The Descent of Man

By Charles Darwin and Janet Browne

In The Descent of Man Darwin addresses many of the issues raised by his notorious Origin of Species: finding in the traits and instincts of animals the origins of the mental abilities of humans, of language, of our social structures and our moral capacities, he attempts to show that there is no clear dividing line between animals and humans. Most importantly, he accounts for what Victorians called the ‘races’ of mankind by means of what he calls sexual selection. This book presents a full explanation of Darwin’s ideas about sexual selection, including his belief that many important characteristics of human beings and animals have emerged in response to competition for mates.

This was a controversial work. Yet Darwin tried hard to avoid being branded as a radical revolutionary. He is steeped in Victorian sensibilities regarding gender and cultural differences: he sees human civilization as a move from barbarous savagery to modern gentlefolk, and women as more emotional and less intellectual than men, thus providing a biological basis for the social assumptions and prejudices of the day. The Descent of Man played a major role in the emergence of social Darwinism.

This complete version of the first edition gives the modern reader an unparalleled opportunity to engage directly with Darwin’s proposals, launched in the midst of continuing controversy over On the Origin of Species.

Janet Browne is the author of the prize-winning biography, Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Oct 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848705616

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809–19 April 1882) is considered the most important English naturalist of all time. He established the theories of natural selection and evolution. His theory of evolution was published as On the Origin of Species in 1859, and by the 1870s is was widely accepted as fact.

Book preview

Charles Darwin

The Descent of Man

and Selection in Relation to Sex

with an Introduction by Janet Browne

WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

OF WORLD LITERATURE

The Descent of Man first published

by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2013

Published as an ePublication 2013

ISBN 978 1 84870 561 6

Introduction © Janet Browne 2013

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Contents

Introduction

Part 1: On the Descent of Man

Chapter 1: The Evidence of the Descent of Man from some Lower Form

Nature of the evidence bearing on the origin of man – Homologous structures in man and the lower animals – Miscellaneous points of correspondence – Development – Rudimentary structures, muscles, sense-organs, hair, bones, reproductive organs, &c. – The bearing of these three great classes of facts on the origin of man

Chapter 2: Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the lower Animals

The difference in mental power between the highest ape and the lowest savage, immense – Certain instincts in common – The emotions – Curiosity – Imitation – Attention – Memory – Imagination – Reason – Progressive improvement – Tools and weapons used by animals – Language – Self-consciousness – Sense of beauty – Belief in God, spiritual agencies, superstitions

Chapter 3: Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the lower Animals – continued

The moral sense – Fundamental proposition – The qualities of social animals – Origin of sociability – Struggle between opposed instincts – Man a social animal – The more enduring social instincts conquer other less persistent instincts – The social virtues alone regarded by savages – The self-regarding virtues acquired at a later stage of development – The importance of the judgment of the members of the same community on conduct – Transmission of moral tendencies – Summary

Chapter 4: On the Manner of Development of Man from some Lower Form

Variability of body and mind in man – Inheritance – Causes of variability – Laws of variation the same in man as in the lower animals – Direct action of the conditions of life – Effects of the increased use and disuse of parts – Arrested development – Reversion – Correlated variation – Rate of increase – Checks to increase – Natural selection – Man the most dominant animal in the world – Importance of his corporeal structure – The causes which have led to his becoming erect – Consequent changes of structure – Decrease in size of the canine teeth – Increased size and altered shape of the skull – Nakedness – Absence of a tail – Defenceless condition of man

Chapter 5: On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties during Primeval and Civilised Times

The advancement of the intellectual powers through natural selection – Importance of imitation – Social and moral faculties – Their development within the limits of the same tribe – Natural selection as affecting civilised nations – Evidence that civilised nations were once barbarous

Chapter 6: On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man

Position of man in the animal series – The natural system genealogical – Adaptive characters of slight value – Various small points of resemblance between man and the Quadrumana – Rank of man in the natural system – Birthplace and antiquity of man – Absence of fossil connecting-links – Lower stages in the genealogy of man, as inferred, firstly from his affinities and secondly from his structure – Early androgyngus condition of the Vertebrata – Conclusion

Chapter 7: On the Races of Man

The nature and value of specific characters – Application to the races of man – Arguments in favour of, and opposed to, ranking the so-called races of man as distinct species – Sub-species – Monogenists and polygenists – Convergence of character – Numerous points of resemblance in body and mind between the most distinct races of man – The state of man when he first spread over the earth – Each race not descended from a single pair – The extinction of races – The formation of races – The effects of crossing – Slight influence of the direct action of the conditions of life – Slight or no influence of natural selection – Sexual selection.

Part 2: Sexual Selection

Chapter 8: Principles of Sexual Selection

Secondary sexual characters – Sexual selection – Manner of action – Excess of males – Polygamy – The male alone generally modified through sexual selection – Eagerness of the male – Variability of the male – Choice exerted by the female – Sexual compared with natural selection – Inheritance at corresponding periods of life, at corresponding seasons of the year, and as limited by sex – Relations between the several forms of inheritance – Causes why one sex and the young are not modified through sexual selection – Supplement on the proportional numbers of the two sexes throughout the animal kingdom – On the limitation of the numbers of the two sexes through natural selection

Chapter 9: Secondary Sexual Characters in the Lower Classes of the Animal Kingdom

These characters absent in the lowest classes – Brilliant colours – Mollusca – Annelids – Crustacea, secondary sexual characters strongly developed; dimorphism; colour; characters not acquired before maturity – Spiders, sexual colours of; stridulation by the males – Myriapoda

Chapter 10: Secondary Sexual Characters of Insects

Diversified structures possessed by the males for seizing the females – Differences between the sexes, of which the meaning is not understood – Difference in size between the sexes – Thysanura – Diptera – Hemiptera – Homoptera, musical powers possessed by the males alone – Orthoptera, musical instruments of the males, much diversified in structure; pugnacity; colours – Neuroptera, sexual differences in colour – Hymenoptera, pugnacity and colours – Coleoptera, colours; furnished with great horns, apparently as an ornament; battles; stridulating organs generally common to both sexes.

