Divided into three parts, this book's purpose, as given in the introduction, is to consider whether or not man is descended from a pre-existing form, his manner ...

Who can divine the intentions of the human heart, the motives that guide behavior? Some of the reasons for our actions lie on the surface of consciousness, whereas others are more deeply embedded in the recesses of the mind. Recovering motives and intentions is a principal job of the historian. For without some attribution of mental attitudes, actions cannot be characterized and decisions assessed. The same overt behavior, after all, might be described as “mailing a letter” or “fomenting a revolution.” (...) The recovery of intentions is crucial for the historian’s narrative. (shrink)

This paper addresses the appropriation of theories of evolution by nineteenth-century feminists, focusing on the critical response to Darwin's The Descent of Man by Eliza Burt Gamble and Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's social evolutionism. For Gilman, evolutionism was a revolutionary resource for feminism, one of its greatest hopes. Gamble and Blackwell revisit Darwin's data with the aim of locating, amidst his ostensive conclusions to the contrary, his implicit "defense" of either the equality or the superiority of (...) women. This article identifies the reasons for, and limitations of, this enthusiasm. To some extent, the basis of this feminism is provided by its keen perception of disparities between what a text does, and what it says it is doing. But these feminists did not think through the implications for their own rhetoric about race hierarchy. Darwin's trope of the "savage" would return in the work of some of these feminists, occasionally displaced or rejected, but usually reiterated, and sometimes integral to the feminism in question. (shrink)

The first annotated edition of the book that shocked the Victorian world and continues to generate controversy today.

The cliché of the clergymen or the religious scholars battling against modern science oversimplifies the history of the encounter between modern science and religion, especially in the case of non-Western societies. Many religious scholars, Muslim and Christian, not only did not oppose modern science but used it instrumentally to propagate their religions. Marwa Elshakry, in her brilliant study of Darwin's opinions among the Arab World, concentrates more on Arab Christians and Sunni Muslims rather than on Shiite Muslims. Muḥammad-Riḍā Iṣfahānī, a (...) Shiite clergyman educated in Islamic theology in Najaf, composed A Critique of Darwin's Philosophy in 1912 as a review of the theory of evolution. However, even before the publication of this book, controversy concerning this topic had been raging in the Arab World for decades. Under the influence of Muslim scholars (Sunni and Shiite) to reconcile modern science with Islam, Iṣfahānī did his best to gather knowledge of modern biology. He applied his self-taught knowledge of modern biology to find new solutions to the difficulties of establishing a dialogue between Islam and modern science. Thanks to the rationalism of his premodern scientific education, Iṣfahānī was more sympathetic towards science than many of his Arab counterparts and able to deeply engage in these debates. Iṣfahānī believed that the theory of evolution in nonhumans did not contradict Islamic discourse nor experimental and rational facts. Nevertheless, he denied the theory of human evolution as a nonscientific hypothesis. He justified his opinion through a detailed refutation of Darwin's heuristic evidence for human evolution in the first chapter of Descent of Man, such as the similarities between anatomy, embryology, and vestigial organs in humans and other animals. He also referred to other Western evolutionists of his time, such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Rudolf Virchow, who also rejected human evolution, and added some other scientific refutations of his own. Undoubtedly, Iṣfahānī's final aim was to demonstrate the possibility of reconciliation between religion in general, and Islam in particular, with modern science. This article provides a detailed consideration of Iṣfahānī's opinions, identifying his Arabic sources and comparing them to the original non-Arabic sources. I also examine the scientific details of Iṣfahānī's achievements and the roots of his misunderstandings. (shrink)

Sex, Gender, Ethics, and the Darwinian Evolution of Humanity examines the impact of Darwin's 'Descent of Man' on contemporary biology and the humanities. Its publication in 1871 was a founding event in anthropology. Its content was primarily concerned with the development of sexual life, social life, and intellectual life, not only as outcomes of evolution, but as components that have actively intermixed over time with the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection. The stamp of Darwinism on modern thought is still (...) very important and brings novelties to academic studies. Several fields influenced by Darwinian anthropology developed in recent decades, including evolutionary ethics, the evolution of sociality and sexual communication in animal and plant species. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are topics that draw heavily on Darwin's 'Descent of Man'. The understanding of Darwin's thought has also progressed greatly in recent decades, following the systematic study of Darwin's correspondence and notebooks, leading to a reassessment of the development of his thought on humans, social groups, and heredity, and how they come together in his theory of evolution. The book combines a historical perspective on Darwin's achievement and his legacy. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, from experimental biology to the social and historical sciences. (shrink)

