“No gentleman-naturalist seemed an unlikelier candidate to write the Descent of Man than Charles Darwin (1809-82). And no book stirred up such a lasting storm, stretching from Victorian to modern times, with its argument for human evolution and mechanism of racial divergence that Darwin called 'sexual selection'. ...Did ever a book impinge more on the world of science, literature, theology, and philosophy?
“Darwin was an affable, old-world gentleman, and already sixty-two in 1871 when the Descent of Man first appeared. Cambridge-educated, once intended for holy orders, he settled into a rural life, becoming the perfect squire only six years after returning from his circumnavigation aboard HMS Beagle in 1836. He was never the professional 'scientist' in the modern sense, more the last great virtuoso whose home was a living laboratory, and whose wealth released him to lavish time on innovative tomes that themselves bore the stamp of rank. Hardly a man, one would have thought, to shake the world with the Origin of Species (1859)--which avoided the subject of human evolution—let alone the Descent of Man, with its frontal assault on mind and morality.
“Yet, there were always two sides to Darwin. He was the grandson of not only the libertine physician Erasmus Darwin, whose evolutionary poetry stirred democrats at the time of the French Revolution, but also of the potter-industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, a devout Unitarian in a day when Unitarians were persecuted for denying the Holy Trinity and banishing miracles from science. The only reason Darwin was packed off to Christ's College, Cambridge (1828-1831), to study for the Church was because he had failed at medicine. Originally he had attended the more secular Edinburgh University (1825-7)...
“Historically speaking, the Descent was not primarily a book about 'human evolution' as we think of it today. True, Part I compares human and animal anatomies; it controversially delves into the emergence of morality; and in one place it tentatively broaches an ancestral lineage for mankind. But this cannot disguise the fact the book was written to an idiosyncratic agenda. It originated in Darwin's worries about slavery and ended in an explanation of racial divergence...
“Much of Darwin's core work on the evolution of the human races was fired by his revulsion to slavery. He felt not only scientific curiosity but a moral imperative to explain how racial differences arose naturally within one human species. This singular agenda left him viewing life differently from most naturalists of his day...
“Here, then, we trace the roots of his concern for the plight of enslaved races, a concern that would lead to the emancipation of humanity from creationist bondage in the Descent of Man....
“Darwin dreaded publishing Descent. For thirty years he marked time, until colleagues forced his hand. Watching the Origin of Species take a pounding in 1859 in a prim Anglican society, he trembled to reveal the full extent of his heresy: 'How I sh[oul]d be abused if I were to publish on the relation of the human mind to that of lower animals'. A decade later, when Descent did go to press, he warned friends that it would seem 'very wicked'. Churchmen would think him 'an outcast and a reprobate.' He expected 'universal disapprobation, if not execution', meaning, as he told a critic, that the book would 'quite kill me in your good estimation'....
“Race, slavery and sex are the keys to unlock the Descent of Man. But to understand why a minor member of the gentry should have tackled tough questions about racial diversity, let alone the evolution of mankind, we need to start at the beginning—with young Darwin's sensitivity to slavery....
“The evidence of slavery abroad mounted as Darwin grew up. Slavers with packed ships would dump their wretched cargo at sea rather than face arrest. Planters in the West Indies were writing off their investments, working a million slaves to death. Campaigners demanded that slavery itself be abolished to stop the atrocities. In an age of laissez-faire, many saw chattel slavery 'as the symbol of all forces which thwarted individual liberty.'...
“Darwin took in abolitionism with his Wedgwood mother's milk. Among anti-slavery families, the Unitarian Wedgwoods and free-thinking Darwins stood prominent. They joined forces around 1790, when the potter Josiah Wedgwood I cast the famous cameo 'Am I a man and a brother?' and his poetic friend Erasmus Darwin described its 'poor fetter'd SLAVE on bended knee/From Britain's sons imploring to be free' in his masterpiece The Botanic Garden. The fetter'd slave became a fashionable icon, copied on hairpins and snuff boxes. The families grew closer after Darwin's son Robert married Susannah, Wedgwood's eldest daughter, and six grandchildren were born....Josiah, elected a Whig MP in 1832, supported Lord Grey's reforming ministry, which abolished slavery throughout the Empire in 1833.
“This was the world that gave Darwin his moral compass. At Edinburgh University in 1826, John Edmonston, a freed slave from British Guiana, gave young Darwin taxidermy lessons in the museum. The bird-stuffing proved invaluable, and in the Descent of Man he remembered this 'full-blooded negro', whose 'many little traits' showed the similarity of their minds. Edmonston belied those pundits who classified 'negroes' as a separate species. He was proof of the biblical view that all humans belong to one stock descended from Adam. At Cambridge Darwin heard this made into Anglican doctrine: one species needed only one Savior. Later he would ignore the Book of Genesis, but the unity of the human races remained central to his science....”
Friday, November 1, 2013
DESCENT OF MAN, EXCERPTS...