Chapter 11: Insects, continued. Order Lepidoptera

Courtship of butterflies – Battles – Ticking noise – Colours common to both sexes, or more brilliant in the males – Examples – Not due to the direct action of the conditions of life – Colours adapted for protection – Colours of moths – Display – Perceptive powers of the Lepidoptera – Variability – Causes of the difference in colour between the males and females – Mimickry, female butterflies more brilliantly coloured than the males – Bright colours of caterpillars – Summary and concluding remarks on the secondary sexual characters of insects – Birds and insects compared.

Chapter 12: Secondary Sexual Characters of Fishes, Amphibians, & Reptiles

Fishes: Courtship and battles of the males – Larger size of the females – Males, bright colours and ornamental appendages; other strange characters – Colours and appendages acquired by the males during the breeding-season alone – Fishes with both sexes brilliantly coloured – Protective colours – The less conspicuous colours of the female cannot be accounted for on the principle of protection – Male fishes building nests, and taking charge of the ova and young. Amphibians: Differences in structure and colour between the sexes – Vocal organs. Reptiles: Chelonians – Crocodiles – Snakes, colours in some cases protective – Lizards, battles of – Orna-mental appendages – Strange differences in structure between the sexes – Colours – Sexual differences almost as great as with birds

Chapter 13: Secondary Sexual Characters of Birds

Sexual differences – Law of battle – Special weapons – Vocal organs – Instrumental music – Love-antics and dances – Decorations, permanent and seasonal – Double and single annual moults – Display of ornaments by the males

Chapter 14: Birds, continued

Choice exerted by the female – Length of courtship – Unpaired birds – Mental qualities and taste for the beautiful – Preference or antipathy shewn by the female for particular males – Variability of birds – Variations sometimes abrupt – Laws of variation – Formation of ocelli – Gradations of character – Case of Peacock, Argus pheasant, and Urosticte

Chapter 15: Birds, continued

Discussion why the males alone of some species, and both sexes of other species, are brightly coloured – On sexually-limited inheritance, as applied to various structures and to brightly-coloured plumage – Nidification in relation to colour – Loss of nuptial plumage during the winter

Chapter 16: Birds, concluded

The immature plumage in relation to the character of the plumage in both sexes when adult – Six classes of cases – Sexual differences between the males of closely-allied or representative species – The female assuming the characters of the male – Plumage of the young in relation to the summer and winter plumage of the adults – On the increase of beauty in the Birds of the World – Protective colouring – Conspicuously-coloured birds – Novelty appreciated – Summary of the four chapters on birds

Chapter 17: Secondary Sexual Characters of Mammals

The law of battle – Special weapons, confined to the males – Cause of absence of weapons in the female – Weapons common to both sexes, yet primarily acquired by the male – Other uses of such weapons – Their high importance – Greater size of the male – Means of defence – On the preference shewn by either sex in the pairing of quadrupeds.

Chapter 18: Secondary Sexual Characters of Mammals, continued

Voice – Remarkable sexual peculiarities in seals – Odour – Development of the hair – Colour of the hair and skin – Anomalous case of the female being more ornamented than the male – Colour and ornaments due to sexual selection – Colour acquired for the sake of protection – Colour, though common to both sexes, often due to sexual selection – On the disappearance of spots and stripes in adult quadrupeds – On the colours and ornaments of the Quadrumana – Summary

Chapter 19: Secondary Sexual Characters of Man

Differences between man and woman – Causes of such differences and of certain characters common to both sexes – Law of battle – Differences in mental powers – and voice – On the influence of beauty in determining the marriages of mankind – Attention paid by savages to ornaments – Their ideas of beauty in woman – The tendency to exaggerate each natural peculiarity

Chapter 20: Secondary Sexual Characters of Man, continued

On the effects of the continued selection of women according to a different standard of beauty in each race – On the causes which interfere with sexual selection in civilised and savage nations – Conditions favourable to sexual selection during primeval times – On the manner of action of sexual selection with mankind – On the women in savage tribes having some power to choose their husbands – Absence of hair on the body, and development of the beard – Colour of the skin – Summary

Chapter 21: General Summary and Conclusion

Main conclusion that man is descended from some lower form – Manner of development – Genealogy of man – Intellectual and moral faculties – Sexual selection – Concluding remarks

Appendix A: Preface to the Second Edition

Appendix B: Postscript

Appendix C: Errata

Index

Introduction

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin dealt with what he called ‘the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist’. The book was all about humans: the story of our biological origins and ancestry, our mental capacities, the emergence of language and the moral sense, the physical characteristics of different peoples and the relations between the sexes. Its breadth was astonishing. The depth of research was remarkable. Even more far-reaching than these, the book was also a comprehensive personal statement of Darwin’s theory of ‘descent with modification’ as it applied to human beings. Admittedly Darwin’s focus was that of a well-educated and prosperous Victorian intellectual. His view is not fully our present view. The evidence he cited has been transformed by the science of genetics and changing cultural commitments. Yet the Victorian politician Benjamin Disraeli caught the heart of the matter when he asked his contemporaries: are we apes or are we angels? Were human beings created by a beneficent god, as the Christian story relates? Or did the human species emerge, step by step, from some animal ancestor? These were the questions that raged through the public world when Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859. In that book Darwin alluded only briefly to human origins and made it plain that he was not prepared to speculate in print. Others before him had volunteered theories about the evolution of human beings and had been ridiculed by scientific experts. In the Origin of Species it seemed to him sufficient to say that, if his views were accepted, ‘light would be thrown on the origins of man and his history.’