Could an ethical theory ever play a substantial evidential role in a scientific argument for an empirical hypothesis? InThe Descent of Man, Darwin includes an extended discussion of the nature of human morality, and the ethical theory which he sketches is not simply developed as an interesting ramification of his theory of evolution, but is used as a key part of his evidence for human descent from animal ancestors. Darwin must rebut the argument that, because of our moral (...) nature, humans are essentially different in kind from other animals and so had to have had a different origin. I trace his causal story of how the moral sense could develop out of social instincts by evolutionary mechanisms of group selection, and show that the form of Utilitarianism he proposes involves a radical reduction of the standard of value to the concept of biological fitness. I argue that this causal analysis, although a weakness from a normative standpoint, is a strength when judged for its intended purpose as part of an evidential argument to confirm the hypothesis of human descent. (shrink)

Darwin’s treatment of morality in The Descent of Man has generated a wide variety of responses among moral philosophers. Among these is the dismissal of evolution as irrelevant to ethics by Darwin’s contemporary Henry Sidgwick; the last, and arguably the greatest, of the Nineteenth Century British Utilitarians. This paper offers a re-examination of Sidgwick’s response to evolutionary considerations as irrelevant to ethics and the absence of any engagement with Darwin’s work in Sidgwick’s main ethical treatise, The Methods of Ethics (...) . This assessment of Sidgwick’s response to Darwin’s work is shown to have significance for a number of ongoing controversies in contemporary metaethics. (shrink)

Desmond and Moore point out that the key to understanding Darwin’s The Descent of Man is his abolitionist motivation and his advocacy that races constitute subspecies. Roberta Millstein raises some doubts about the importance of this motivation. She points out that the inclusion of the extensive section devoted to non-human animals is not justified by Darwin’s treatment of humans per se, because his explanation of the origin of races is peculiar. In this sense, she argues that Darwin’s specific explanation (...) of the origin of races does not confirm the central importance that Desmond and Moore give to Darwin’s abolitionism. In this paper I have two different aims. On the one hand, to show that the human case actually is based on the treatment of nonhuman animals, and consequently, Darwin’s argument is not as poor as Millstein believes. My second goal, taking Millstein’s challenge seriously, is to show that Darwin’s explanation of the origin of races does confirm the Desmond and Moore thesis in a deeper sense than the one they propose themselves. For the anti-slavery motivation could not only explain the fact that Darwin sees all humans as forming the same species, but the specific explanation he gives for the origin of races. (shrink)

In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism for biological evolution in his most famous work, On the Origin of Species. However, Origin makes little mention of humans. Despite this, Darwin thought deeply about humans and in 1871 published The Descent of Man, his influential and controversial book in which he applied evolutionary theory to humans and detailed his theory of sexual selection. February 2021 will mark the 150th anniversay of it's publication. In A Most Interesting Problem, twelve leading anthropologists, (...) biologists, and journalists revisit The Descent. Following the same organization as the first edition of Descent - less the large section on sexual selection -- each author reviews what Darwin wrote in Descent, comparing his words to what we now know now. There are chapters on evidence for human evolution, our place in the family tree, the origins of civilization, human races, intelligence, and sex differences. An introduction by Darwin biolographer and historian Janet Browne provides context for Descent and a conclusion by Science magazine journalist Ann Gibbons looks to the future of the study of human evolution. All the chapters are written with a broad audience in mind. Ultimately, readers learn that Darwin was remarkably prophetic in some of his predictions, such as that the earliest human fossils would be discovered in Africa. But he was wrong in other areas, particularly in regards to variations between the sexes and races. Thus, A Most Interesting Problem is not so much a celebration of Darwin as it is a tribute to how science works, how scientific ideas are tested, and the role of evidence in helping structure narratives of human origins. The reader is left with a view of how far we have come in our quest for understanding human origins, biological variation, behavior, and evolution. (shrink)

