ABSTRACT
Peter J. Bowler has shown that contingency has been ignored in the early reception of evolution theory, although it constitutes a crucial aspect of Darwin's theory; hence, Bowler speaks of the 'non-Darwinian' revolution. In contemporary Western liberal culture, the belief in a clock-like ordered nature, prevalent in Darwin's youth and singled out for explicit rejection in On the Origin of Species, has been widely replaced by a view of nature as a complex, unstable system, the future of which is contingent upon a multitude of small, unpredictable events. Famously, the debates following the publication of On the Origin of Species focused on Darwin's 'monkey theory', as the descent of all primates from a common ancestor was inaccurately but popularly referred to. Before Darwin, the dual nature of humankind was largely undisputed. Mirror scenes between humans and apes proliferated in the fiction of the last decades, reflecting both anthropological anxiety - the insecurity about human ontology after Darwin's intervention.