The book reprinted here was Darwin’s long-considered response to those questions. It was published in 1871 under the title The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, in two substantial volumes. This book on mankind was just as sensational, just as memorable as the Origin of Species. It was written in the same personal style as the Origin of Species, with the same gentlemanly air, the same clarity, and the same explicit rationalism. Darwin’s conclusions were bold: ‘we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system – with all these exalted powers – Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’ (Descent: 647).

* * *

It had been a long process that brought Darwin to this point. The book had, in fact, taken Darwin a lifetime to produce. It can be regarded as the completion of an intellectual project begun during his travels on the Beagle voyage, nearly forty years beforehand, when Darwin first seriously engaged with questions about human ancestry and the races of mankind. Indeed, there is much to be argued in favour of the idea that Darwin’s encounters with the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego, Australia and New Zealand, and his growing belief that humans could be scientifically understood just like any other species, were key factors in encouraging him to think directly about evolution, or transmutation, as it was then called. Certainly, in the first few years after returning from the Beagle voyage, he developed a vision of evolution in the natural world in which humans were an integral part. ‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals,’ he wrote in an early notebook (Notebook C, 196).

Yet at some point in the 1840s he deliberately removed all mention of human origins from his writings, evidently deciding that the topic was far too inflammatory to publish, although of the profoundest interest to him. As he later explained to Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘You ask whether I shall discuss man; I think I shall avoid whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices, though I fully admit that it is the highest & most interesting problem for the naturalist.’ (Darwin Correspondence, 22 December 1857). It is very likely that Darwin was shocked by the venomous rejection of a transmutationary text that had been published anonymously in 1844; and correspondingly elected in his future work to avoid any discussion of humans emerging from apes. This anonymous book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, was by the naturalist and journalist Robert Chambers. It drew sharp responses from many established scientists despite eager interest among the reading public. Darwin probably delayed publication of his own ‘species’ book in order to avoid the same kind of response. And when he did eventually publish Origin of Species, even though he kept humankind out of the text, the implication was nevertheless easy to discern. Readers were still attuned to the earlier excitements of Vestiges. The possibility that mankind had emerged via an entirely natural process from animal ancestors rather than being created by divine intervention, as most Christians believed, was indeed the focus of the most far-reaching and challenging arguments generated by Darwin’s Origin of Species.

A succession of commentaries, books, reviews and articles each affirming the sanctity of mankind escalated through the 1860s. Whether scientific or theological in approach or utterly popular, these arguments shaped the cultural and intellectual context in which Darwin lived and worked. Most significantly, many ordinary Victorians questioned whether science could – or should – explain human origins. A substantial number of public intellectuals similarly thought that these matters were not legitimate areas for scientific study. The dawning of humankind and the bestowal of a soul was a matter for theologians, they said, not for naturalists. Such opinions were dramatised in England, at least, in 1860, soon after the Origin of Species was published, in a public confrontation between the youthful, quarrelsome scientist Thomas Henry Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. The confrontation (which was unplanned) occurred at the summer meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and is remembered today for a clever verbal exchange in which Wilberforce supposedly asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from an ape. Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. No verbatim account of the discussion exists, and there is considerable uncertainty regarding what Huxley and Wilberforce actually said. Nevertheless it quickly came to symbolise the divergent positions that were being taken on human origins, with the Christian church, as represented by the Bishop, standing firm on the divine creation of mankind, and science, as represented by Huxley, offering a naturalistic alternative. Much recent historical scholarship shows that these extreme positions were only rarely expressed in the English-speaking world: many thinkers at that time seemingly adopted various intermediary viewpoints and hoped for reconciliation between science and religion on this issue. Yet apes and angels were the nub of the matter.

So Darwin bided his time. He threw himself into research projects that illustrated natural selection in ways that did not relate to human ancestry. He published a careful study of the insect fertilisation of orchids in 1862; and a detailed analysis of the variation of animals and plants under domestication in 1868. Perhaps these projects allowed him to evade harder questions. For it seems clear that he preferred to let other authors debate and defend his theories in public. In fact, he might never have published his ideas on mankind if it had not been for changing circumstances – many of them brought about by the controversies surrounding Origin of Species – and for the writings of some of his contemporaries on that very issue.

Soon after publication of Origin of Species, three of Darwin’s closest scientific friends produced important studies that developed different aspects of the evolutionary framework as it concerned mankind. In 1863, the great geologist Charles Lyell published the Antiquity of Man. In this book Lyell revealed the world of human geological history. Lyell did not have much information to give on actual fossilised humans or pre-humans – there were only a few known broken remains of skulls at that time, and their identity was still contested. He focused on what came to be called prehistoric mankind – cave men and women. Until then, the paucity of early human artefacts such as worked flints and tools had suggested that mankind was very recent in geological terms, a view that accorded well with the notion that humans appeared only when the Bible story started, some 4000 or 6000 years ago. Even those who believed in a far longer age of the earth were sure that human history was relatively short and could be measured in thousands of years, not epochs. The common assumption was that humans only appeared when the earth arrived at its modern state, which was after the glacial period – or for those who believed in the biblical flood, at the point when the floodwaters receded. Lyell pushed the origin of human beings further back beyond this watery dividing line, into the geological deep past. It was the first significant book after Darwin’s Origin of Species to shake the contemporary view of humanity.

Then came Thomas Henry Huxley, whose short treatise was called Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, published a few weeks after Lyell’s. ‘Lyell’s object is to make man old,’ complained the English periodical, the Athenaeum, ‘Huxley’s to degrade him.’ The text showed Huxley at his snarling extreme – in his element. He used this volume to continue a very public argument with the renowned anatomist Richard Owen on the hot topic of monkeys, brains, and humans. Huxley showed how mankind must, on all biological grounds, be classified with the apes. On first opening Huxley’s book, readers saw exactly what his argument would be. His frontispiece showed five skeletons standing in line, each bony figure leaning slightly forward ready to evolve into the next. From gibbon to orang, chimpanzee, gorilla, and man, the implication could not be clearer – humans were the result of a series of physical changes from the apish state. His point was understood but not necessarily accepted. One reviewer observed dryly ‘We are not yet obliged to be quite on all-fours with Professor Huxley.’ Another, alluding to the confrontation with Bishop Wilberforce, accused him of diving into ‘the African forests in search of his grandfather’.

