The Ascent of Nature in Darwin's Descent of Man
[In the following essay, Durant studies the development of Darwin's arguments for the transmutation of human beings through sexual and natural selection in The Descent of Man.]
What a chance it has been . . . that has made a man.
(Darwin, E Notebook, 68-69)
It is a fact familiar to all historians of science that Darwin was extremely slow to put his most important ideas into print. Having become a convinced transmutationist in 1837, he made such rapid progress over the next few years that he soon foresaw the prospect of writing a work that would revolutionize natural history. Yet it was not until 1844 that he produced an essay that was suitable for publication by his family in the event of his death; and fourteen years later, the unexpected arrival of Wallace's short paper "On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type" found him still hard at work on the definitive version of his theory. Only when faced with the awful prospect of being pre-empted by the younger man did Darwin finally act with a real sense of urgency to prepare an "Abstract" of his views for immediate publication. It is widely agreed that the reasons for this long delay have to do as much with Darwin's cultural context as with the state of his own opinions. The scientific community in early Victorian Britain was largely hostile to the sort of high-level theorizing in which Darwin indulged, and it was particularly opposed to the idea of the natural transmutation of species. In this situation Darwin was driven to playing a waiting game by the obvious absence of a suitably receptive audience for his views. Opting to pursue his heterodox ideas in secret, he developed a private dialogue with a number of key contemporaries who have been described as constituting the "cultural circle" within which the earliest drafts of the theory of evolution by natural selection were written (Manier 1978). By engaging with the members of this cultural circle in the safety of his study, Darwin was able both to advance a theory and to formulate a strategy for "going public" when the time was right.1
One of the first casualties of Darwin's developing strategy for the eventual presentation of his views to the scientific community was the sensitive question of man's place in nature.2 Privately, Darwin was never in any doubt about where he stood on this question. From the very outset, the transmutation notebooks treated man and mind as part of the natural world. For Darwin, man was at once a fertile source of insights into the rest of the world of life and an important illustration of the process of transmutation. In particular, the different human races were an ideal model for the generation of several varieties or species from a common ancestor; human behavior provided valuable clues to the relationship between habit and instinct, and more generally to the role of an organism's experience in the process of transmutation; and man was a crucial test case for the all-important principle of continuity in nature. Within a year of beginning his systematic investigation of transmutation, Darwin had decided that these and related issues deserved separate treatment in a new series of notebooks. The two notebooks on man that were filled between July 1838 and August 1839 (approximately) are among the most important records we possess of Darwin's early work, and their publication in 1974 was a milestone in the recent history of Darwin studies (Gruber and Barrett 1974, pp. 259-381). Yet the bulk of the material contained in these notebooks was carefully excluded from even the earliest and most tentative of the extended drafts of his theory that Darwin wrote between 1938 and 1858—his 1842 Sketch, 1844 Sketch, and Natural Selection. In reply to a query from Wallace in 1857 about the scope of his planned work on transmutation, Darwin clarified the strategy that had shaped these early drafts: "You ask whether I shall discuss 'man'. I think I shall avoid the whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices; though I fully admit it is the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist" (Life and Letters of Charles Darwin 2:109). Darwin was determined that nothing should stand in the way of his argument for transmutation, and two years later this determination led him to exclude from the Origin virtually any reference to "the highest and most interesting" problem of all. But in the end he could not leave man out altogether. In the name of honesty, as he later confessed, Darwin wrote what was to become the most over-quoted understatement in the entire literature of evolutionary theory: "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" (Origin 1859, p. 757).
After more than two decades of painstaking preparation, this was a strategic masterstroke. In a single sentence Darwin had hinted at the real extent of his theoretical ambitions while providing almost nothing by way of a visible target for his critics to aim at. Of course, this did not prevent the scientific community from taking up the question of man's place in nature after 1859. As Darwin's opponents had no difficulty in discerning the broader implications of his views, so many of his supporters were keen to carry the battle into fields that the Origin had so studiously avoided. In the early 1860s Huxley (1863a), Lyell (1863), Wallace (1864), and others opened up the question of the antiquity and origin of man for public debate. But although Darwin applauded his friends' efforts from the sidelines, once again he chose to play a waiting game. In the decade after the publication of the Origin he concentrated almost exclusively on defending his theory of transmutation; and only when this argument had been largely won—and, in the process, Darwin's reputation within the scientific community had been enhanced enormously—did he satisfy professional and public interest in his views on man. With the publication of two closely related works, the Descent (1871) and the Expression (1872), what Howard Gruber has termed the "two grand detours" of Darwin's career were finally over; at last the full scope of his theoretical vision had been revealed (Gruber and Barrett 1974, p. 24).
The interval between Darwin's earliest speculations and his final publications on the question of man's place in nature spans the greater part of his productive life. Throughout this period, observations and reflections on man were an integral part of a steadily developing program for a revolutionary natural history founded upon the naturalistic principle of transmutation. But at the same time the ideologically explosive issue of man's place in nature was sequestered from the core issue of transmutation within a far-sighted strategy for presenting this program to the scientific community. Darwin's private dialogue with his cultural circle; his increasingly confident command of an argument that embraced the worlds of life, man, mind, and morality; and his organization of this argument within a strategic framework that was eventually encoded in the Origin and the Descent: these are the central themes with which an adequate account of Darwin's views on man must deal. Accordingly, this paper begins with a review of man's place in Darwin's notebooks, and goes on to consider the way in which the major themes of these notebooks came to be presented to the public. It will be argued that, partly because of the heavy self-restraint that he exercised for most of his professional life, the Descent reveals more clearly than any of Darwin's other works the structure and scope of his transmutationist program for natural history.
It was Josiah Wedgwood's opinion that a two-year voyage of discovery would do his nephew no harm at all: "The undertaking would be useless as regards his profession," he wrote to Robert Darwin, "but looking upon him as a man of enlarged curiosity, it affords him such an opportunity of seeing men and things as happens to few" (Brent 1981, pp. 116-117). This perceptive remark captures in essence what the voyage of the Beagle did for Charles Darwin. Of men and things he saw enough to last a lifetime; and when in 1836 he came to look back upon his experiences it was the sight of true savages in Tierra del Fuego, as well as the beauty of primeval forests in Brazil and the effects of a violent earthquake at Concepcion, which stood out in his mind (Diary, pp. 425-430).
