
It's a Sin
As 'It’s a Sin' comes to the end of its run on Channel 4, and we celebrate LGBTQ+ History month,
...
Feb
19
Feb
24
One hundred and
fifty years ago, on 24 February 1871,
the first edition of Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man was published in
London. It shocked many readers. While
there had been years of controversy about the origins of mankind, much of it
generated by vigorous responses to Darwin’s earlier book On the Origin of
Species (1859), this was the book in which Darwin unambiguously spoke his
mind about human evolution. In it
he described what he knew about the emergence of humans from animal ancestors,
the physical characteristics of different peoples, the development of language
and the moral sense, the relations between the sexes in animals and in humans,
and a host of similar topics that blurred the boundaries between ourselves and
the animal world. It was a big serious book that would hardly have stirred the
Victorian intellectual world if it had been about sponges or orchids. But to describe
human beings—Queen Victoria, Ulysses S. Grant, Dante Gabriel Rossetti--- as
little more than grown-up animals was dynamite.
The push back was immediate. Harper’s Weekly complained that, “Mr.
Darwin insists on presenting Jocko as almost one of ourselves.” The Truth Seeker called the book “hasty” and
“fanciful.” The London Times deplored
the book’s publication, saying “To put [these views] forward on such incomplete
evidence, such cursory investigation, such hypothetical arguments as we have
exposed, is more than unscientific—it is reckless.” A correspondent in The Guardian appealed directly to the
Bible. “Holy Scripture plainly regards man’s creation as a totally distinct
class of operations from that of lower beings.”
In satirical journals of the day, amusing cartoons lampooned Darwin as an
ape himself. “'A Venerable Orang-Outang.
A Contribution to Unnatural History” was the caption to a hairy Darwin in The
Hornet on 22 March 1871.
Others, nevertheless,
welcomed Darwin’s depth of learning, sincerity, and rationality. In an article
on “Darwinism and Divinity” published a year later, Leslie Stephen --the public intellectual and father of the
novelist Virginia Woolf-- spoke for many of the coming generation by
asking “What possible difference can it make to me whether I am sprung from an
ape or an angel?” In Stephen’s eyes, the Descent
of Man expressed an important new feeling that science was the place to
look for answers about human origins. Over the subsequent century and a half,
the intellectual world has more or less come to agree with Stephen. Biologists
today consider our animal origins as well-established facts, supported by
fossil remains, genetic similarities, and many other features.
What was in this book that seemed so
provocative to Victorians? It was printed in two volumes and published
by John Murray, the London firm that had previously published the Origin of
Species. Unlike Origin which
has proven to be a classic text that transcends its time and place, Descent
was deeply embedded in the Victorian social and moral context. Darwin began by relating the many
incontrovertible anatomical features common to both animals and mankind. Then he
turned to the mental powers, stating decisively, “there is no fundamental
difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties” (Descent
1: 66). He daringly proposed that religious belief was nothing more than a
primitive urge to bestow an external cause on otherwise inexplicable natural
events, comparing it to the “love of a dog for its master.” From religion it
was but a small step to the moral world. The phenomena of duty, self-sacrifice,
virtue, altruism, and humanitarianism were, he thought, acquired fairly late in
human history and not equally by all tribes or groups. Some societies displayed
these qualities more than others, he noted; and it is clear that he thought
there had been a progressive advance of moral sentiment from what he called the
early “barbaric” societies, such as Ancient Greece or Rome, to the civilized
world of 19th century England that he inhabited. In this manner,
he kept the values of the English middling classes to the front of the minds of
his readers as representative of all that was best in nineteenth-century
culture. The higher moral virtues were, for him, self-evidently the values of
his own class and nation.
Also in Part 1 Darwin
discussed possible intermediaries between ape and human, and mapped out (in
words) a provisional family tree, in which he took information mostly from
fellow evolutionists like Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Henry Huxley. In truth, Darwin found it difficult to give an
actual evolutionary tree to humans. Although there were, by then, a few
fragments of Neanderthal skulls available for study in European museums, these
had not yet been conclusively confirmed as from ancestral humans. For the
second edition of Descent of Man he
asked Huxley to fill this gap with an up-to-date essay about fossil finds. Darwin
could only guess at possible reasons for human ancestral forms to have
abandoned the trees, to lose their hairy covering, and become bipedal.
Part II covered Darwin’s idea of
sexual selection that is today understood today as a feature of animal courtship
and mating behavior. It seems curious that such a large part of the book was
dedicated to a lengthy exegesis of this form of selection in birds, insects,
and animals. Yet Darwin claimed its importance lay being a powerful factor in
the diversification of human beings into what were then considered to be
separate races. Sexual selection was “the most powerful means of changing the
races of man that I know.”
It was an idea he had been
nurturing for many decades. He proposed that all animals, including humans,
possess many trifling features that are developed and remain in a population
solely because they contribute to reproductive success. These features were
inheritable (as Darwin understood it) but carried no direct adaptive or
survival value. The textbook example is the male peacock that develops large
tail feathers to enhance its chances in the mating game even though the same
feathers actively impede its ability to escape from predators. The female
peahen, argued Darwin, is attracted to large showy feathers, and if she can,
will choose the most glamorous mate and thereby pass his characteristics on to
the next generation. It was a system, he stressed, that depended on individual
choice rather than survival value.