Soon after was Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently formulated the principle of evolution by natural selection. Wallace wrote two compelling articles on human evolution in the 1860s. In the first, he argued that natural selection was the primary force in changing apes into men. In fact, he said what Darwin feared to say. In the second article, published in the 1869 Quarterly Review, he backtracked somewhat and declared that natural selection seemed to him insufficient to explain the origin of humankind’s extraordinary mental capacities. He agreed with Darwin that natural selection pushed our apish ancestors to the threshold of humanity. But at that point, he thought physical evolution stopped and something else took over – the power of mind. The human mind alone continued to advance, human societies emerged, and cultural imperatives took over. Not every society developed at the same rate – in Wallace’s terminology, primitives were slow, Caucasians fast. Darwin was thoroughly taken aback. ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child,’ he exclaimed to Wallace in surprise. It was partly the alarm of seeing Wallace’s change of heart that encouraged Darwin to express his own views fully in the Descent of Man. Darwin’s own belief was that everything characteristic of the human condition – language, morality, religious sense, maternal affection, civilisation, appreciation of beauty – had emerged in gradual steps from animals. He could not agree with Wallace that some external force – Wallace believed it to be some spiritual power – had made us what we are.

For Darwin, grateful though he was, and always affectionately disposed to his friends, none of these three significant publications went far enough. He felt the pressure of alternative stories mounting. The Duke of Argyll’s creative evolutionism was gaining ground. Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Biology and his Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative integrated evolutionary concepts with political, social and religious ideas already attractive to contemporaries. Ernst Haeckel was busy describing apish ancestry to a wide German-speaking readership. Darwin was fired into action. The moment at last seemed ripe to finalise his research and make it public. He could call on the investigations of prominent anatomists and anthropologists who were favourably disposed toward a secular, biological view of humankind. He was able to consult scientific contemporaries who were using evolutionary theory as it related to humans such as Francis Galton, John Lubbock, and Edward B. Tylor, and reach out to knowledgeable colleagues like Haeckel, Pierre Paul Broca, Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages, Édouard Claparède, and Carl Vogt. His immense network of correspondents could help in locating specialists to guide him through relatively unfamiliar areas, such as the likely beginnings of human language, and to gather further information on a mass of topics from individuals across the globe. He even asked his daughter Henrietta Darwin, aged 28, to act as copy editor, correcting his grammatical mistakes and helping with clarity. Soon Darwin had gathered so much material that he felt obliged to put some of it aside for another book. This additional material concerned the expression of emotions in animals and humans and was published in 1872, one year after Descent of Man, under the title, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. These two books represent Darwin’s most important statements on the evolution of humankind.

There was a lot for Darwin to keep in mind, a lot to reformulate and squeeze into shape. Above all, there was the endless problem of propriety. In his ‘Man’ book he was tackling Adam and Eve directly. ‘I shall be well abused,’ he remarked to John Murray, his London publisher.

* * *

John Murray, the publisher of all Darwin’s books, flinched a little at the subject matter. Despite his familiarity with Darwin’s unorthodox topics and his determination not to let them stand in the way of a successful business relationship, this book on human ancestry rattled his confidence rather more than the Origin of Species had done. The Murray publishing archive in Edinburgh shows that Murray asked his friend Whitwell Elwin for his professional opinion on the manuscript. Elwin was no longer editor of Murray’s Quarterly Review but he still served as a useful barometer of public opinion for Murray. ‘It might be intelligible that a man’s tail should waste away when he had no longer occasion to wag it,’ Elwin roared, ‘though I should have thought that savages would still have found it useful in tropical climates to brush away insects . . . The arguments in the sheets you have sent me appear to me to be little better than drivel.’

But Murray bravely continued. He published 2,500 copies of the Descent of Man in the first weeks of 1871. Three further print runs were issued during the same year, bringing the number of copies up to 8000. Darwin made small changes in the texts of each reprint. For bibliophiles, there are some interesting variants. Darwin’s own copy, for example, was ready by December 1870 and has that date printed on its title page. A second edition was published in 1874 with corrections and emendations. An introduction to that second edition written by Darwin is reprinted here as an appendix. By 1877 the English publishers recorded that they had issued a total of 11,000 copies. The American firm of D. Appleton and Co. simultaneously published the Descent of Man in New York in 1871, and continued to match the English editions pretty closely. In Europe, the Franco-Prussian war, then at its height, would seemingly have obliterated any prospect of foreign language editions and translations. Yet astonishingly, in view of the political situation, especially during the siege of Paris and the dreadful events around the Commune, Darwin’s book was translated into Dutch, French, German, Russian, and Italian in 1871, and into Swedish, Polish, and Danish shortly thereafter, a testimony to the fortitude of Darwin’s European colleagues and general interest in evolutionary affairs.

The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, as printed here in the first edition, contained two parts, as suggested by the title. However, the structure of Darwin’s argument is not always easy to discern. In Part 1 Darwin gave a systematic account of the connections between humans and animals. It covered comparative anatomy and, at much greater length, the human mental faculties – language, reasoning ability, morality, consciousness, the religious sense, memory, and imagination. Everything that characterised the mind of human beings was to be explained as having emerged from animals, stepwise, by entirely natural processes. His thesis was that humans differed from animals only by degree. In Part 2 Darwin presented his important concept of sexual selection. He explained how this concept was both different from natural selection and complementary to it. Much of this section was dedicated to establishing what he meant and necessarily included lengthy discussion of the process as discerned in animals. At the end of Part 2 Darwin proposed that sexual selection was instrumental in explaining the origin of human ‘races’ and cultural progress. Here there are fascinating glimpses into Darwin’s understanding of the biological basis of Victorian racial hierarchies, gender relations and the structure of contemporary civilisation. The word ‘evolution’, used in its modern sense, occurs for the first time in any of Darwin’s works, on page 2. Darwin also used the term ‘survival of the fittest’ which he adopted from Herbert Spencer in 1868.