THE DESCENT OF MAN, by Charles Darwin, with an introduction by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (Penguin Books, London: 1879, 2004), pp. Xi-xv, xvii-viii
“No gentleman-naturalist seemed an unlikelier candidate to write the Descent of Man than Charles Darwin (1809-82). And no book stirred up such a lasting storm, stretching from Victorian to modern times, with its argument for human evolution and mechanism of racial divergence that Darwin called 'sexual selection'. ...Did ever a book impinge more on the world of science, literature, theology, and philosophy?
“Darwin was an affable, old-world gentleman, and already sixty-two in 1871 when the Descent of Man first appeared. Cambridge-educated, once intended for holy orders, he settled into a rural life, becoming the perfect squire only six years after returning from his circumnavigation aboard HMS Beagle in 1836. He was never the professional 'scientist' in the modern sense, more the last great virtuoso whose home was a living laboratory, and whose wealth released him to lavish time on innovative tomes that themselves bore the stamp of rank. Hardly a man, one would have thought, to shake the world with the Origin of Species (1859)--which avoided the subject of human evolution—let alone the Descent of Man, with its frontal assault on mind and morality.
“Yet, there were always two sides to Darwin. He was the grandson of not only the libertine physician Erasmus Darwin, whose evolutionary poetry stirred democrats at the time of the French Revolution, but also of the potter-industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, a devout Unitarian in a day when Unitarians were persecuted for denying the Holy Trinity and banishing miracles from science. The only reason Darwin was packed off to Christ's College, Cambridge (1828-1831), to study for the Church was because he had failed at medicine. Originally he had attended the more secular Edinburgh University (1825-7)...
“Historically speaking, the Descent was not primarily a book about 'human evolution' as we think of it today. True, Part I compares human and animal anatomies; it controversially delves into the emergence of morality; and in one place it tentatively broaches an ancestral lineage for mankind. But this cannot disguise the fact the book was written to an idiosyncratic agenda. It originated in Darwin's worries about slavery and ended in an explanation of racial divergence...
“Much of Darwin's core work on the evolution of the human races was fired by his revulsion to slavery. He felt not only scientific curiosity but a moral imperative to explain how racial differences arose naturally within one human species. This singular agenda left him viewing life differently from most naturalists of his day...
“Here, then, we trace the roots of his concern for the plight of enslaved races, a concern that would lead to the emancipation of humanity from creationist bondage in the Descent of Man....
“Darwin dreaded publishing Descent. For thirty years he marked time, until colleagues forced his hand. Watching the Origin of Species take a pounding in 1859 in a prim Anglican society, he trembled to reveal the full extent of his heresy: 'How I sh[oul]d be abused if I were to publish on the relation of the human mind to that of lower animals'. A decade later, when Descent did go to press, he warned friends that it would seem 'very wicked'. Churchmen would think him 'an outcast and a reprobate.' He expected 'universal disapprobation, if not execution', meaning, as he told a critic, that the book would 'quite kill me in your good estimation'....
“Race, slavery and sex are the keys to unlock the Descent of Man. But to understand why a minor member of the gentry should have tackled tough questions about racial diversity, let alone the evolution of mankind, we need to start at the beginning—with young Darwin's sensitivity to slavery....
“The evidence of slavery abroad mounted as Darwin grew up. Slavers with packed ships would dump their wretched cargo at sea rather than face arrest. Planters in the West Indies were writing off their investments, working a million slaves to death. Campaigners demanded that slavery itself be abolished to stop the atrocities. In an age of laissez-faire, many saw chattel slavery 'as the symbol of all forces which thwarted individual liberty.'...
“Darwin took in abolitionism with his Wedgwood mother's milk. Among anti-slavery families, the Unitarian Wedgwoods and free-thinking Darwins stood prominent. They joined forces around 1790, when the potter Josiah Wedgwood I cast the famous cameo 'Am I a man and a brother?' and his poetic friend Erasmus Darwin described its 'poor fetter'd SLAVE on bended knee/From Britain's sons imploring to be free' in his masterpiece The Botanic Garden. The fetter'd slave became a fashionable icon, copied on hairpins and snuff boxes. The families grew closer after Darwin's son Robert married Susannah, Wedgwood's eldest daughter, and six grandchildren were born....Josiah, elected a Whig MP in 1832, supported Lord Grey's reforming ministry, which abolished slavery throughout the Empire in 1833.
“This was the world that gave Darwin his moral compass. At Edinburgh University in 1826, John Edmonston, a freed slave from British Guiana, gave young Darwin taxidermy lessons in the museum. The bird-stuffing proved invaluable, and in the Descent of Man he remembered this 'full-blooded negro', whose 'many little traits' showed the similarity of their minds. Edmonston belied those pundits who classified 'negroes' as a separate species. He was proof of the biblical view that all humans belong to one stock descended from Adam. At Cambridge Darwin heard this made into Anglican doctrine: one species needed only one Savior. Later he would ignore the Book of Genesis, but the unity of the human races remained central to his science....”
