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How science has shifted our sense of identity

Biological advances have repeatedly changed who we think we are, writes Nathaniel Comfort, in the third essay of a series marking Nature’s anniversary on how the past 150 years have shaped science today.
  1. Nathaniel Comfort

    1. Nathaniel Comfort is Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.

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Illustration by Señor Salme

In the iconic frontispiece to Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), primate skeletons march across the page and, presumably, into the future: “Gibbon, Orang, Chimpanzee, Gorilla, Man.” Fresh evidence from anatomy and palaeontology had made humans’ place on the scala naturae scientifically irrefutable. We were unequivocally with the animals — albeit at the head of the line.

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Nature 574, 167-170 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03014-4

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 14 October 2019: The article has been updated to clarify that Alfred Binet’s words originally appeared in the book Les enfants anormaux in 1907. The date of 1914 given in the earlier version was for the English translation.

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