* * *

He began the Descent of Man by describing the many incontrovertible anatomical features common to both animals and mankind. Part of his point was to establish that human beings are just as variable in their physical constitution as animals – a continuation of his style of argument from the Origin of Species. Then he turned to the mental powers, stating decisively, ‘there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.’ He presented cameo observations of animal behaviour in substantiation of this claim, ranging from horses that knew the way home to ants that defended their property, chimpanzees that used twigs as implements, bower-birds that admired the beauty of their nests, and household cats and dogs that apparently dreamed of rabbits in their sleep. The domestic nature of Darwin’s observations in this area, the large doses of willing anthropomorphism, ‘these fairy tales of science’, as Frances Power Cobbe was to call them in a review published in 1872, probably went a long way towards softening readers before he confronted them with the shock of apes in the family tree.

To explain the emergence of the mental powers of humankind through variation and natural selection was altogether more problematic. His premise was that instincts vary and can be selected if favourable to the individual. He launched straight into an examination of the power of human speech: this was obviously critical for him since language was integral to all contemporary definitions of being human and assumed to present an insuperable barrier between animals and humans. Darwin particularly wished to contest the widespread view that the ability to speak indicated God’s special gift to humans. The famous linguist and scholar Friedrich Max Müller had said as much in the magazine Nature in 1870. Darwin had come to believe that the ability to speak must have emerged in a gradual fashion from the social vocalisations of apes and further developed in early human societies through the imitation of natural sounds.

As monkeys certainly understand much that is said to them by man, and as in a state of nature they utter signal-cries of danger to their fellows, it does not appear altogether incredible, that some unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger. And this would have been a first step in the formation of language. (Descent: 45, 46)

Darwin was similarly daring when dealing with religion. Taking his cue from the cultural anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, he mapped out a comparative evolution of the religious sense, proposing that religious belief was ultimately nothing more than a primitive urge to bestow a cause on otherwise inexplicable natural events. At first, dreams might have given rise to the idea of spirits, as Tylor suggested, or to animism, where plants and animals are imbued with spirits. Darwin suggested that these beliefs could easily grow into a conviction about the existence of one or more gods who directed human affairs. As societies advanced in civilisation, he said, ethical values would become attached to such ideas. ‘Strange superstitions and customs’ would give way to the ‘improvement of reason, to science, and our accumulated knowledge’. Human beings have a biological need to believe in something ‘other’, he suggested. Audaciously, he compared religious devotion to the ‘love of a dog for its master’.

As for morality, he pointed out that the concept was only relative. Wide and conscientious reading in the moral philosophers, long observational experience with household pets, and no doubt his children as well, told him that living beings had to learn the difference between good and bad behaviour – the knowledge was not innate. Members of what he called ‘primitive’ societies held very diverse ideas about behaviour. If honeybees ever became as intelligent as humans, Darwin suggested, unmarried females would think it a ‘sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.’ (Descent:58)

Darwin proposed this for effect rather than logical necessity, because he went on to argue that the higher human values emerged and spread only as human civilization progressed, meaning that duty, self-sacrifice, virtue, altruism, and humanitarianism were acquired fairly late in human history and perhaps 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 ‘barbaric’ societies, such as Ancient Greece or Rome, to the civilised world of nineteenth century England that he inhabited. ‘How little the old Romans knew of [sympathy] is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions.’ In this manner, he kept 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 values were, for him, self-evidently the values of his own class and nation.

In Part 1, he also discussed fossil 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. Even though there were, by then, a few isolated fragments of Neanderthal skulls available for study in European museums, these had not yet been conclusively confirmed as from ancestral humans. Huxley, for instance, took his opinion from that of Carl Vogt, who regarded the puzzling fragment from the valley of the River Neander as part of the skull of a congenital idiot.

In truth, Darwin found it difficult to give an actual evolutionary tree to humans. Briefly he tracked humans back as far as the Old World monkeys, saying that the human species must have diverged from the original monkey stock considerably earlier than did the anthropoid apes, probably at a point close to now-extinct forms of Lemuridae. He further recognised the great apes as humanity’s nearest relatives. Darwin knew very little about fossil monkeys and could name only Dryopithecus, identified in the deposits of Europe at that time. For the second edition of Descent of Man he asked Huxley to fill this gap with an up-to-date essay about fossil finds. He could only guess at possible reasons for human ancestral forms to have abandoned the trees, to lose their hairy covering and become bipedal. He relied on Haeckel’s work in this area to push the primate line back through Marsupials, Monotremes, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Fishes, ending up at the Ascidians, grandfathers of them all.

The early progenitors of man were no doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having the proper muscles . . . The foot, judging from the condition of the great toe in the foetus, was then prehensile; and our progenitors, no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm, forest-clad spot. The males were provided with great canine teeth, which served them as formidable weapons. (Descent:158, 159)

* * *

At the heart of the book lay Darwin’s idea of sexual selection. This was his special contribution to the evolutionary story of mankind, his answer to the reviewers, commentators and critics of the previous twelve years. ‘I do not intend to assert that sexual selection will account for all the differences between the races,’ he wrote. Nonetheless, he felt certain that it was ‘the main agent in forming the races of man’. Sexual selection was ‘the most powerful means of changing the races of man that I know’.