“No gentleman-naturalist seemed an unlikelier candidate to write the Descent of Man than Charles Darwin (1809-82). And no book stirred up such a lasting storm, stretching from Victorian to modern times, with its argument for human evolution and mechanism of racial divergence that Darwin called 'sexual selection'. ...Did ever a book impinge more on the world of science, literature, theology, and philosophy?
“Darwin was an affable, old-world gentleman, and already sixty-two in 1871 when the Descent of Man first appeared. Cambridge-educated, once intended for holy orders, he settled into a rural life, becoming the perfect squire only six years after returning from his circumnavigation aboard HMS Beagle in 1836. He was never the professional 'scientist' in the modern sense, more the last great virtuoso whose home was a living laboratory, and whose wealth released him to lavish time on innovative tomes that themselves bore the stamp of rank. Hardly a man, one would have thought, to shake the world with the Origin of Species (1859)--which avoided the subject of human evolution—let alone the Descent of Man, with its frontal assault on mind and morality.
“Yet, there were always two sides to Darwin. He was the grandson of not only the libertine physician Erasmus Darwin, whose evolutionary poetry stirred democrats at the time of the French Revolution, but also of the potter-industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, a devout Unitarian in a day when Unitarians were persecuted for denying the Holy Trinity and banishing miracles from science. The only reason Darwin was packed off to Christ's College, Cambridge (1828-1831), to study for the Church was because he had failed at medicine. Originally he had attended the more secular Edinburgh University (1825-7)...
“Historically speaking, the Descent was not primarily a book about 'human evolution' as we think of it today. True, Part I compares human and animal anatomies; it controversially delves into the emergence of morality; and in one place it tentatively broaches an ancestral lineage for mankind. But this cannot disguise the fact the book was written to an idiosyncratic agenda. It originated in Darwin's worries about slavery and ended in an explanation of racial divergence...
“Much of Darwin's core work on the evolution of the human races was fired by his revulsion to slavery. He felt not only scientific curiosity but a moral imperative to explain how racial differences arose naturally within one human species. This singular agenda left him viewing life differently from most naturalists of his day...
“Here, then, we trace the roots of his concern for the plight of enslaved races, a concern that would lead to the emancipation of humanity from creationist bondage in the Descent of Man....
“Darwin dreaded publishing Descent. For thirty years he marked time, until colleagues forced his hand. Watching the Origin of Species take a pounding in 1859 in a prim Anglican society, he trembled to reveal the full extent of his heresy: 'How I sh[oul]d be abused if I were to publish on the relation of the human mind to that of lower animals'. A decade later, when Descent did go to press, he warned friends that it would seem 'very wicked'. Churchmen would think him 'an outcast and a reprobate.' He expected 'universal disapprobation, if not execution', meaning, as he told a critic, that the book would 'quite kill me in your good estimation'....
“Race, slavery and sex are the keys to unlock the Descent of Man. But to understand why a minor member of the gentry should have tackled tough questions about racial diversity, let alone the evolution of mankind, we need to start at the beginning—with young Darwin's sensitivity to slavery....
“The evidence of slavery abroad mounted as Darwin grew up. Slavers with packed ships would dump their wretched cargo at sea rather than face arrest. Planters in the West Indies were writing off their investments, working a million slaves to death. Campaigners demanded that slavery itself be abolished to stop the atrocities. In an age of laissez-faire, many saw chattel slavery 'as the symbol of all forces which thwarted individual liberty.'...
“Darwin took in abolitionism with his Wedgwood mother's milk. Among anti-slavery families, the Unitarian Wedgwoods and free-thinking Darwins stood prominent. They joined forces around 1790, when the potter Josiah Wedgwood I cast the famous cameo 'Am I a man and a brother?' and his poetic friend Erasmus Darwin described its 'poor fetter'd SLAVE on bended knee/From Britain's sons imploring to be free' in his masterpiece The Botanic Garden. The fetter'd slave became a fashionable icon, copied on hairpins and snuff boxes. The families grew closer after Darwin's son Robert married Susannah, Wedgwood's eldest daughter, and six grandchildren were born....Josiah, elected a Whig MP in 1832, supported Lord Grey's reforming ministry, which abolished slavery throughout the Empire in 1833.
“This was the world that gave Darwin his moral compass. At Edinburgh University in 1826, John Edmonston, a freed slave from British Guiana, gave young Darwin taxidermy lessons in the museum. The bird-stuffing proved invaluable, and in the Descent of Man he remembered this 'full-blooded negro', whose 'many little traits' showed the similarity of their minds. Edmonston belied those pundits who classified 'negroes' as a separate species. He was proof of the biblical view that all humans belong to one stock descended from Adam. At Cambridge Darwin heard this made into Anglican doctrine: one species needed only one Savior. Later he would ignore the Book of Genesis, but the unity of the human races remained central to his science....”