The protagonist of Edith Wharton’s 1904 short story “The Descent of Man” is both scien­tist and satirist. The target of his satire-“false interpreters” of evolutionary theory-allows Wharton to combine analysis of genre with inquiry into the cultural controversy Darwin’s ideas inspired. Anthropocentric anxieties explain popular preference for soothing “pseudo-science” over unsparing accounts of natural selection; they likewise explain widespread obtuseness to Professor Linyard’s ridicule of hazy illogic posing as science. Motivated more strongly by fitness interests than by allegiance to (...) scientific truth, however, the professor becomes complicit in widespread misreading of his own text. He thereby encourages the ignorance he intended to dispel, and Wharton highlights the ironies inherent in this self-sabotage. She insists that susceptibility to evolved adaptations is universal, moreover, and that it often impedes the discovery and promulgation of truth. (shrink)

In the second chapter of The descent of man , Charles Darwin interrupted his discussion of the evolutionary origins of language to describe ten ways in which the formation of languages and of biological species were ‘curiously’ similar. I argue that these comparisons served mainly as analogies in which linguistic processes stood for aspects of biological evolution. Darwin used these analogies to recapitulate themes from On the origin of species , including common descent, genealogical classification, the struggle for (...) existence, and natural selection, among others. Skeptical of this interpretation, Gregory Radick sees the naturalistic account of language formation in the Descent comparisons as reinforcing Darwin’s idea that languages and the races of mankind have both undergone progressive development. Yet the details of Darwin’s language–species comparisons, as well as the polemical context in which they appear, show that they were not aimed at so limited a function. Rather, they addressed issues related to species transmutation in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 231-232 [Access article in PDF] Donald R. Kelley. The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. vii + 320. Cloth, $59.50. The field of intellectual history, once known as the history of ideas, intersects with many other historical sub-disciplines, especially the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science, and cultural (...) history. Donald Kelley, a distinguished intellectual historian and editor of The Journal of the History of Ideas, has written a comprehensive history of his field that emphasizes the process by which scholars who studied the history of thought gradually adopted an approach to their subject that resulted in "the descent of ideas" from philosophical abstraction to the "sublunar" realm of human experience and understanding. This intellectual descent, just like the biological descent of man plotted by Darwin in 1871, has not followed a linear course. Displaying remarkable scholarly range and erudition, Kelley guides the reader through a complex and sometimes amorphous history of intellectual history that covers developments in scholarship from ancient times to the present.The most original and distinctive feature of the book is Kelley's emphasis on the importance of eclecticism in the emergence of intellectual history. The book begins with an exposition of the scholarship of the early nineteenth-century Liberal French philosopher and educator Victor Cousin, whose eclectic approach to teaching the history of philosophy was for him not only the best route to attaining true wisdom but also the key to organizing the history of thought. In this way Cousin helped to make intellectual history a distinct branch of historical scholarship, while his contemporaries Abel-François Villemain and François Guizot marked a parallel shift in interest from the history of ideas to the history of literature and the history of civilization. From this starting point Kelley looks back to classical, medieval, and early modern thought, exploring earlier expressions of eclecticism, including that of Diogenes Laertius in the third century CE, as a distinct and often maligned philosophical tradition. An excellent chapter on the "new" or modern eclecticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which rejected syncretism as well as skepticism and which found a place for Christian thought, gives new significance to the work of [End Page 231] Jakob Thomasius, his son Christian Thomasius, and J. J. Brucker, whose Critical History of Philosophy (1742-44) established the history of philosophy as a distinct discipline.Kelley devotes considerable space to discussing the intersection between the history of philosophy and intellectual history. The former has long served as the "taproot" of the latter, even after eighteenth-century philosophers, striving to establish philosophy as a rigorous science, rejected a historical approach to attaining wisdom. This development caused a split within the ranks of philosophers between the "purists" in the Kantian tradition and "culturalists" like J. G. Herder who, "following the descent of ideas into the medium of language, strayed off into what came to be known as cultural history" (p. 4). In a chapter devoted to the history of philosophy in modern times, Kelley explores the contributions made by the philosophers Ernst Cassirer, Benedetto Croce, and Arthur Lovejoy to the field of intellectual history.By taking a long historical perspective on the development of his field, Kelley is able to demonstrate that some recent trends in intellectual and literary history have longstanding precedents. Thus he traces the recent "linguistic turn" in historical analysis, which he styles the "linguistic return," back to the Renaissance, and he sees the claims of twentieth-century scholars who emphasize the importance of narrative structures in giving meaning to the past as restatements of ancient literary theory. In his chapter, "The Way of Ideas and the Ways of Words," Kelley shows that the descent of ideas began long before the emergence of intellectual history as a distinct field. As might be expected in a work of historiography, Kelley's methodology in establishing these precedents and continuities in scholarship is in a certain sense traditional. Yet there is little that... (shrink)

