Adam M. Goldstein is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Iona College and an associate editor at Evolution: Education and Outreach, a journal devoted to bringing evolutionary theory to a popular audience. Goldstein studies the history of the philosophy of science, with a particular interest in how chance explains evolution. He has become increasingly obsessed with eradicating the “March of Progress” image, that popular representation of human evolution that shows a monkey-like figure slowly transforming into an upright human being. – Nick Hune-Brown

I.

BELIEVER: Do you remember the last time you encountered the March of Progress image?

ADAM M. GOLDSTEIN: It was actually yesterday. I was organizing my Twitter feed and the Leakey Foundation—this is a foundation that studies human evolution—this is their logo! I just couldn’t think. I couldn’t fathom it.

BLVR: How do you generally react when you see the image?

AG: Sometimes when I see it on billboards around Manhattan or on a poster I can think, “Oh, that’s cute. I see what they’re saying—recumbent bicycles are the best ones or something.” But I have to say, if I have a mission in life, all my scholarly work aside, this is it. I feel such an instinctive… I can’t look at it. It makes me feel this kind of rage.

II.

BLVR: What’s wrong with the March of Progress image?  

AG: The first thing is, it’s racist. It’s really very hard to deny that.

BLVR: Do you mean it was originally intended to be racist when it was first created?

AG: Yes, certainly, certainly. In the March of Progress image, the left-most figure dragging his hands along the ground has always been represented as a black-skinned person. And well before there were evolutionary theories, it’s always been charged by Europeans in the scientific tradition that anyone who isn’t white is on some level a degraded type of human being or a distortion of what is actually human. When evolutionary thinking came about, a primitive person was always seen with black skin and represented usually as some form of ape or monkey. So the image takes up an already existing idea of black-skinned person as inferior and puts it in an evolutionary visual idiom.

III.

BLVR: As a visual explanation of how humans evolved, is there something wrong with the March of Progress?

AG: Yes, the fact is this march of progress thing is scientifically completely wrong. If you look up the term “evolution” in the dictionary it usually does imply a development in stages towards some end point, but biologically evolution as we understand it is not at all like that. There really...