Darwin's first encounter with the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego in 1832 was to stay with him for the rest of his life. At the close of the Descent, almost forty years later, he recounted the experience with a freshness that belied the passage of time:
The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind—such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to every one not of their own small tribe. He who has seen a savage in his native land will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. (2:404)
Darwin had not drawn this transmutationist conclusion from his encounter with the Fuegians at the time. In fact, when he had approached the natives in December 1832, his first thoughts had been of the perfectibility of man. Yet as he tried to grasp the significance of the enormous gulf that separated Fuegians from Englishmen, he resorted to an analogy with the world of nature. "I would not have believed," he wrote in his diary at the time, "how entire the difference between savage and civilized man is. It is greater than between a wild & domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is greater power of improvement" (Diary p. 119). This parallel between wild and domesticated animals, on the one hand, and savage and civilized man, on the other, was central to Darwin's subsequent accounts of his experience. It embodied his belief that man was a single species, and that human history was, in the main, a passage from barbarity to civility. In addition, it captured his conviction that on Tierra del Fuego he had seen man in a true state of nature. Visiting the region again in 1834, Darwin was moved to pen a gloomy portrait of a people whose skill, "like the instinct of animals, is not improved by experience" (Diary p. 213); and two years later he returned to the contrast between wildness and domestication:
Of individual objects, perhaps no one is more sure to create astonishment, than the first sight in his native haunt, of a real barbarian,—of man in his lowest & most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, & then asks, could our progenitors be such as these? Men,—whose very signs & expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference of savage & civilized man. It is the difference between a wild & tame animal: & part of the interest in beholding a savage is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, the rhinoceros on the wide plain, or the hippopotamus wallowing in the mud of some African river. (Diary, p. 428)
Reading this passage with the benefit of hindsight, we find it difficult to forget that it was written less than a year before Darwin opened his first transmutation notebook. The vision of man as an animal, with his own nature and habits; the interest in the relationship between instinct and reason; and the employment of the familiar analogy between domestication and civilization: all these were to find their place in the later notebooks. Yet Darwin drew no transmutationist conclusions from his encounter with the Fuegians before the Summer of 1837. Up until then, he appears to have been preoccupied with the relationship between savagery and civilization; and even here he seems to have been certain of little except the fact that the one had given rise to the other.3 There is no doubt, however, that Darwin's interest in the question of man's place in nature was awakened by his first shocking encounter with the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. As his views changed in the months after his return to England, so he came to place a new significance upon these primitive people. Within a year of opening his first transmutation notebook, he had begun to compare them, not with the lion, the tiger, the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus, but rather with the monkey and the ape. The difference was crucial.
Recent research by Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and others has helped to clarify man's place in the development of Darwin's theory of transmutation, and nothing more than the briefest of reviews will be attempted here. Although the subject of man was not involved directly in Darwin's conversion to transmutationism, it was an integral part of his subsequent inquiries (Herbert 1974, 1977). In the opening pages of the first transmutation notebook, Darwin was already working with a complex theory according to which sexual generation and geographical isolation played key roles in the development of a number of distinct varieties or species from a common ancestor (Kohn 1980). Man was relevant to this theory in at least two ways. First, as a relatively young species that had become differentiated into a number of geographically distinct races, man provided clear evidence for the reality of transmutation.4 Second, as the only species whose mental processes (as opposed to mere behavior) could be studied directly, man provided unique insights into the role of habit in the process of transmutation. Sandra Herbert has argued convincingly that it was Darwin's increasing interest in the role of behavior in the generation of adaptation that led him to undertake an expanded program of reading in the Spring and Summer of 1838, and that it was in the course of this reading that he encountered Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population. "Thus," Herbert writes, "because of the enormous effect of Malthus on Darwin's work, biology remains permanently indebted to the field of political economy, as it does to the ability and willingness of certain individuals to transgress the boundaries between fields" (1977, p. 216).5
It is clear that, from the very outset, Darwin had no hesitation in using his own species as a source of insights into the rest of the world of life. In this sense, the idea that man was an animal, to be studied and known in the same way as any other, was not so much a conclusion of the theoretical endeavors of the notebooks as it was a precondition for them. But although Darwin took for granted an essentially naturalistic perspective on man, as his inquiry developed he began to explore its wider implications—if people were animals, then they must be the products of transmutation; if they were to become extinct, then perhaps they would be replaced by other, similar beings; and if they were to survive, presumably they would continue to change (B 169, 214-215, 227-232). These and similar ideas in the second half of the first transmutation notebook marked the beginning of Darwin's systematic investigation of man's place in nature. Significantly, this investigation was conducted in the form of a private dialogue between Darwin and his imaginary critics. At the heart of this dialogue lay Darwin's dissent from a prevailing anthropocentrism that virtually deified man by setting him apart as a creature possessed of unique qualities not amenable to scientific analysis. Reason, will, consciousness, morality: these and other similar attributes were widely regarded as the distinguishing marks of man. But for Darwin they constituted a direct challenge to a naturalistic view of the world of life as a single domain, characterized by the possession of common properties and powers, and subject to universal natural laws. It was toward meeting this challenge that virtually the whole of his work on man was ultimately directed.6
Darwin soon settled upon his general approach to the question of man's place in nature. In a key passage in the second transmutation notebook, he summed up as follows the position that he was to hold for the rest of his life:
Once grant that species and genus may pass into each other... & whole fabric totters & falls.—Look abroad, study gradation, study unity of type, study geographical distribution, study relation of fossil with recent. The fabric falls! But man—wonderful man "divino ore versum coelum attentior" is an exception.—He is mammalian,—his origin has not been indefinite.—he is not a deity, his end under present form will come, (or how dreadfully we are deceived) then he is no exception.—He possesses some of the same general instincts all & feelings as animals. They on other hand can reason—but man has reasoning powers in excess, instead of definite instincts—this is a replacement in mental machinery so analogous to what we see in bodily, that it does not stagger me.—What circumstances may have been necessary to have made man! Seclusion want &c & perhaps a train of animals of hundred generations of species to produce contingents proper.—Present monkeys might not,—but probably would,—the world now being fit, for such an animal—man (rude, uncivilized man) might not have lived when certain other animals were alive, which have perished. Let man visit Ourang-outang in domestication, hear expressive whine, see its passion & rage, sulkiness & very extreme of despair; let him look at savage, roasting his parent, naked, artless, not improving, yet improvable and then let him boast his proud preeminence.—not understanding language of Fuegians puts on par with monkeys. (C 76-79)
This passage contains a number of basic Darwinian themes—first, the dissent from anthropocentrism; second, the very tentative reconstruction of the circumstances that may have made man; and third, the reinstatement of the principle of continuity by means of the analogy between apes and savages. These themes were central to Darwin's defense of a transmutationist philosophy of man's place in nature, and it is worth considering each of them in turn.
Darwin's opposition to anthropocentrism took a characteristic form. Looking at man "as a Naturalist would at any other Mammiferous animal," he set out to demonstrate that there was no difference in kind between animal nature and human nature. This task necessarily involved the criticism of a whole series of conventional dualisms. For example, faced with the familiar contrast between animal instinct and human reason, Darwin argued that animals possess "some slight dash of reason" while people were "creatures of habit" (M 70). Throughout the Summer of 1838, Darwin explored the interrelationships between habit, instinct, memory, and reason, in order to show that even the most advanced mental powers were no more than a smooth extension of capabilities found throughout the animal kingdom. Significantly, it was at this time that he adopted what he termed a "materialist" position. Not pretending that he was able to divine the ultimate nature of reality, Darwin insisted nonetheless on the naturalist's right to presume that matter, when appropriately organized, could think.7 This denial of the dualism between the mental and the physical underlay his use of animal and human expression as the basis for a natural history of the mind. Darwin's method was quite simple. Having identified particular mental and emotional states with their corresponding expressive signs, he traced their descent through groups of related organisms. Thus human feelings such as love, hate, anger, and fear were treated as discrete organic entities (often called instincts), and shown to have clearly discernible roots in the animal world. "The whole argument of expression," Darwin wrote, "more than any other point of structure takes its value from its con-nexion with mind (to show hiatus in mind not saltus between man and Brutes) no one can doubt this connexion" (M 151). In such ways, Darwin undermined the anthropocentric position, replacing it with the outlines of a unified framework embracing the whole of animate life under the aegis of natural law.