Extensa exposición de la recepción del darwinismo en el Uruguay, que llega hasta la actualidad. Salvo en épocas más recientes, las reacciones, en favor o en contra, fueron de índole ideológica más que científica, especialmente a partir del concocimiento de The descent of man. Las polémicas entre católicos y 'evolucionistas' tienen, según el autor, su punto candente entre 1871-90. Le siguió un período de mayor apaciguamiento, en que la cuestión se consideró en función de los desarrollos de la ciencia (...) biológica. Es obligado poner esta contribución en relación con la obra de Thomas Glick, Darwin y el darwinismo: en el Uruguay y en América Latina (ver HLAS 56:5067)"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58. (shrink)

The nineteenth century theologian, author and poet Charles Kingsley was a notable populariser of Darwinian evolution. He championed Darwin’s cause and that of honesty in science for more than a decade from 1859 to 1871. Kingsley’s interpretation of evolution shaped his theology, his politics and his views on race. The relationship between men and apes set the context for Kingsley’s consideration of these issues. Having defended Darwin for a decade in 1871 Kingsley was dismayed to read Darwin’s account of the (...) evolution of morals in Descent of Man. He subsequently distanced himself from Darwin’s conclusions even though he remained an ardent evolutionist until his death in 1875. (shrink)

A study of the descent of Western idealism in the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions as continued by outstanding creative thinkers from St. Thomas Aquinas to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Includes as well the following representatives of the Platonic descent: Paracelsus, Francis Bacon, Jakob Boehme, and Immanuel Kant. These philosophers and mystics have influenced profoundly the entire course of modern civilization. Their lives are significant, for only when we know the men themselves can we interpret correctly the force and character (...) of their ideals through the examples of their lives and ideas. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 230—233. A word about the quotation marks. People ask about them, in the beginning; in the process of giving themselves up to reading the poem, they become comfortable with them, without necessarily thinking precisely about why they’re there. But they’re there, mostly to measure the poem. The phrases they enclose are poetic feet. If I had simply left white spaces between the phrases, the phrases would be read too fast for my musical intention. The quotation marks make (...) the reader slow down and silently articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and with the stresses, I intend. They also distance the narrative form myself. I am not Alette. Finally they may remind the reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice: this is not a thought, or a record of thought process, this is a story, told.(1) We read (reread) the poems that keep the discourse with ourselves going. —Wallace Stevens We have to break open words or sentences, too, and find what’s uttered in them. —Gilles Deleuze “The Descent of Alette” “is an allegorical poem” “in four books” “first published” “in 1992” “by Alice Notley.” “In the Descent of Alette,” “the double quotation mark” “is wrapped around” “words, phrases, sometimes whole sentences, and utilized as bones for structure and tonality.” “The winged” “dbl quotation” “like angels or devils” “descending from elsewhere” “function as” “poetic feet.” “Distance” “in the text through the use of dbl quotes,” “according to Notley,” “was a way to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” I know someone who tattooed double quotes on her shoulder blades. In other words, the body is quotable. To be able to say that one is quotable. A body filled with other’s sayings. I never asked her what for, what is the double quote tattoo for and why on the shoulder blades? I prefer my own interpretation that keeps shifting every time I see her. First words of every poem in every book: Book One One ... On ... A ... There ... I ... We ... An ... A ... A ... I ... At ... A ... When ... When ... There ... I ... In ... At ... I ... Once ... A ... A ... In ... A ... A ... Two ... I ... I ... Eyeball ... In ... I... A ... I ... I ... On ... I ... There ... What ... As ... As Book Two I ... When ... I ... I ... As ... I ... I ... There ... I ... There ... I ... A ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I Book Three The ... Presently ... I ... I’m ... I ... We ... What ... My ... I ... Who ... But ... Lay ... My ... I ... The ... Your ... The ... I ... It’s ... As ... The ... Talon’s ... When ... We ... I ... Slowly ... I ... I ... The ... How ... The Book Four I ... I ... You ... The ... Now ... She ... The ... There ... As ... Then ... The ... All ... Let’s I ... You ... The ... Thus ... The ... I ... The ... I ... There ... Have ... The ... As ... The Defamiliar Object “Poetry is a defamiliarized language, whose formations, so far from being simply formations of meaning, are aesthetic structures...”(2) “The same can be” “irresponsibly associated” “with the use of punctuation.” “The dbl quotation as a measure” “of poetic feet” “is treated as such” “because the author” “injects artfulness into it.” “The dbl quote is an object—” “a joystick” “to control breadth” “(of breath.)” “To de-familiarize” “said sign” “is also to” “impart the sensation of [it] as [it is] perceived and not as they are known.”(3) “The dbl quote” “nests previous words, phrasings and sayings.” “How many have come and gone” “through the doorway of this punctuation sign.” “There are also air quotes and virtual quotes.” “There is emphasis and there’s irony.” “It would be aggravating” “or interesting” “to watch a reading of” “The Descent of Alette” “with someone” “raising and curling” “fingers” “bent out of shape” “in what could be used as” “peace signs.” “I am trying to avoid” “scare quotes.” “I looked up” “what they are” “and supposedly they arose” “in the early 20th century.” “The scare quote” “is a mark around a word or phrase to indicate that it doesn’t signify conventional or literal meaning.” “This isn’t how Notley” “intended to use them” “in The Descent of Alette.” “The characters, places, and things” “signify nothing” “beyond” “their literal meaning” “ within the allegory .” “I’d like to stress” “within the allegory;” “that’s why its” “italicized.” “It is told through” “the main character/voice of” “Alette.” “The author reminds us she is not Alette.” “The author marvelously found a way” “to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” “This was attempted” “by tonal and intimate” “affect of the dbl quote” “used as poetic feet.” “Its as though” “punctuation in this regard” “becomes a magical toy.” “Arguably, punctuation” “(as perceived)” “undergoes a kind of” “ defamiliar ” “make-over.” “The text” gently forces the reader” “to slow down,” “read slowly.” “At some point” “one begins to sense” “lines of text” “moving on its own.” “Broken words, phrases, and sentences” “shuttling left to right” “like a subway” “that stops” “from station to station;” “open quote to end quote.” Double Quote Occupied “There are two worlds; one above ground” “and one underground.” “The world above ground is where,” “the tyrant” “with a capital t” “lives.” “(The “T” gets tangled in the claws of the dbl quote.)” “Alette becomes an owl and kills him.” “In the last book the tyrant dies.” “ “...the tyrant” “a man in charge of” “the fact” “that we were” “below the ground” “endlessly riding” “our trains, never surfacing” “A man who” “would make you pay” “so much” “to leave the subway” “that you don’t” “ever ask” “how much it is” “It is, in effect,” “all of you & more” “Most of which you already” “pay to live below” “But he would literally” “take your soul” “Which is what you are” “below the ground” “Your soul” “your soul rides” “this subway” “I saw” “on the subway a” “world of souls” ”(4) “New York;” “the city of cities” “and its subways—” “worlds underground,” “above ground,” “& above the above ground.” “Skyscrapers,” “Wall Street,” “old money,” “new money,” “and falling further down a cleavage;” “the middle class” “slipping away.” “Contemporary artist ” “Ligorano Reece” “recently made” “a sculpture of ice ” “a block of ice” “carved to read” “middle class” “(in all upper case letters)” “and let it melt” “naturally” “for