Living Fossil: A Metaphor’s Travels Across Popular Culture and the Foundations of Darwinian Evolution and Anthropology

Abstract

Throughout the Victorian era, the metaphor “living fossil” repeatedly crisscrossed social and scientific domains. The term existed in popular culture before and after Darwin’s Origin. Most notably, it also operated as two distinct scientific concepts, one introduced by Darwin and another in cultural evolutionists’ depiction of human living fossils. Serving in different ways, living fossils were typically aberrant, persistent and unchanging examples that contradicted an expectation of ongoing change and associated progress. We explore the development and relationships of living fossil applications, focusing principally on Darwin’s concept. In Origin, Darwin deployed living fossils as exceptions that prove the rule of his principles of natural selection and divergence. He structured a case for the causal adequacy of these principles to explain living fossils’ persistence, invariance, and taxonomic positions in gaps between other groups. As other natural historians began discussing living fossils and labeling new ones, Darwin’s concept endured, but was subject to perceivable variation; associations with natural selection or divergence varied greatly and attributes of his living fossil examples were sometimes ignored. Cultural evolutionists adopted a view that human societies developed over time in a unilinear succession of stages. In this view primitive groups, their implements, languages, and cultures, stopped evolving at different points in the past and persisted unchanged into the present. While Darwin’s concept and this anthropological concept were connected associatively to the evolution of languages and to themes of spatial isolation, prolonged stasis and disruption of expected progress, they inherited significantly different theoretical backgrounds and commitments.