Darwin complemented his theoretical attack on anthropocentrism with an attempt to demonstrate how, as a matter of historical fact, man had arisen from the animal world. Here, however, he soon encountered difficulties. To begin with, he had toyed with the idea that man was a necessary stage in the progressive development of life on earth, but by the end of the first transmutation notebook (B) he had given up this notion in favor of the more radical view that man was caught up in the web of time and chance.8 On this view, there had been room in the economy of nature for a creature such as man, and (other things being equal) if Homo sapiens were to disappear, a similar animal might eventually come to take its place; but the details of the process were neither predictable in advance nor, necessarily, discoverable in retrospect. This was the basis for Darwin's exclamation: "What circumstances may have been necessary to have made man!" (C 78). As he reflected on the contingencies of human origins, Darwin recognized the need to prescribe his explanatory task with some care. Returning to this theme in the fourth transmutation notebook, he wrote:
What a chance it has been, (with what attendant organization, Hand & throat) that has made a man.—any monkey probably might, with such chances be made intellectual, but almost certainly not made into man.—It is one thing to prove that a thing has been so, & another to show how it came to be so.—I speak only of the former proposition.—as in races of Dogs, so in species & in man. (E 68-69)
Realizing how very slight was his ability to reconstruct the circumstances that had made man, Darwin became preoccupied with establishing the fact of man's animal ancestry, and with illustrating in very general terms what a historical account of this ancestry, were one available, would be like. In this task the role of analogy was crucial—"as in races of Dogs, so in species & in man"—and this brings us to the final theme in the passage under discussion, namely Darwin's reinstatement of the principle of continuity.
The analogy between apes and savages, enunciated clearly for the first time in the C Notebook, but repeated several times thereafter, served Darwin well as a substitute for the historical account of man's place in nature that he could not provide. As part of his investigation of behavior, Darwin had begun watching the primates at the London Zoo. This experience had put a new complexion on his understanding of the lives of primitive people. Rethinking some of his experiences aboard the Beagle, Darwin came to see savages as symbolic not only of the state of nature but also of the historical links between animals and man. By placing the Fuegians midway between apes and Englishmen, he gave himself a concrete observational basis for the analogical reconstruction of human origins; and at the same time, he tapped a powerful source of cultural imagery with which to convey his unorthodox views.9 Darwin's awareness of the heuristic significance of his analogy is evident in the following extract from the first notebook on man:
Nearly all will exclaim, your arguments are good but look at the immense difference between man, forget the use of language & judge only by what you see. Compare Fuegian & Ourang-outang, & dare to say differences so great . . . 'Ay Sir there is much in analogy we never find out'. (M 153)
Darwin's commitment to the principle of continuity was as strong as his conviction that civilized man was the most recent and the most advanced product of a long process of progressive development; and both were embodied in this evocative analogy between apes and savages.
Darwin's opposition to anthropocentrism, and his preoccupation with establishing the principle of continuity, gave to his early writings on man's place in nature their most distinctive aspect. For in his concern to bridge the gulf between nature and man he consistently interpreted animals and people in terms of each other. On the one hand, human thoughts and actions were explained in terms of animal instinct, and on the other, animal behavior was explained in terms of human thoughts and feelings. Of course, the result was a convergence of animal and human nature in accordance with the principle of natura non facit saltum. In the notebooks on man, Darwin probed beneath the superficial rationality of human life to expose its irrational and impulsive foundations. He turned not only to savages but also to such groups as children and the insane for evidence of the existence of instincts; and he began to sketch out plausible mechanisms for the development of the more complex mental faculties. For example, he argued that the moral sense or conscience had its origins in the interplay between instinct, memory, and reason. Indeed, by making use of the principles of associationist psychology, he was able to suggest how, from comparatively simple beginnings, even the most elevated precepts of morality and religion might have been produced.10 This was the reductive side of the argument. But even as he lowered man's mind into nature, Darwin raised the minds of the other animals to meet it. Thus, at the same time that human conscience was resolved into simpler, instinctive elements, animals were endowed with a moral sense. Commenting on the behavior of the Wedgwood family's pet dog, for example, Darwin wrote in the first notebook on man: "I feel sure I have seen a dog doing what he ought not to do, & looking ashamed of himself.—Squib at Maer, used to betray himself by looking ashamed before it was known he had been on the table,—guilty conscience" (M 24). A month or two later, he returned to this subject: "What difference is there between Squib after having eaten meat on table, & criminal, who has stolen. Neither, or both, may be said to have fear, but both have shame" (N 25). Here, Darwin's dependence upon a human standard for his analysis of animal expression was particularly clear, for without having known what it felt and looked like to be ashamed it would have been impossible for him to have recognized the signs of canine conscience. This principle applies to the bulk of the work on animal and human behavior in the notebooks. Setting out to locate in animals the seeds of every major human faculty, Darwin inevitably painted much of nature in human colors. This is evidenced by the very terms in which animal behavior was reported. Apes were described as affectionate, passionate, sulky, and despairing; dogs were said to feel courage, shame, jealousy, and joy; and even the lowly wasp was endowed with intellect (C 77-79; M 23-24, 63, 84, and 149; N 2, 44). This descriptive language was an integral part of Darwin's theoretical enterprise, for it was only by simultaneously demoting man and promoting animals that he achieved his naturalistic synthesis. The following is an example of the two tendencies at work in the second notebook on man:
The tastes of man, same as in Allied Kingdoms—food, smell (ourang-outang), music, colours we must suppose Pea-hen admires peacock's tail, as much as we do.—touch apparently, ourang-outang very fond of soft, silk handkerchief—cats & dogs fond of slight tickling sensation.—in savages other tastes few. (N 64)
Thus was anthropomorphic zoology combined with zoomorphic anthropology in effecting the unification of animals and man, matter and mind, nature and morality.
Darwin was well aware of the anthropomorphism involved in his analysis of the relationship between animals and man. In the second notebook on man he suggested that "arguing from man to animals is philosophical . . .", since man was "a 'travelling instance' a 'frontier instance', for it can be shown that the life and will of a conferva is not an antagonist quality to the life & mind of man" (N 49). Darwin had been reading Sir John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, and he had come across a reference to Bacon's "travelling instances", in which the nature or quality under investigation "travelled" or varied in degree. In such cases, Herschel had argued, the natural philosopher was able to trace "that general law which seems to pervade all nature—the law, as it is termed, of continuity" (1831, p. 188). In other words, by describing man as a travelling instance in nature Darwin was invoking the principle of continuity to justify his extension to other animals of capabilities more commonly associated with man. Man was a limiting case in nature an extreme example of laws, properties, and powers common to the whole domain of animate life. This was the central assumption, and from it there followed the methodological principle that prior knowledge of human nature—whether derived from observation or from introspection—was a legitimate source of insights for the naturalist. Thus Darwin's anthropomorphism was the corollary of his rejection of anthropocentrism, and this rejection in turn followed from his meta-theoretical commitment to the principle of continuity in nature.
It has been argued that while Darwin's theoretical program involved the closest integration of man with nature, his strategy for presenting this program to the scientific community dictated that the question of man's place in nature be deferred in favor of the central issue of transmutation. This decision cost Darwin dear. The Origin was a work of iron self-discipline, and only in its closing paragraphs did it provide so much as a glimpse of the larger naturalistic vision that was its ultimate inspiration. Moreover, it seems that the long years of concealment caused Darwin to neglect and even to devalue his early work on man. In 1864, for example, he wrote to Wallace, congratulating him on the appearance of an article on human origins and offering him the use of his accumulated materials on the subject: "Do you intend to follow out your views," he wrote, "and if so, would you like at some future time to have my few references and notes? I am sure I hardly know whether they are of any value, and they are at present in a state of chaos" (ML 2:33). While the terms of this offer must be interpreted with caution (Darwin's relationship with Wallace over the question of priority was always difficult, and in addition he was often disarmingly modest about his achievements), they are clearly worlds away from the early theoretical notebooks. Even at this comparatively late stage, it appears that Darwin had no definite plans for putting his ideas on man into print. On the contrary, his thoughts were fully taken up with the preparation of the Variation and it was only when this work was finished that he turned at last to man.
The Descent is an enigmatic book. One of the most eagerly awaited and (in retrospect, at least) significant works in the history of biology, its publication was nevertheless something of an anticlimax. Surveying the literature in 1958, Alvar Ellegård noted "a slight tone of disappointment in many reviews of the book" (1958, p. 296); and a similar tone is detectable in a number of more recent historical assessments.11 Certainly, the Descent provided obvious grounds for criticism. Lacking both the elegance and the authority of the Origin, it appeared to struggle with a mass of material that was never quite under complete control. Indeed, to many readers it appeared to consist of two completely different works bound together. Taking up this point in his review, Wallace suggested that for his second edition Darwin might consider separating the material on human evolution from that on sexual selection in animals, bringing out two distinct volumes (Wallace 1871, p. 180). But Darwin did not take this advice, and his second edition appeared in 1874 as a single volume containing almost five hundred pages on the courtship and mating habits of animals.
Perhaps even more surprising than the form of the Descent was the fact that much of its content, particularly on the subject of man's place in nature, was unoriginal. Only too well aware of this fact himself, Darwin informed his readers at the outset that, had he known earlier of Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (first edition, 1868), he might never have completed his own work: "Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived," he wrote, "I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine" (Descent 1: 4). In fact, Haeckel was only one of many authors who by 1871 had published their views on the antiquity and origin of man and society, and Darwin drew on a large number of them for his own account. From Boucher de Perthes, Lubbock, and Lyell he took evidence concerning the great antiquity of man (Descent 1: 3); from Haeckel, Huxley, and Vogt he obtained support for the descent of man from animals (chap. 1); from Lubbock, Maine, McLennan, Spencer, and Tylor he borrowed ideas on the early evolution of society (chap. 2); and from Bagehot, Galton, Greg, and Wallace he drew ideas relevant to the application of the principle of natural selection to mental and social phenomena (chap. 5). In all these fields, then, the Descent covered ground with which its better-informed readers were already quite familiar.
The task of criticizing the Descent is easy, but it can be very misleading. Certainly the book was not Darwin's most impressive achievement, but neither was it merely a derivative account of human origins tacked together with an apparently irrelevant and inordinately long-winded discussion of sexual selection in animals. On the contrary, it is best described as the missing half of the Origin. Complementing the limited naturalism of Darwin's most famous book, it sought to integrate the realms of life, man, mind, and morality within a single compass. In this sense, the Descent was nothing less than the fulfillment of the original program of the early notebooks. Of course there were significant differences between the two. The notebooks were a record of the intellectual adventure of a young man at the peak of his power, whereas the Descent was the altogether more cautious and less radical product of late middle age. But for all that it lacked both the fire of the notebooks and the finesse of the Origin, the Descent bore a closer resemblance to Darwin's early naturalistic vision than anything else that he ever published. Its theme was the unity of man with the rest of the evolving world of animate life on earth, and although it was written in the light of the evolutionary anthropology of the 1860s, it followed fairly closely the arguments that Darwin had rehearsed in private in the late 1830s.
In the late 1860s, far more than in the late 1830s, Darwin found it relatively easy to establish man's physical affinity with the rest of the animal world. Following the notorious dispute between Huxley and Owen over the hippocampus major earlier in the decade, there had appeared a succession of works testifying to the close anatomical similarities between apes and man. Drawing on these works in the Descent, Darwin dispensed with comparative anatomy in a short introductory chapter. He dwelt far longer on the question of mind, however. On this, one of the most controversial issues since the publication of the Origin, there was still nothing like a consensus within the scientific community. Although Spencer and others were moving towards a naturalistic psychology, many even among Darwin's inner circle of supporters withheld their consent from this project. In the later 1860s, for example, not only did the Catholic zoologist St. George Mivart campaign with some success on behalf of a sharp distinction between body and soul, but also Lyell refused to accept a naturalistic account of the human mind. Worst of all, from Darwin's point of view, was the fact that by the end of the decade the cofounder of the theory of natural selection had defected from the ranks of the naturalists over this very issue. Wallace's conversion to spiritualism was a major blow to the program that Darwin had hinted at in the closing paragraphs of the Origin, which had called (among other things) for a psychology "based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation" (Origin 1859, p. 757).12 It was to the task of making good this program that the Descent was chiefly devoted.
Darwin introduced his discussion of psychology in the Descent by reasserting his commitment to the principle of continuity: "My object . . . ," he wrote, "is solely to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties" (Descent 1:35). In accordance with the method of the notebooks, Darwin rested his case upon a judicious blend of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic arguments. Savages, who were said to possess smaller brains and more prehensile limbs than the higher races, and whose lives were said to be dominated more by instinct and less by reason than those of civilized people, were placed in an intermediate position between nature and man; and Darwin extended this placement by analogy to include not only children and congenital idiots but also women, some of whose powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation were "characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation" (Descent 2:326-327). Conversely, each of the major human mental attributes was located firmly in the animal world. As in the notebooks, so in the Descent, Darwin drew no distinction between the observation of behavior in an animal and the ascription to it of the appropriate (that is, human) mental or emotional experience. Animals felt pleasure and pain, happiness and misery; they felt jealousy and pride, and were capable of both magnanimity and revenge (1:39-48). All the higher animals, Darwin suggested, possessed similar senses, emotions, and faculties, "though in very different degrees" (1:48-49); and even the most elevated of human capabilities, such as perfectibility, language, and the moral sense, had their analogues elsewhere in nature.
Darwin's program for a natural history of mind is well illustrated by the way in which he dealt with religion. Faced with the difficult task of providing a naturalistic account of religious belief, he turned first to savages in order to discover the simplest and most primitive forms of the phenomenon. Leaning heavily on the work of the evolutionary anthropologists, he suggested that religious ideas originated in people's earliest attempts to understand the world. McLennan had argued that the simplest hypothesis to occur to savages was "that natural phenomena are ascribable to the presence in animals, plants, and things, and in the forces of nature, of such spirits prompting to action as men are conscious they themselves possess" (Descent 1:66). Such animism (whose logic was startlingly similar to that of Darwin's comparative psychology), was seen as the basis for a succession of more sophisticated beliefs—fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. With this conclusion established, Darwin turned to the animal kingdom for more clues. Now that religion had been defined as little more than the tendency to project subjective experience into nature, might not some animals be fairly described as religious? Darwin continued as follows:
The tendency in savages to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed: my dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day: but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and no stranger had a right to be on his territory. (Descent 1:67)
With reasoning like this it is not difficult to turn one's pets into passable philosophers, and once this has been done the transition from animals to man presents few serious problems. A little further on, Darwin suggested that "the deep love of a dog for his master" was analogous to a person's sense of devotion to his God (1:68). Since the beliefs of savages had already been reduced to the level of crude superstition, and the behavior of domesticated animals was now elevated to that of spirituality, Darwin's readers were left in no doubt as to the true origins of religion.
Having established the principle of continuity in relation to the mental, moral, and social capacities of animals and man, Darwin went on in Chapter 4 to reconstruct the probable course of human development. People varied greatly both in body and mind, and they tended to increase beyond the means of subsistence. Hence they were subject to natural selection. This agency, together with other influences such as the inherited effects of habit, had modified man's ape-like ancestors into progressively more upright, more intelligent, and more social creatures. The outlines of Darwin's argument were clear enough, but the details proved far more difficult to establish. As in the notebooks, so now, Darwin found it impossible to specify with any degree of precision the particular forces that had made man. Indeed, he confessed that natural selection was incapable of accounting for many aspects of the human condition (Descent 1:152-153). Unlike Wallace, however, Darwin did not use this confession as a justification for abandoning a naturalistic perspective on man. Instead, he resorted to what had hitherto been a rather minor element within his transmuta-tionism, namely the idea of sexual selection. This idea was the keystone of the Descent, for it helped to secure the unity of nature and man in a fashion perfectly consonant with the rest of Darwin's theoretical synthesis.
The idea of sexual selection had its roots in Darwin's early cultural circle. In his famous Zoonomia, for example, Erasmus Darwin had suggested that the widespread contest among males for the possession of females had as its final cause, "that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved" (1794-1796, 1:503). The same idea was contained in fragmentary outline in the transmutation notebooks, and it occupied a coherent though subordinate place in the 1842 Sketch, the 1844 Essay, Natural Selection, and the Origin.13 Sexual selection involved reproductive competition between individuals of the same species and sex. Darwin recognized two quite distinct forms of such competition—"male combat" and "female choice"—and in the Descent he described each of these processes with the help of exactly the same analogy that he had used in his defence of natural selection. In the Origin he had made much of the comparison between artificial and natural selection. In the Descent he wrote:
In the same manner as man can improve the breed of his gamecocks by the selection of those birds which are victorious in the cock-pit, so it appears that the strongest and most vigorous males, or those provided with the best weapons, have prevailed under nature, and have led to the improvement of the natural breed or species. (1:258-259)
Moving on to the second aspect of the theory, Darwin simply extended the analogy with domestication one stage further. He continued:
In the same manner as man can give beauty, according to his standard of taste, to his male poultry .. . so it appears that in a state of nature female birds, by having long selected the more attractive males, have added to their beauty. No doubt this implies powers of discrimination and taste on the part of the female which will at first appear extremely improbable; but I hope hereafter to shew that this is not the case. (1:258-259)
Darwin applied the theory of male combat to those species in which the male was larger and more aggressive than the female, or in which he possessed distinctive armor or weaponry; and he invoked the theory of female choice wherever the male was distinguished by color, ornamentation, or song. The difference between these theories was rather great, for while the one was simply an analogical extension of the idea of natural selection to cover the case of intra-specific male competition, the other was a far more literal transfer of the idea of artificial selection into the natural world. According to Darwin, many female animals literally chose their sexual partners on grounds of subjective preference; and what is more, they did so with sufficient single-mindedness to stamp their likes and dislikes upon future generations. He wrote: "It would even appear that mere novelty, or change for the sake of change, has sometimes acted like a charm on female birds, in the same manner as changes of fashion with us" (Descent 2:230).
Darwin's preoccupation with the theory of sexual selection in the Descent undoubtedly disconcerted many of his readers, yet the theory occupied a central place within his larger program. First, it bolstered the claims of evolutionary naturalism in the face of widespread criticism; second, it reinforced the all-important principle of continuity between animals and man; and third, it provided a versatile, not to say protean, source of solutions to some of the more problematic aspects of man's place in nature. In connection with evolutionary naturalism, sexual selection provided Darwin with a welcome explanation for many phenomena with which natural selection was unable to cope (Kottler 1980, pp. 205-206). In particular, it answered the arguments of those natural theologians who continued to cite the existence of beauty in nature as an objection to Darwinism. For example, the Duke of Argyll made much of the argument that, in the case of the humming birds, "Mere ornament and variety of form, and these for their own sake, is the only principle or rule with reference to which the Creative Power seems to have worked in these wonderful and beautiful Birds"; and he suggested that Darwinian natural selection provided no explanation whatever for such phenomena (1867, pp. 232-234). Darwin's reply illustrates very clearly the importance of the theory of sexual selection within his naturalistic synthesis:
The Duke of Argyll says,—and I am glad to have the unusual satisfaction of following for even a short distance in his footsteps—'Ί am more and more convinced that variety, mere variety, must be admitted to be an object and an aim in Nature.' I wish the Duke had explained what he here means by Nature. Is it meant that the Creator of the universe ordained diversified results for His own satisfaction, or for that of man? The former notion seems to me as much wanting in due reverence as the latter in probability. Capriciousness of taste in the birds themselves appears a more fitting explanation. (Descent 2:230)
Here the logic of Darwin's position was completely consistent. Just as the idea of God as cosmic craftsman had been replaced in the Origin by the selecting power of nature, so the idea of God as cosmic artist was replaced in the Descent by the selecting power of animals. Interestingly, the confusion that had been created in the minds of many readers by the one metaphor extended also to the other (Young 1971). For example, one reviewer of the Descent found in the theory of female choice clear evidence of "a cause which will seem to most men more needful of explanation and more worthy of it, than the effect itself." Seeing in the aesthetic instincts of animals clear evidence of the handiwork of God, the reviewer decided that the Descent was "a far more wonderful vindication of Theism than Paley's Natural Theology" (Anon. 1871, pp. 319-320). This extraordinary conclusion was made possible because the natural theologian used an anthropomorphic analogy to interpret the phenomena of nature in terms of the transcendent will of God, while Darwin used the same device to interpret the same phenomena in terms of immanent powers and laws. It was around this rather tricky distinction that a great many of the Darwinian debates of the late nineteenth century ultimately revolved (Durant 1977, pp. 84-96).
