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Rosie Jayde Uyola

The Descent of Man

Updated: Oct 18

FFW (5 min; 10 sentences min): What do you see? What does this drawing encourage the viewer to infer?


The Descent of Man, Ernst Haeckel (1871)



Overview


The Descent of Man was published 11 years after On the Origin of Species, which was the culmination of decades of work, including Darwin's global voyage aboard the HMS Beagle.

But his first book, which shook the foundations of the scientific and religious world when it was published, skirted around the issue of what his theories meant for humans. Descent of Man changed this and tackled the thorny issue head on, putting Darwin on a collision course with religion and conventional scientific thought at the time. The central theme of Darwin's work is that humans were no more special than any other animals and that we evolved from ancestral primates.



What is Sexual Selection?


Darwin was born 210 years ago! Among the many things he discovered is a special process called Sexual Selection. What is Sexual Selection and how does it work?




Race and Racism


Social Darwinism


The main author of Social Darwinism, despite its name, is not Darwin. Rather, it was Herbert Spencer who developed it as an ethical theory and a political philosophy. After the appearance of The Origin of Species, Spencer quickly reformulated his ethical theory as a logical consequence of the process of natural selection. The core idea of Social Darwinism is that the wealthy and powerful enjoy the privileges they do because they are more fit in terms of the traits favored by natural selection. The poor and powerless have less fit traits and therefore it is best to let them perish since their elimination will represent natural selection favoring fitter traits and the spread of fitter traits is a form of progress.


This line of thinking about moral issues, politics, and social policy was used to justify colonialism, extreme laissez-faire capitalism, and aggressive militarism. In any military conflict the fitter army would prevail and this would constitute a form of progress. It also justified withholding assistance from the poor and restriction of immigration to the U. S. from regions of the world deemed to have less fit populations. Social Darwinism was closely allied to eugenics, the idea that society (usually the government) should prevent the "unfit" from reproducing.


This led to the enactment, in many U. S. states and in Sweden, of laws mandating the sterilization of those deemed mentally or morally defective. The Nazis carried Social Darwinist logic to an extreme, taking it as their mission to serve the welfare of the superior German race at the expense of less fit races and even to exterminate those other races they deemed enemies of the German race. Thus, in Germany, during the Third Reich, Social Darwinism gave an apparently scientific justification to extreme forms of old-fashioned racism and nationalism.


It is important to note that Darwin declared that he was not himself a Social Darwinist and many early supporters of Darwinism as scientific theory, such as Thomas Huxley, the most effective advocate of the theory of evolution in the latter part of the nineteenth century, also rejected Social Darwinism. Now in the early twenty-first Century, there are no longer any serious advocates of Social Darwinism (North Western University)



Polygenism


In his work The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin and some of his supporters argued for the monogenesis of the human species, seeing the common origin of all humans as essential for evolutionary theory. This is known as the single-origin hypothesis. Darwin even dedicated a chapter of his The Descent of Man to an attempt to refute the polygenists and support common ancestry of all races. Polygenist evolution views however continued into the early 20th century, and still found support amongst prominent scientists.


Chapter VII of this work, On the Races of Man, was specifically directed at polygenism, as understood in the United States as well as within the ASL. Darwin emphasized that the likenesses of all humans in physical and behavioral categories were far greater than their differences. He explains that utilizing the criteria that naturalists apply to other species, one could doubt whether human races were real. In this he means that naturalists have not applied any consistent criteria by which one could classify human races. He further argued that most of the physical differences noticed by naturalists could not have any significance, if so they would have been removed by natural selection (further reading).


One of the means by which creationist attempt to link Darwin to the genocides of the 20th century appears in this chapter. Darwin rationalized the “extinction of less civilized races” within the context of natural selection. In this model, Darwin felt that based on Malthusian competition that the technology of more civilized races might have an advantage when then came into contact with less civilized races. His reasoning for this was based on his own observations of what was happening to indigenous populations, such as the Australian aborigines as displaced Englishmen began to take over Australia.


However, Darwin did not believe that natural selection always favored the “more civilized races.” He also observed that in climates where disease resistance was important, migrants from the more "civilized" races might not fare better than the indigenous populations who maintained resistance to disease in that climate. Darwin did not claim that these actions were morally justified, but simply the result of competition.


Did Darwin get the mechanism of racial variation correct?


The Descent of Man outlines how sexual selection could account for the protean or polymorphic features of modern humans. Sexual selection involves the traits that males and females of a species utilize to determine whom is a suitable mate. At this time, Darwin saw sexual selection mainly as resulting from male choice (and this is a clear legacy of his Victorian upbringing.) 



Gender Roles & Expectations


FFW (5 min; 10 sentences min): What gender role expectations do you feel most people experience in today's society? In your culture (in U.S. or back home)? Draw a line down the middle of your notebook page and write gender expectations on each side.




Check for understanding: How may have Victorian gender role expectations influenced Darwin?



Legacy of Descent of Man






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