In humans, he claimed physical
differences between groups were similarly caused by sexual selection. Preference
for certain skin colours was, for him, a good example. Early men would choose
women as mates according to localized ideas of beauty, he suggested. The skin
colour of an entire population would gradually shift as a consequence. “The
strongest and most vigorous men…would generally have been able to select the
more attractive women…who would rear on average a greater number of children” (Descent
2: 368-9). Different societies would have dissimilar ideas about what
constituted attractiveness and so the physical features of various groups would
gradually diverge through sexual selection alone. According to Darwin, sexual
selection among humans would also affect mental traits such as intelligence,
maternal love, bravery, altruism, obedience, and the “ingenuity” of any given
population; that is, human choice would go to work on the basic animal
instincts and push them in particular directions.
Here, we see Darwin at his
most Victorian. His ideas about biology were inextricably tied up in his views
about human society and gender differences among human beings. Notoriously, he
believed that sexual selection enhanced male superiority across the world. In
early human societies, the necessities of survival, he argued, would result in
men becoming physically stronger than women and that male intelligence and
mental faculties would improve beyond those of women. In civilized regimes it
was self-evident to him that men, because of their well-developed intellectual
and entrepreneurial capacities, ruled the social order. After publication,
early feminists and suffragettes bitterly attacked this doctrine, feeling that
women were being naturalised by biology into a secondary, submissive role. Indeed,
some medical men assumed that women’s brains were smaller than those of men and
were eager to adopt Darwin’s suggestion that women were altogether less evolutionarily
developed. For many, it seemed at that time, that the ‘natural’ function of
women was to reproduce, not to think.
Darwin also attempted to
explain the racial hierarchy of the British empire. Notably he used Herbert
Spencer’s terminology of “the survival of the fittest” that he had at first
been reluctant to adopt. As he saw it, the various tribes of mankind had
emerged through competition, selection, and conquest. Those tribes with little
or no culture (as determined by Europeans) were likely to be overrun by bolder
or more sophisticated populations. “All that we know about savages . . . show
that from the remotest times successful tribes have supplanted other tribes” (Descent
1: 160). Darwin was convinced that many of the peoples he called primitive
would eventually be overrun and destroyed by more advanced races such as
Europeans: particularly the Tasmanian, Australian, and New Zealand aborigines.
This was a playing out of the great law of “the preservation of favoured races
in the struggle for life.” His emphasis cast the notion of race into
biologically determinist terms, reinforcing contemporary ideas of an inbuilt
racial hierarchy.
Such words merged easily into contemporary
ideologies of empire. The concept of natural selection as applied to mankind in
Descent of Man seemed to vindicate
continuing contests for territory and the subjugation of indigenous
populations. Formulated in this way, Darwin’s concept of natural selection was
a clear echo of the competitive, industrialised nation in which he lived. It
comes as no surprise that his views seemed to substantiate the leading
political and economic commitments of his day. Indeed, his book can be seen as a primary
motor for social Darwinism during the fifty years from 1880 to 1930 or so. These
ideas were put into action by the businessmen, philanthropists and business
magnates who masterminded the development of North American industry.
The political consequences of Darwin’s Descent of Man continued. Many of Darwin’s remarks captured anxieties that were soon made manifest in the eugenics movement. His cousin Francis Galton had little hesitation in applying Darwin’s ideas to establish the eugenics movement. Believing that human populations could direct their own future through selective breeding, Galton campaigned tirelessly to reduce breeding rates among what he categorised as the poorer, irresponsible, sick, and profligate elements of society, and that the ‘more highly-gifted men’ should have children and pass their attributes on to the next generation. Galton did not promote incarceration or sterilisation as ultimately adopted by the United States and elsewhere during the early years of the 20th century, nor did he conceive of the possibility of the whole-scale extermination of an entire people, as played out during World War II. But he was a prominent advocate of taking human development into our own hands and the necessity of counteracting the likely deterioration of the human race. History shows that Descent was a highly significant factor in the emergence of social Darwinism and eugenics.
So, in its way, Darwin’s Descent
of Man can be regarded as a text for the times as well as the missing half of the Origin of Species–the
half that Darwin delayed for twelve years because it applied the new ideas of
competition and selection to humankind and human society. It gave scientific validity to common ideas
in Victorian society and while it can hardly account for all the racial
stereotyping, nationalist fervour and harshly expressed prejudice found in the
years following publication there can be no denying its impact in providing
biological backing for notions of racial superiority, gendered typologies and
class distinctions.
Yet it remains a book to celebrate with interest. Thinking about the Descent of Man as a historical document allows insight not only into Darwin’s mind but also into the times in which he lived, very different from today. His conclusions were simultaneously honest and bold: “we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man, with all his noble qualities .. . . still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” (Descent 2: 404)
Janet Brown is Aramont Professor in the History of Science, Harvard University and the author of the prize-winning biography, Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place.
Images: Statue of Charles Darwin outside Shrewsbury public library (formerly Shrewsbury School where he was educated). Credit: Robin Weaver / Alamy Stock Photo
Inset: Darwin portrayed as an ape in a cartoon in the Hornet magazine of 22 March 1871. Credit: Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo