What the Ape Man Can Teach Us About a Common Mental Mistake

Pithecanthropus is the ape-man. He’s also known as the Java Man and the Peking Man. Latin-loving scientists call him Homo erectus, Homo modjokertenses, Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, Pithecanthropus robustus, and Pithecanthropus dubius.

He is the creation of Dutch physician Eugene Dubois. In the 1890s, Dubois discovered a few bony remains of a primitive-looking human in the gravels of the Solo River basin in Java, Indonesia. With these remains, he constructed Pithecanthropus and claimed he was the Missing Link that completed Darwin’s theory of evolution.

With Pithecanthropus, he thought he would shake God down from the heavens.

Although the popular science crowd was enthusiastic over the findings, some were dubious of Dubois, including G.K. Chesterton, who objected in The Everlasting Man that those few bones were too “few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of the vast void that lies between man and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors.”

Some might argue that Chesterton was simply too subjectively wedded to the claims of religion to accept the objective findings of science. After all, Dubois, a physician and man of science, engaged in objective research and believed that Pithencanthropus was the Missing Link.

It’s here one finds a central truth that underlies every troubling, annoying, and dangerous person in the history of mankind:

Objectivity is fool’s gold.

No one is capable of absolute objectivity. Anyone who claims absolute (or near-absolute) objectivity for himself ends up like the exuberant prospector in the movies who, after five years of digging in the hot California sun and going months without a decent meal or shower, confidently presents the local banker with a piece of pyrite.

Objectivity is the prized fool’s gold of all fanatics. They claim it and hold it against all hope. They don’t realize that solid objectivity, like real gold, is rare and, more importantly, elusive. As a result, they tend to claim it facilely and refuse to be shaken from any convictions formed with it.

Such was the case with Dubois. He panned for bones in the Solo River, found some nuggets, and used his objective…

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