Adrian Desmond - The Descent of Man

Charles Darwin

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THE DESCENT OF MAN, AND SELECTION IN RELATION TO SEX

With an introduction by
JAMES MOORE and ADRIAN DESMOND

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Second edition published in 1879 by John Murray, London

First published in Penguin Classics 2004

Editorial material copyright James Moore and Adrian Desmond, 2004

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the editors have been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-33621-2

PENGUIN CLASSICS

CHARLES DARWIN was born into an upper-middle-class medical family in 1809. He was destined for a career in either medicine or the Anglican Church. However, he did not complete his Edinburgh medical education and after leaving Christs College, Cambridge, in 1831, his future was entirely changed when he joined HMS Beagle as a self-financing, independent naturalist. On returning to England in 1836 he began to write up his theories and observations which culminated in a series of books, most famously On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection of 1859. He married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839. In 1842 they moved to Down House in the north Kent countryside where Darwin lived for the rest of his life. During this time he was socially reclusive and continually ill. He died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

JAMES MOORE has degrees in science, divinity and history, with a PhD from Manchester University. He has taught at Cambridge, Harvard, Notre Dame and McMaster universities and is currently Reader in History of Science and Technology at the Open University in Milton Keynes. His books include a study of Protestant responses to evolution, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (1979); a source-book, Religion in Victorian Britain (1988); a series of essays, History, Humanity and Evolution (1989), The Darwin Legend (1994) and with Adrian Desmond, Darwin (1991). He is working on a biography of Alfred Russel Wallace.

ADRIAN DESMOND is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Biology Department at University College London. He studied at London and Harvard Universities, has higher degrees in vertebrate palaeontology and history of science, and a PhD for his study of the radical evolutionists of Darwins younger day. He is the author of a two-volume biography Huxley (1994, 1997) and co-author with James Moore of Darwin (1991). His other titles include The Politics of Evolution (1989) and Archetypes & Ancestors (1982). He is currently co-editing the T. H. Huxley family correspondence for multi-volume publication.

For detailed creative feedback we would like to thank Pietro Corsi, John Greene, Randal Keynes, Greg Radick, Evelleen Richards and Frank Turner. Points of biographical information were kindly provided by Berit Pedersen, Sofia kerberg and Michael Palmer. For translations of passages in Darwins text we are grateful to Helen Constantine (French), Tania Gergel and Samantha Evans (Latin), and Timothy Perrott and John and Cordula Van Wyhe (German). Finally we are indebted to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, and the John Murray archives, for allowing us to study Darwin manuscripts and publishing ledgers respectively.

1807 Trade in slaves is abolished by Act of Parliament. Slavery still flourishes in the British colonies and elsewhere.

1809 Charles Darwin is born at Shrewsbury. The Darwins and Wedgwoods are prominent in the anti-slavery movement.

18257 Darwin studies medicine at Edinburgh University. He hears heretical views about the similarity of human and animal mental functions. He is taught to stuff animals by the freed black slave John Edmondston.

182831 Moves to Christs College, Cambridge, and prepares for a Church career.

18316 Gentleman companion to Captain FitzRoy aboard HMS Beagle. Marvels at Fuegian savages and the diversity of the human races. Witnesses slavery for the first time and abhors it.

1833 Slavery is abolished throughout the British Empire, but slaves still have to work out a seven-year indenture.

183742 Darwin lives in London. He privately lambasts those who consider slaves as sub-human and accepts a common ancestry for black and white human races. All life is descended in a tree-like fashion from a common primeval ancestor. Darwin develops his theory of natural selection to explain this. From the first he embraces human physical and mental evolution. He begins to approach the origin of the human races by means of male sexual competition.

1842 Writes a short sketch of his theory. He moves to Down (later spelt Downe) in Kent with his wife Emma Wedgwood, whom he had married in 1839, and the first two of their ten children.

1844 Finishes a 189-page account of his evolution theory and provides for its publication in case of his death.

1856 Starts writing a huge book, Natural Selection, against a backdrop of racist and abolitionist turmoil in America. A chapter is to be included with sexual selection, explaining the evolutionary divergence of the human races from one stock.

1857 Indian Mutiny cuts off his supply of information from Edward Blyth on sexual characters. The anti-evolutionist Richard Owen erects a special sub-class for mankind. Darwin drops mankind from Natural Selection.

1859 Rushes into print with On the Origin of Species, an abstract of his big book, after receiving an outline of a similar theory from Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin now sees a more active role for females in sexual selection.

18613 Debates rage between Richard Owen and T. H. Huxley over the similarity of human and ape brains.

18615 American Civil War is fought over the issue of slavery. In Britain, an evangelical revival hardens the argument against the old nigger philanthropists; pro-slavery members of the Anthropological Society (founded 1863) depict the races springing from separate ape species.

1863 Charles Lyell collates the discoveries of prehistoric stone tools in his