Evolution in Entertainment

To the general public of the 1800s and early 1900s, traveling circuses, sideshows, and wild-west extravaganzas that featured a wide variety of daredevil performances, exotic animals, and gymnastic distractions provided hours of amusement and family fun for all who attended.

With a mostly minimal entrance fee and their ability to travel to different locales (rather than being location dependent), they were likely a welcome distraction for many townsfolk that had never seen such dynamic costumes, creatures, quirky characters, and of course, clowns.

Carnival barkers invited people to “step right up folks!” shouting “come one, come all!” and beckoning many a mistrusting observer inside with the offer of winning some great prize or witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime performance, but mostly to part with their hard-earned money.

Welcome to the Freak Show

Of course, the nature of fallen man being what it is, such circuses tended towards featuring all manner of “colorful,” unusual, and outlandish acts, eventually slipping into more than just the mysterious but ever further towards the strange and outright bizarre.

Indeed, there was a dark side to many of even the most prominent of these traveling shows in the popular sideshow spectacles of the day. Sadly misnamed was the freak show, which featured a wide assortment of people who mostly were the unfortunate victims of medical conditions that were largely untreatable by the experts of the day and unknown by the layperson. These people were quite susceptible to exploitation by those who knew their vulnerability yet provided community, care, and cash to a whole contingent of people who were otherwise largely outcasts from mainstream society.

Indeed, the sideshow performers often created great bonds of friendship with one another—some even got married and had children, which may not have been the case should they never have had the opportunity of entering a more welcoming social environment.

And yet, aside from the obvious ongoing humiliation of having a physical abnormality not only displayed and highlighted—in public advertising both in print and open-air venues—there was an even more insidious focus that was often emphasized about these so-called “sideshow freaks”—the common claim to them being like animals.

De-humanizing the Disenfranchised

Many sideshow performers had what was known as a pitch card, essentially a photograph or illustration of them, with a brief depiction about their appearance and supposed personal background, which were largely fiction.

These provided a way for them to make a few extra nickels on the side and brought larger crowds through cheap advertising. A look at just a few of them reveal the often-dehumanizing nature of the names given to them and the common creatures they were compared to: the Lobster Man, Mule-Faced Woman, Dog-Faced Man, Spider Woman, Hopp-the Frog Boy, Lion-Faced Man, Camel Girl, Wolf Boy, Dog Girl, or Wolf Man. And of course, this was all in addition to the more well-known “bearded ladies,” giants, little people, and such.

Enter the Ape-Men

But the most negatively influential depictions of all were those used to attempt to demonstrate the connection between all people to supposed animal ancestors (rather than the biblical understanding that we were specially created in the image of God) through the portrayal of many of these folks as apelike, and specifically as evolutionary missing links.

It should be noted that the promotion of so-called ape-people, ape/human hybrids, and so-called “missing links” were already gaining popularity among the more liberal and/or atheistic-minded of the Western intelligentsia decades before Charles Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859, which dealt almost exclusively with so-called “lower animals” (let alone his volume on supposed human evolution released in 1871, titled, briefly, The Descent of Man).

The Evolution of Evolution

The “urban legend” often promoted today that Darwin “discovered” the story of evolution while traveling around the world because of the scientific “facts” he observed is historical hogwash. These naturalistic ideas had been creeping around the scientific community for a while. After all, Charles’ own great-grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had written a full-blown treatise on evolution called Zoonomia in 1794 that contained most of the essential elements taught by modern-day evolutionists (albeit in a more primitive way).

Darwin popularized a specific mechanism (natural selection) that could supposedly justify the concept that different kinds of creatures could be modified through an indefinite number of small changes to produce entirely different kinds of creatures with entirely new forms, functions, and features from its ancestors.

Of course, that idea has been shown to be false: natural selection only “selects” from genetic information already in existence; it does not originate never-before-seen variation. Creationists actually embrace natural selection as part of the creation model as it accounts for the enormous variation we see within the various kinds of creatures God created.

But evolutionists once believed it could do the “heavy lifting” of generating novel variation, but that was proven false. Hence the popularization of today’s neo-Darwinian theory, which attempts to include genetic mutation (essentially spelling mistakes made within DNA) as a creative mechanism for novel genetic information upon which natural selection operates.

And although many modern evolutionists still claim this one-two punch to have been the way the biodiversity of life evolved on earth, this of course has also never been observed, which means it’s a faith position rather than a purely scientific one.

It should be noted that “natural selection” is so equated with the concept of biological evolution that they are often used interchangeably, both in popular-level references and even in scientific literature. Keep this in mind as we explore further . . . but now back to our historical carnival ride.

Influencing the Average

The popularization of these evolutionary ideas among the average person in the 1800s, who generally were churchgoers (and certainly not involved in studying any kind of alleged scientific evolutionary explanations for life and humans), often came through more mundane means, such as the circuses and carnivals that were growing in popularity everywhere.

Arguably the most famous circus of all was Barnum and Bailey’s, eventually touted as “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Barnum had featured diseased, deformed, and diminutive individuals in exhibits for years in different venues. In fact, Barnum had “The Wild Man of the Prairies,” described as the “deformed but talented man-monkey Hervey Leach” as far back as the 1840s. Promotional material for Leach’s 1846 appearance at London’s Egyptian Hall asked,

Is it an animal? Is it human? . . . Or is it the long sought for link between man and the Ourangoutang, which naturalists have for years decided does exist, but which has hitherto been undiscovered?1

And this date further demonstrates that evolutionary stories had been promoted for decades prior to Darwin’s initial book launch.

Zip—The What Is It?

However, only months after Charles Darwin published his highly influential Origin of Species in 1859, Barnum released posters depicting another “Man Monkey,” similarly described as looking somewhat human but with the anatomy of an orangutan, which was declared to be “nothing less than the ‘missing link.’”2.

To increase the public’s perception as to the validity of their claims, the circus advertised that the “savage creature” was “a man-monkey captured while swinging from trees in an African jungle”3 and had been examined by their “most scientific men” and identified as a “connecting link between the wild native African and the brute creation.”4

And many of the advertisements used the demeaning, non-specific title “What is it?” to pique the general public’s curiosity while advancing the notion that there was supposed scientific evidence for the story of human evolution one could observe right before their own eyes!

Promoted as “Zip the Pinhead” or “Zip the What is it?” his real name was William Henry Johnson. Zip was the son of former slaves William and Mahalia Johnson and had six siblings. Far from being born in the jungles of Africa, he was actually an African-American born in rural Liberty Corners, NJ. And far from being any kind of ape-human hybrid, he was likely the victim of the brain disorder known as microcephalicism (often called “pin-head” or “cone-head” disease back then). He also had a form of dwarfism.

Barnum encouraged Zip to dress in a loincloth and lean on a stick (to emphasize that bipedalism hadn’t fully developed in him yet) or put on his most-famous outfit—a furry monkey suit—and to grunt and screech like an animal, all to play up the missing-link angle.

The simple, good-natured Johnson happily went along with the charade throughout his life, so much so that according to an April 26, 1926, New York Times article reporting his death,5 he’d actually offered himself as scientific evidence of a “missing link” during the famous so-called Scopes monkey trial.

By the time Zip passed away from pneumonia at the age of 81, he had been used to convince millions of people he was in fact a genuine ape-man, a missing link that “confirmed” the story of evolution as fact and the Bible’s history of humanity as false. Apparently, Zip knew this was untrue, as his sister testified that he’d said to her, “Well, we fooled ’em a long time” before he died.6

Next week: Part 2, Tragic Tales of Evolutionary Exploitation