. But the molecules paint a completely
different picture. When you put the DNA of all of the human “races” in the mix with the
DNA of Neanderthals and most of the living species of chimps and gorillas, a surprising
result emerges. As shown in figure 15.11, the genetic differences among all the human “races”
are tiny. All humans are far more genetically similar to one another than the populations of
West African chimps are to one another, and the same is true of other populations of chimps
and gorillas. As anthropologists have been saying for years, human “races” are genetically
FIGURE 15.11. Molecular phylogeny of apes and humans, showing their genetic distance from one
another based on mitochondrial DNA. All human “races” are much more similar to one another than
two populations of gorillas or chimpanzees are to each other. (Modified from Pascal Gagneux et al.,
“Mitochondiral Sequences Show Diverse Evolutionary Histories of African Hominoids,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA 93 [1999], fig 1b: ©1999, National Academy of Sciences USA)