In brief, Darwin postulated that all animals, including humans, possess many trifling features that emerge and remain in a population solely because they contribute to reproductive success. These features are inheritable (as Darwin understands it) but carry no direct adaptive or survival value. The classic 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 fly from predators. The female peahen, argued Darwin, is attracted to large showy feathers, and if she can, will choose the most adorned 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 the Descent of Man Darwin devoted nearly one third of the book to establishing the existence of this sexual selection in birds, mammals and insects. In animals, he argued that the choice of mate was determined by the female: the female peahen did the choosing. When he came to humans he reversed that proposition and insisted that men did the choosing.

It was an important idea. Darwin used sexual selection to explain the divergence of early humans into the racial groups that contemporary physical anthropologists described. Early men would choose women as mates according to local ideas of beauty, he suggested. Preference for certain skin colours was a good example. 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 an average a greater number of children.’ (Descent: 618, 619) 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.

These views were reinforced by his insistence that sexual selection was not just confined to physical attributes like hair or colour. 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.

For example, he believed that sexual selection fostered inbuilt 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 their intelligence and mental faculties improving beyond those of women. In civilised regimes it was self-evident to him that men, because of their well-developed intellectual and entrepreneurial capacities, ruled the social order.

To avoid enemies, or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to invent and fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test, and selected during manhood . . . Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. (Descent: 585, 586)

In this way he made human culture an extension of biology and saw in every human society a ‘natural’ basis for primacy of the male. After publication, early feminists and suffragettes bitterly attacked this doctrine, feeling that women were being ‘naturalised’ by biology into a secondary, submissive role. Indeed, many medical men supported the contemporary assumption that women’s brains were smaller than those of men and were eager enough to adopt Darwin’s suggestion that women were altogether less evolutionarily developed, and that the ‘natural’ function of women was to reproduce, not to think. For several decades after publication of the Descent of Man, men in the medical profession thought that the female body was especially prone to disorders if the reproductive functions were denied. Something of this belief can even be traced right through to the 1950s or so.

In the Descent of Man Darwin also made concrete his thoughts on human progress and civilisation. The notion of a hierarchy of races informed his discussion. He stated that natural selection and sexual selection combined with cultural shifts in learned behaviour would account for the differences that he saw between populations. The racial hierarchy, as Darwin saw it, ran from the most primitive tribes of mankind to the most civilised; and had emerged over the course of aeons 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, or may infer from their traditions and from old monuments . . . show that from the remotest times successful tribes have supplanted other tribes.’ These tales of long-gone struggle and victory were mirrored in the hierarchies of the present day. Darwin was certain that many of the peoples he called primitive would inevitably be overrun and destroyed by more advanced races: he cited as an example the case of the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealand aborigines being extinguished by colonising Europeans. This was a playing out of the great law of ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’. His emphasis on naturalism explicitly cast the notion of race into biologically determinist terms, reinforcing contemporary ideas of a racial hierarchy.

Such words merged easily into contemporary ideologies of empire. The concept of natural selection as applied to mankind by Darwin in Descent of Man seemed to authorise harsh and continuing fights for territory, the subjugation of indigenous populations and the expression of political power on the international scale. Indeed, when first formulated Darwin’s theory of natural selection was itself an echo of the competitive, industrialised nation in which he lived. It comes as no surprise that, in turn, his views seemed to substantiate the leading political and economic commitments of his day. The success of white Europeans in conquering and settling in Australia, for example, seemed to make ‘natural’ the whole-scale extermination of the original peoples. Conquest was deemed a necessary part of imperial progress: and in the Descent of Man Darwin was comfortable with the notion that this was human nature. Herbert Spencer’s doctrine of ‘survival of the fittest’, as used by Darwin, Wallace, Spencer and others, in Descent of Man and elsewhere, became a popular phrase in the emergence of ‘social Darwinism’ through the later years of the nineteenth century. This nostrum of ‘survival of the fittest’ was well suited to encourage hardnosed economic expansion and colonisation. Karl Pearson, a committed Darwinian biologist, expressed it starkly in 1900: he said, no-one should regret that ‘a capable and stalwart race of white men should replace a dark-skinned tribe which can neither utilise its land for the full benefit of mankind, nor contribute its quota to the common stock of human knowledge.’ (The Grammar of Science, 1900, 369)

Several of Darwin’s remarks in Descent of Man also captured anxieties about human progress that were later made manifest in the eugenics movement. Darwin feared that what he called the ‘better’ members of society were in danger of being numerically swamped by the ‘unfit’. In this latter category Darwin included men and women of the streets, the ill, the physically maimed, indigents, alcoholics, and the mentally disturbed or defective. He pointed out that medical aid and charity given to the sick and the poor ran against the fundamental principle of natural selection.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. (Descent: 130)

He suggested that it was the characteristic of a truly civilised country to circumvent natural selection to aid the sick and help the weak.

In these passages Darwin anticipated some of the problems that his cousin Francis Galton would try to alleviate by defining and founding the eugenics movement. Galton was an enthusiastic convert to Darwin’s theories and had little hesitation in applying the concept of natural selection to human populations. As Darwin had already expressed, he too felt that civilised societies tended to prevent natural selection working, in the sense that many of the ‘unfit’ were preserved by medicine, charity, family or religious principles, whereas in a state of nature such people would die. Galton said the ‘unfit’ were more fecund than superior members of society. The human race would soon deteriorate, he declared. He campaigned tirelessly for interventions to reduce breeding rates among what he categorised as the poorer, unfit, profligate elements of society and to promote higher rates of reproduction among the middle classes. He hoped that the ‘more highly-gifted men’, the more successful men, should have children and pass their attributes on to the next generation. Galton did not promote the extreme policies of incarceration or sterilisation ultimately adopted by the United States, nor did he conceive of the possibility of the whole-scale extermination of particular groups, 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 improving the human race. The movement he founded might well have emerged without Darwin’s Descent of Man. Yet history shows that this book was a highly significant factor in the emergence of eugenics – with all its terrible consequences – and social Darwinism. While Darwin’s Descent of Man can hardly account for all the racial stereotyping, nationalist fervour and harshly expressed prejudice found in years to come, there can be no denying the impact of his work in providing a biological backing for notions of racial superiority, reproductive constraints, gendered typologies and class distinctions.