Sexual selection not only answered the natural theologians but also strengthened the links between animals and man. Indeed, the account of female choice in the Descent constituted an almost endless series of variations on the theme that animals were far more like people than they might appear. "With respect to animals very low in the scale," wrote Darwin in his discussion of the natural history of mind, "I shall have to give some additional facts under Sexual Selection, shewing that their mental powers are higher than might have been expected" (Descent 1:35-36). Darwin consistently described animal reproduction in terms drawn from the world of Victorian courtship and marriage; he compared the sexual ornamentation of many males with the gaudy appearance of savages; and he used a human standard in order to establish the nature of the mental processes that operated throughout the animate world. In a passage on sexual selection among birds, for example, Darwin explained the logic of his position in the following words:
We can judge .. . of choice being exerted, only from the analogy of our own minds; and the mental powers of birds, if reason be excluded, do not differ fundamentally from ours .. . If this be admitted, there is not much difficulty in understanding how male birds have gradually acquired their ornamental characters. (Descent 2:124)
If this be admitted . . . In fact, many of Darwin's contemporaries were unwilling to grant as much as this, and as a result the theory of sexual selection met with considerable skepticism.14 It is important to notice, however, that the idea of female choice was of a piece with the rest of Darwin's comparative psychology, and indeed with the whole of his evolutionary thought. For in the end it was simply the most overtly voluntaristic interpretation of a fundamentally anthropomorphic analogy between nature and human artifice.
After an enormously detailed survey of sexual selection in the animal kingdom, Darwin turned once again in the closing chapters of the Descent to man. Armed with a new and powerful explanatory device, he suggested that many distinctive human characteristics were the combined result of male battle and both male and female choice. Darwin was a master of the art of storytelling; in his hands the theory of sexual selection was made to deliver a series of plausible explanations of what were assumed to be the distinct natures of men and women. Thus, by suggesting that brain as well as brawn had been important in male combat, he accounted for man's superiority over woman in both physical and mental powers (Descent 2:328-329); and by simply reversing the roles of the sexes when it came to mate selection, he reconciled the theory of "female choice" (sic) with the obvious and widespread subjection of women (2:371-372). Men's superior strength, he argued, had given them the power of sexual choice, and as a result women had become progressively more beautiful. But at the same time, women had retained a degree of sexual choice as well—as was evidenced, for example, by the existence of male adornments such as the beard. In equally ingenious ways, Darwin accounted for temperamental differences between the sexes; for racial variations in hair distribution and color, skin color, and so on; and even for a number of universal human attributes, such as musical abilities and language. To illustrate the enormous power of sexual selection, he compared it with the unconscious human selection that was responsible for the continual transformation of domesticated animals. "Each breeder," he wrote, "has impressed . . . the character of his own mind—his own taste and judgment—on his animals" (Descent 2:370). In just the same way, and just as unconsciously, the human race had molded itself down the generations in conformity to its own changing inclinations and ideals.
Darwin had now come full circle. Having begun by applying the model of artificial selection to nature, he had returned to man, rediscovering in human history the very process with which he had commenced his investigation. In the long chain of this argument, the theory of sexual selection was a key link not only between animals and man, but also between past and future. For if it was true that people had brought themselves to their present position—if it was true, in other words, that mankind was quite literally self-domesticated—then the question arose as to what might yet be accomplished by way of further improvements in human nature. Significantly, therefore, it was immediately after Darwin had terminated his lengthy account of sexual selection with the "remarkable conclusion" that mind had played an important part in the progressive development of the higher animals that he went on to consider the implications of his theory for the future of mankind. He wrote:
Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care. He is impelled by nearly the same motives as are the lower animals when left to their own free choice, though he is in so far superior to them that he highly values mental charms and virtues. On the other hand he is strongly attracted by mere wealth or rank. Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind: but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realised until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. All do good service who aid towards this end. When the principles of breeding and of inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man. (Descent 2:402-403)
Far from having been idle speculations tacked on to the end of the Descent, these ideas were implicit in the very structure of Darwin's thought. They were the final, and perhaps the most obvious, application of the model of artificial selection to the natural world. Unlike his cousin Francis Galton, Darwin saw no practical means whereby to translate the conclusions of evolutionary theory into effective social policy.15 This disagreement should not be taken as a sign of any fundamental difference between the social philosophies of the two men, however. Darwin believed that the English aristocracy had been made handsomer than the middle classes by means of sexual selection (ML 2:34); he was a fierce critic of primogeniture, which he regarded as a disruptive influence in the selective process (Descent 1:170); he was a somewhat reluctant advocate of the struggle for existence as a necessary precondition of human progress (1:167-184); and he took comfort from the thought that, having risen to "the very summit of the organic scale", man might go on to "a still higher destiny in the future" (2:405).16 Thus Darwin's position was perfectly clear. Man was an animal, like any other, and his past development, present condition, and future prospects were alike dependent upon those natural laws that governed the entire domain of earthly life.
From the time of his first encounter with the Fuegians aboard the Beagle to his final flirtation with eugenics in the closing paragraphs of the Descent, Darwin elaborated his views on nature and human nature within a larger vision of a world continuously active in the generation of new forms of life and mind. This was materialism, and Darwin knew it; but it was a materialism that humanized nature every bit as much as it naturalized man. Far more committed to the principle of continuity than he was to any particular doctrines concerning the ultimate constituents of the universe, Darwin developed his case by moving freely between the domains of nature and human affairs, seeing in each the reflected image of the other. The ideas of artificial, natural, and sexual selection were an integral part of this process of mutual illumination; but so too was Darwin's comparative psychology, which depended upon a characteristic combination of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic analogies. To Benjamin Disraeli's famous question: is man an ape or an angel? Darwin's reply was clear. But he defended it, not by discrediting the angels, but rather by painting the apes in such human colors that further dispute was made to seem almost futile. As the title of this chapter suggests, Darwin's program involved the ascent of nature in the descent of man.
