The March of Progress
What you think it means: This is evolution.
What’s wrong with it: This is not how evolution works.
Despite competition from a little fish with legs, there is no more a potent and popular symbol for evolution than this column of apes striding purposefully into the future. The problem is, that’s exactly what it isn’t. The March of Progress was drawn by illustrator Rudolph Zallinger for the “Early Man” volume of the popular Life Nature Library series by Time-Life books. Faced with the task of compressing several million years of human evolution into a single graphic, Zallinger chose to place the figures in a steady queue, starting with the oldest, and ending with the most recent. The original title was “The Road to Homo Sapiens”, which arguably even more inaccurate than its popular name, as both imply that our species is somehow the culmination of millions of years of directed evolution. The graphic flatters our perception that we are the crown in the tree of life, rather than one of its many side branches. In fact, the original image features fifteen hominids, including a few evolutionary blind alleys. It was not supposed to imply that each one led to the other, or that humans travelled through discrete stages of evolution to arrive where they were today. But, as the book’s author F. Clark Howell noted: “…it was read that way by viewers…. The graphic overwhelmed the text. It was so powerful and emotional”.
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