* * *

Scholars nowadays agree that Descent of Man offered a far-reaching naturalistic account of human origins. Even so, few nineteenth century readers wished to put human beings on exactly the same level as beasts. Harper’s Weekly complained that, ‘Mr Darwin insists on presenting Jocko as almost one of ourselves.’ An anonymous reviewer in The World, a New York literary magazine, said that, ‘Mr Darwin, like the rest of his atheistic school, evidently rejects with contempt the idea of a spiritual God who creates and sustains the universe.’ The Truth Seeker called the book ‘hasty’ and ‘fanciful’. Another writer in the Catholic Tablet explained that human beings possessed rationality, a ‘perfectly distinct faculty from anything to be found in the brutes’. The Spectator’s reviewer said, ‘Mr Darwin has shocked the deepest prejudices and presuppositions’ of the English people. The London Times deplored the book’s publication, saying that ‘it is hard to see how, on Mr Darwin’s hypothesis, it is possible to ascribe to Man any other immortality or any other spiritual existence, than that possessed by the Brutes . . . To put them [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 summed them all up by appealing to the direct evidence of the Bible. ‘Holy Scripture plainly regards man’s creation as a totally distinct class of operations from that of lower beings.’

Others, nevertheless, noted Darwin’s evident sincerity and depth of learning. The animal-human boundary, the human soul and the divine origin of human morals had been topics of debate for many years. In 1872, in an early article on ‘Darwinism and Divinity’ written in response to the Descent of Man, Leslie Stephen 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?’ It is clear that the Descent of Man expressed an important new feeling that science was the place to look for answers about human origins. The book obliged people to explore the implications of the very notion of what it meant to be human. In France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia and North America, and progressively all over the globe, people from every walk of life repositioned this controversial issue within their own cultural contexts. This concern about human origins was one of the first genuinely public debates about science to stretch across general society. These responses, evocative of the cultural diversity of the nineteenth century, remind us that the introduction of new ideas is rarely straightforward and that the past histories of science have involved many different forms of publication, many different audiences, many different languages and intense personal effort as well as the lasting power of the ideas themselves.

Janet Browne

Harvard University

Further Reading

Two comprehensive websites are valuable resources:

Darwin Correspondence Project: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online: http://darwin-online.org.uk/

Alter, Stephen G. Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Barlow, Nora. Ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882. With the original omissions restored. Edited and with appendix and notes by his grand-daughter. London: Collins, 1958.

Bowler, Peter J. Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Browne, E. J. Darwin: Voyaging. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Browne, E. J. Darwin: The Power of Place. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Burkhardt, F. H. and Smith, S. Eds., The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. 19 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–2012

Campbell, Bernard G. Ed., Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man: The Darwinian Pivot. New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 2006.

Cronin, Helena. The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray, 1872.

Desmond, A. J. and Moore, J. R. Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins. London, New York: Allen Lane, 2009.

Freeman, R. B. The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist. 2nd ed., Folkestone, Eng.: Dawson, 1977.

Hawkins, Mike. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Hodge, Jonathan and Radick, Gregory, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Livingstone, David N. Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought. 2nd ed. Vancouver: Regent College Pub., 2001.

Secord, James A. Ed., Charles Darwin: Evolutionary Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Richards, Evelleen ‘Redrawing the boundaries: Darwinian science and Victorian women intellectuals’, in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp.119–142.

Note on the text

The text printed here is that of the first edition (John Murray, London, 1871). That edition was in two volumes, and at the end of Volume 1 there is a postscript and an errata list. The postscript is reprinted here (page 651) as Appendix B. The errata list is not reproduced here, but the appropriate corrections have been made to the text.

We have also included (Appendix A, pages 649, 650) Darwin’s Preface to the second edition, of 1874.

The Descent of Man

and

Selection in Relation to Sex

Introduction

The nature of the following work will be best understood by a brief account of how it came to be written. During many years I collected notes on the origin or descent of man, without any intention of publishing on the subject, but rather with the determination not to publish, as I thought that I should thus only add to the prejudices against my views. It seemed to me sufficient to indicate, in the first edition of my Origin of Species, that by this work ‘light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history’; and this implies that man must be included with other organic beings in any general conclusion respecting his manner of appearance on this earth. Now the case wears a wholly different aspect. When a naturalist like Carl Vogt ventures to say in his address as President of the National Institution of Geneva (1869), ‘personne, en Europe au moins, n’ose plus soutenir la création indépendante et de toutes pièces, des espèces’, it is manifest that at least a large number of naturalists must admit that species are the modified descendants of other species; and this especially holds good with the younger and rising naturalists. The greater number accept the agency of natural selection; though some urge, whether with justice the future must decide, that I have greatly overrated its importance. Of the older and honoured chiefs in natural science, many unfortunately are still opposed to evolution in every form.

In consequence of the views now adopted by most naturalists, and which will ultimately, as in every other case, be followed by other men, I have been led to put together my notes, so as to see how far the general conclusions arrived at in my former works were applicable to man. This seemed all the more desirable as I had never deliberately applied these views to a species taken singly. When we confine our attention to any one form, we are deprived of the weighty arguments derived from the nature of the affinities which connect together whole groups of organisms – their geographical distribution in past and present times, and their geological succession. The homological structure, embryological development, and rudimentary organs of a species, whether it be man or any other animal, to which our attention may be directed, remain to be considered; but these great classes of facts afford, as it appears to me, ample and conclusive evidence in favour of the principle of gradual evolution. The strong support derived from the other arguments should, however, always be kept before the mind.