In his important study of Darwin as a creative thinker, Howard Gruber notes that "to a striking extent, Darwin's thinking about nature seems marked by images drawn from human experience and conduct" (Gruber and Barrett 1974, p. 10). It is extremely difficult to deny the truth of this assessment, but scholars have differed over its interpretation. Gruber himself acknowledges that it is tempting to see the profusion of human imagery in Darwin's theoretical writings as evidence that "human life is the fundamental source of our creative imagery", and that therefore "the general forms of scientific thought are directly constrained by existing social relations which govern the limits of our images of man"; but he rejects this conclusion as being "both anthropomorphic and un-Darwinian", suggesting instead that the lesson to be learned from Darwin's work is "the value of abundant and varied images", and the continual effort to transcend them (Gruber and Barrett 1974, pp. 12-13). This interpretation lies somewhere between two rather more extreme views that have been taken by Darwin scholars. On the one hand, some historians have sought to minimize the significance of anthropomorphic imagery in Darwin's work. For example, Michael Ghiselin has attempted to distinguish between the "misleading language" in which Darwin couched his theories and the content of those theories themselves. "What matters," he has written, "is ideas, not the language in which they are expressed" (1969, p. 240). On the other hand, Robert Young (1971) has pointed to the broader cultural and ideological significance of the metaphor of natural selection; and Edward Manier (1978) has argued that anthropomorphism was deeply embedded in Darwin's metaphysics. Where Ghiselin sees Darwin's rich descriptive and theoretical language as little more than an irrelevant encumbrance—added, as he puts it, for "literary effect"—Young and Manier see it as constitutive of his scientific enterprise. The interpretation offered here is intended to provide a way out of this dilemma. Anthropomorphic imagery occupied a coherent place in Darwin's philosophy of nature, man, and society, and at the same time it served him well as an effective literary device by which to present this philosophy as persuasively as possible. In the terms employed in the opening section of this chapter, anthropomorphism was part and parcel of both Darwin's program and his strategy.
So far as Darwin's program was concerned, it has been argued that the use of anthropomorphic imagery was closely related to the rejection of anthropocentrism. Darwin's commitment to the principle of continuity led him to treat man as a "travelling instance" in nature, and this in turn allowed him to project into nature as immanent properties and powers many of the complex human attributes whose origins he sought. Similarly, anthropomorphism played an important part in Darwin's strategy for presenting his program to the scientific community. Of significance here is the fact that, as he prepared for the public presentation of his views, Darwin placed more and more emphasis upon argument from analogy. The case for natural selection in the Origin was organized around the analogy with artificial selection, as was that for sexual selection in the Descent. In the end, as Manier has noted, Darwin adopted a story-telling mode of discourse that was well-suited to the task of persuasion, particularly in those cases in which the direct evidence for evolution was rather weak (Manier 1978, pp. 110-111). The Origin and the Descent were both, among other things, highly effective pieces of naturalistic propaganda, and each depended in their different ways upon the vocabulary of evocative analogies and metaphors to convey their central message.
The problem with describing Darwin's thinking as constitutively anthropomorphic is that this description risks being interpreted as stern criticism. Interestingly, this problem is not so great in the case of zoomorphism, which was an equally important part of Darwin's work. The reason for this discrepancy is surely that twentieth-century biology recognizes a legitimate place for zoomorphism but not, on the whole, for anthropomorphism. In recent years, a number of biologists have published highly successful zoomorphic accounts of man and society, whereas anthropomorphism has been almost universally abjured as what the American biologist William Morton Wheeler once called "a very terrible eighth mortal sin" (1939, p. 47). It need hardly be said, however, that it is unhelpful to employ the conventions of our own day if what we seek is a better understanding of nineteenth-century science. If we attempt to rewrite Darwin's theories in language other than their own, stripping them of all "extraneous" analogies and "unfortunate" metaphors, we stand to lose at least as much in historical perspective as we gain in supposed philosophical clarity. To separate Darwin's ideas from their distinctive terms of reference is not merely to sacrifice context for content but ultimately to distort both in the interests of some ulterior view of science. For Darwin's language reflects some of his most fundamental assumptions about nature, man, and society; it embodies the particular meaning that he attached to his theoretical synthesis; and it points beyond this synthesis to the wider culture in which it was constructed and to which, after so many delays, it was eventually directed. In the last analysis, to say that Darwin's theories were constitutively anthropomorphic is not to criticize them, but it is to recognize that they were constitutively social as well.
Notes
1 From the moment when he opened his first notebook on transmutation in the Summer of 1837, Darwin displayed a sensitivity toward the views held by his scientific colleagues that amounted at times to real fear of persecution. This emerged from time to time in phrases such as "Opponent will say . . ." (B 217), "Mention persecution of early Astronomers . . ." (C 123), and "I fear great evil from vast opposition . . ." (C 202). For good discussions of this subject, see Gruber and Barrett (1974, pp. 35-45), and Herbert (1977, pp. 157-178).
2 Throughout this chapter, the term "man" will be used in the same way that Darwin used it, namely, to stand for the whole of humankind. This principle will also be adopted for other key terms, such as "savage", whose place in contemporary English has become contentious.
3 It is difficult to arrive at a clear conception of Darwin's views on the status of savages during the voyage of the Beagle. For example, he appears to have been torn between pity for the unimproved condition of the Fuegians and admiration for the way that "Nature, by making habit omnipotent, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and productions of his country" (Diary p. 213). Similarly, he was ambivalent about the exact nature of the gap that separated savage from civilized people. Sandra Herbert has pointed out that, although in a sense the Beagle's return of several Fuegians to their native environment after several years in the company of Englishmen amounted to "an experiment in acculturation", it was one whose outcome provided no simple understanding of the difference between the two peoples (1974, p. 227).
4 The first transmutation notebook contains many entries on the origins of and interrelationships between the different human races. Darwin appears to have envisaged a three-fold analogy between natural species, human races, and domesticated varieties. This analogy is never stated very explicitly, but the entries move back and forth between these categories in such a way as to make the thrust of the argument quite plain. Man is a young species, and consequently both he and his domesticated animals have had time to diversify only to a very limited extent; nevertheless, this diversification indicates the general way in which larger-scale transmutation occurs over longer periods of time in nature (see B 3-4, 32-34, 93, 119-120, 147-148, 169, 217, and 244). The important point here is not that man and his works were the sole source of insights into transmutation, but rather that they were part and parcel of the larger inquiry. Of course, it should be emphasized that at this early stage of the investigation the analogy with domestication carried none of the selectionist overtones that it was to acquire after September 1838.
5 It is well known that Darwin himself claimed for Malthus an important role in the genesis of the theory of natural selection (see Autobiography, p. 120). The question of the relationship between Malthus and Darwin has remained controversial, however, not least because of the wider questions that it raises concerning the relationship between science and its social context. Although Darwin's claim was disputed by De Beer (1960, p. 121), on the basis of a reading of the (incomplete) third transmutation notebook, the recovery and subsequent publication of several missing pages from this notebook (Z> 162-163) has revealed very clearly the essential accuracy of his recollection, and Herbert's judgement may be taken as representative of the current consensus. However, her comment concerning Darwin's willingness to "transgress the boundaries between fields" rather begs the question (to which she is extremely sensitive in other parts of her essay) of the nature of disciplinary boundaries in the early nineteenth century. For the argument that, in turning to Malthus in the late 1830s for insights into the natural world, Darwin transgressed no perceived disciplinary boundary whatever, see Young (1969). For more recent accounts of the nature of Malthus's influence on Darwin see Limoges (1978), Herbert (1971), Bowler (1976b), and Kohn (1980).
6 It is impossible to arrive at an adequate understanding of Darwin's early work on man without taking into account its oppositional form. By making his primary objective the overthrow of the conventional view of human nature, Darwin was led to consider a very particular set of qualities that, in a very real sense, was not of his own choosing. As Greta Jones has pointed out, the result was that he naturalized, not every conceivably significant aspect of human life, but rather just those aspects that were of most concern to his contemporaries (1978, pp. 6-7). This is another of the ways in which Darwin's social context left an enduring imprint on his scientific work.
7 On this point, Darwin frequently returned to an analogy with the world of physics. For example, in an important passage on habit, in the second transmutation notebook, he wrote: "Thought (or desires more properly) being hereditary it is difficult to imagine it anything but structure of brain hereditary, analogy points to this.—Love of the deity effect of organization, oh you materialist!—Read Barclay on organization!!. . . . Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter?" (C 166). See also OUN: 37, and 39-41. In the first notebook on man, Darwin again described himself as a materialist (M 57).
8 The change in Darwin's thinking on this subject is clear from a comparison of the following entries in the first two transmutation notebooks: "Man in savage state may be called species in domesticated races.—If all men were dead, then monkeys make men.—Man makes angels" (B 169). "Without two species will generate common kind, which is not probable, then monkeys will never produce man, but both monkeys and man may produce other species" (B 214-215) and "The believing that monkey would breed (if mankind destroyed) some intellectual being though not MAN—is as difficult to understand as Lyells [sic] doctrine of slow movements &c &c" (C 74).
9 The notion of savagery was of great ideological as well as scientific significance throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth century animals and man were commonly assigned their places on a continuous scale of increasing complexity, the so-called great chain of being (Lovejoy 1936). This may appear to have been a radical step, but in practice it often had highly conservative implications, since "savages" and "primitive" people generally, and Negroes in particular, were commonly placed between the "civilized" races of mankind and the rest of the natural world (see Jordan 1968, and Bynum 1974a, chap. 1 for further discussion of this point). In the early nineteenth century the idea of the chain of being fell into disrepute, but assumptions about the biological and social inferiority of "savages" persisted. Polygenist anthropologists assigned separate origins to the "inferior" races of mankind, and even the monogenist James Cowles Prichard argued that "Civilized life holds the same relation to the condition of savages in the human race, which the domesticated state holds to the natural or wild condition among the inferior animals (1813, p. 209). This was the image of savagery that had struck Darwin so forcibly during the voyage of the Beagle, and that he now brought to the defence of a transmutationist philosophy of man's place in nature. Its broad appeal throughout the nineteenth century is illustrated by the fact that in due course it became incorporated into virtually the entire literature of evolutionary anthropology (see Stocking 1968, chap. 6, and Weber 1974, pp. 260-283).
10 In the first notebook on man, Darwin wrote: "May not moral sense arise from our enlarged capacity yet being obscurely guided . . . or strong instinctive sexual, parental, & social instincts, giving rise 'do unto others as yourself.' 'love thy neighbour as thyself.' Analyze this out, bearing in mind many new relations from language . . . May not idea of God arise from our confused idea of 'ought', joined with necessary notion of 'causation', in reference to this 'ought', as well as the works of the whole world" (M 150-151). Associationism served Darwin well as a way of accounting for the development of complex ideas by small steps.
11 In his book on the reception of the Origin, Peter Vorzimmer commented that "the Descent is undoubtedly Darwin at a disadvantage" (1970, p. 233). A year later, in a volume published to mark the centenary of the Descent, Loren Eiseley referred rather apologetically to Darwin's having written it with "tired and shakey" hands (B. Campbell 1972, p. 2). Finally, the most damning assessment of recent years is probably that of Greta Jones. The Descent, she writes, "as well as having a derivative character, is confused, self-contradictory and obscure in places" (1978, p. 16).
12 Mivart's most effective work was On the Genesis of Species (1871a). Mivart's biographer wrote that, by 1871, he "could maintain with some vehemence that man differed more from the gorilla than the latter did from the dust of the earth" (J. Gruber 1960, p. 40). As for Lyell, he never accepted a completely naturalistic view of transmutation. On 5 May 1869, for example, he wrote to tell Darwin that, "as I feel that progressive development or evolution cannot be entirely explained by natural selection, I rather hail Wallace's suggestion that there may be a Supreme Will and Power which may not abdicate its function of interference, but may guide the forces and laws of nature" (K. Lyell 1881, 2:442). For the argument that it was the questions of man's place in nature that lay at the heart of Lyell's rejection of evolutionary naturalism, see Bartholomew 1973. "Wallace's suggestion" was first made in a review of the tenth edition of Lyell's Principles of Geology. Wallace wrote: "While admitting to the full extent the agency of the same great laws of organic development in the origin of the human race as in the origin of all organized beings, there yet seems to be evidence of a Power which has guided the action of those laws in definite directions and for special ends . . . We must . . . admit the possibility, that in the development of the human race a Higher Intelligence has guided the same laws for noble ends" (1869, p. 393). This change of heart came as a great disappointment to Darwin (ML 2:39-40). For more detailed analysis of the reasons for Wallace's defection from the ranks of the evolutionary naturalists, see R. Smith (1972), Kottler (1974, and this volume), Turner (1974a, chap. 5); and Durant (1979).
13 For a more detailed exposition of Darwin's path to the theory of sexual selection, see Richard Burkhardt (this volume).
14 The most detailed argument of all on the subject of sexual selection was conducted between Darwin and Wallace (see Kottler 1980).
15 The Origin had an inspirational effect on Darwin's cousin, and it led him to undertake a life-long study of human nature and of the ways in which it could be improved. (For futher details, see Cowan 1977, and Durant 1977, chap. 5.) Darwin, in turn, admired greatly the first major product of this study, Galton's book Hereditary Genius (ML 2:41), but he was never a wholehearted supporter of Galtonian eugenics. For example, early in 1873 Galton sent his cousin a paper outlining a eugenic program designed to encourage "a sentiment of caste among those who are naturally gifted" (1873, p. 126). Darwin wrote back, thanking Galton for the paper, but pointing out many practical difficulties. He concluded: "Though I see so much difficulty, the object seems to me a grand one; and you have pointed out the sole feasible, yet I fear Utopian, plan of procedure in improving the human race. I should be inclined to trust more (and this is part of your plan) to disseminating and insisting on the importance of the all-important principle of inheritance" (ML 2:44).
16 For an excellent discussion of Darwin as a social evolutionist, see Greene (1981a, pp. 95-127).
Bibliography (Short Titles)
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