The sole object of this work is to consider, firstly, whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existing form; secondly, the manner of his development; and thirdly, the value of the differences between the so-called races of man. As I shall confine myself to these points, it will not be necessary to describe in detail the differences between the several races – an enormous subject which has been fully discussed in many valuable works. The high antiquity of man has recently been demonstrated by the labours of a host of eminent men, beginning with M. Boucher de Perthes; and this is the indispensable basis for understanding his origin. I shall, therefore, take this conclusion for granted, and may refer my readers to the admirable treatises of Sir Charles Lyell, Sir John Lubbock, and others. Nor shall I have occasion to do more than to allude to the amount of difference between man and the anthropomorphous apes; for Prof. Huxley, in the opinion of most competent judges, has conclusively shewn that in every single visible character man differs less from the higher apes than these do from the lower members of the same order of Primates.

This work contains hardly any original facts in regard to man; but as the conclusions at which I arrived, after drawing up a rough draft, appeared to me interesting, I thought that they might interest others. It has often and confidently been asserted, that man’s origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. The conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other species of some ancient, lower, and extinct form, is not in any degree new. Lamarck long ago came to this conclusion, which has lately been maintained by several eminent naturalists and philosophers; for instance by Wallace, Huxley, Lyell, Vogt, Lubbock, Büchner, Rolle, &c. [1] and especially by Häckel. This last naturalist, besides his great work, Generelle Morphologie (1866), has recently (1868, with a second edit. in 1870), published his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, in which he fully discusses the genealogy of man. If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine. Wherever I have added any fact or view from Prof. Häckel’s writings, I give his authority in the text, other statements I leave as they originally stood in my manuscript, occasionally giving in the footnotes [reprinted in this edition as endnotes to each chapter] references to his works, as a confirmation of the more doubtful or interesting points.

During many years it has seemed to me highly probable that sexual selection has played an important part in differentiating the races of man; but in my Origin of Species (first edition, p. 199) I contented myself by merely alluding to this belief. When I came to apply this view to man, I found it indispensable to treat the whole subject in full detail. [2] Consequently the second part of the present work, treating of sexual selection, has extended to an inordinate length, compared with the first part; but this could not be avoided.

I had intended adding to the present volumes an essay on the expression of the various emotions by man and the lower animals. My attention was called to this subject many years ago by Sir Charles Bell’s admirable work. This illustrious anatomist maintains that man is endowed with certain muscles solely for the sake of expressing his emotions. As this view is obviously opposed to the belief that man is descended from some other and lower form, it was necessary for me to consider it. I likewise wished to ascertain how far the emotions are expressed in the same manner by the different races of man. But owing to the length of the present work, I have thought it better to reserve my essay, which is partially completed, for separate publication.

Notes to the Introduction

[1] As the works of the first-named authors are so well known, I need not give the titles; but as those of the latter are less well known in England, I will give them: Sechs Vorlesungen über die Darwin’sche

Reviews for The Descent of Man

[britt84 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting to read, and definitely a very important work of science, though nowadays somewhat outdated...I do very much enjoy and appreciate Darwin's writings. He is very thorough and really delved into his subject. Sometimes this makes the reading a bit difficult because there's so much information, but mainly it greatly strengthens his theories. He also relates his ideas to the findings of other scientists and gives elaborate descriptions of examples, observations, and readings. I do feel that this book is less 'strong' than his 'On the Origin of Species'.One important part from a modern perspective is his ideas on inheritance and his theory of pangenesis. As we now know this theory to be incorrect - and scientifically speaking not to be able to explain the issues he discusses - this actually weakens his argument. In 'On the Origin of Species' he leaves the system of inheritance somewhat in the dark. He acknowledges that this is problematic, but this admittance of the problem works better than an incorrect theory - again, from a modern perspective. I do understand that he felt a need to provide this theory, since evolution doesn't work without some theory of inheritance, but the incorrectness of his theories makes this book less convincing.Furthermore, I found the build-up of this book somewhat less structured than 'On the Origin of Species'. There, Darwin takes you by the hand and leads you along all the evidence he has collected, making for a coherent, logical whole. The problem with 'The Descent of Man', I think, is the fact that he is really writing about two things, namely the origins of the human species and sexual selection. He discusses both ideas pretty much separately, which means the book is less of a whole. It might have been nicer had he split up the subjects and discussed both more extensively in separate volumes.Aside from these issues, it is still a great pleasure to read, full of interesting facts and great descriptions.

[ShanShahwani · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

it is a very nice book

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a difficult book to read in some ways. The main one being that it is so dense, the amount of information, observations, and evidence presented to the reader is staggering, all of it with the purpose of supporting the central theories of the book. These being that sexual selection plays a part in evolution as well as natural selection, with the former being a specific mechanism of the latter. The book is about man, and his evolution, but the majority of the examples are from other species, which support homologous principles in human evolution. There are quite a few pictures, which aren't bad. Some readers may be put off by the authors regard of different races of people, which will be considered "non p.c" by many, though it is really just scientific observation, despite it getting some geneticists into trouble to this day. The main problem is that this book is very long, and the evidence in support of the theory is greatly in excess to what would have been sufficient. At the time the theories were not things which were going to be readily accepted, and this is probably why the book goes into so much detail. I would struggle to recommend this book to anyone, as it seems so long and unnecessary, and does not make fascinating reading, as you can tell where a chapter is going when you start reading it, and then it seems like a painful slog to finish it. I have no doubt that this book made good reading when first published, but today it just seems like flogging a dead horse to read it as we don't need convincing of the theories. Maybe an evolutionary sceptic would enjoy it much more than I.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is Darwin's final major book with a focus on man. The primary focus is on man's origin in Part I, and sexual selection in Parts II & III. I found the discussion of moral sense and social instincts to be particularly enlightening with his focus on "sympathy" and "habit" as discussed by the Scottish philosophers (cf. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments). Notably he rejects God as the source of conscience. The bulk of the text, however, contains detail examples and discussion of the process of sexual selection.