however long—” “hours,” “days.” “It didn’t take very long to melt.” A global uprise of mass demonstrations; a cacophony of bodies on the street, in parks and universities, on City Hall lawns, coastal ports, neighborhoods, etc., and for what? The reasons are endless and finite. Not a single body is unaffected by the movement even when not “occupying.” “Occupiers” “stormed into a Sotheby’s auction” “protesting” “via human microphone” “that the CEO takes home” “about” “six thousand dollars” “a day.” “(The a/Art market” “is not a reflection” “of a desire” “for a/Art” “but a reflection” “of a desire” “for money” “confused with a/Art.)” What could it mean to occupy that which has been written or said? Someone with double quotes tattooed on both shoulders attempts to reclaim the sign; re-invent it privately-publicly since the body is always split between both spheres. A genre of hide-and-seek; the speaking and silent body which can never mean what it says even while it so desires to mean something. To nest (and hold hostage) someone in double quotes is an act of violence; a gesture of displacement where one is arrested, dislocated, and scrutinized under a distant gaze. “The air quote” “also known as” “finger quote or ersatz quote” “supposedly” “harks back to” “1927.” “The brevity of this gesture” “ as something invisible” “like virtual money or credit” “doesn’t really exist” “though it take up space;” “its the ghostliest of all punctuation signs” “and one that requires the presence and appearance of a body.” “ “she made a form” “in her mind” “an imaginary” “form” “to settle” “in her arms where” “the baby” “had been” “We saw her fiery arms” “cradle air” “She cradled air...” ”(5) “The air” “gets occupied” “by one or two hands” “with thumb, forefinger, and middle finger” “which alternately could be used” “to shoot rubber bullets,” “pepper spray,” “tear gas.” “How three fingers” “could be responsible for so much:” “satire, sarcasm, irony” “and ultimately” “bruises, blood, death.” (“The violence of the dbl quote is to eagerly to place oneself inside a tornado.)” “The violence of this” “embodied punctuation mark” “stems from a discordance with others.” “Is the name, word, or phrase” “placed in dbl quotes” “heroic” “ or brave?” “An act of displacement;” “must there always be” “bright or negative lights—” “a leaderless act” “to inhabit, to occupy” “space removed” “from normative use.” “Of course” “I’m also wondering” “what it means to re-occupy” “public/private space—the street, neighborhood or page” “policed” “by laws, limits, and” “to some extent” “punctuation.” Echo, Mirror “There are first, second, and third voices interwoven.” “ “Braid of voices,”(6) ” “Some lines read as internal thoughts,” “dialogues,” “and scene descriptions,” “all of which make up the allegory.” “It seems appropriate” “for the word” “allegory” “to nest in dbl quotes” “for perhaps it might be” “a gesture to echo on and on” “eternally referencing” “whatever came before.” I notice the first tooth of the double quote, when paying too close attention, gets caught in the hook of the “f”. I space bar to untangle them; the f does not resist the closed bite of “deaf” and I resist to know what it could mean, because it could doubly mean nothing. “ “He looked” “so familiar” “to me...”(7) ” “The second-person” “echoes in one of two directions:” “further into” “or farther from” “me.” “Its as though” “the second-person amplifies” “or else the opposite” “in which he,” “who looks so familiar,” “retreats further” “like stars in a telescope.” “The dbl quote” “has this kind of affect” “concerning distance and dimension” “as also illusory” “as something twice removed” “and unreal” “in a similar way” “movie stars are unreal and far away.” “ “I entered” “a car” “in which I seemed” “to see double” “Each person I” “looked at seemed” “spread out” “as if doubled” “Gradually” “I perceived that” “each person” “was surrounded by a ghostly” “second image” “was encased in it” “& each” / “of those images,” “those encasings,” “was exactly the same” “each was in fact” “the tyrant...” ”(8) A daydream of a mirror-less world while staring through window blinds; a palm tree behind. It was dark with nothing there. A world with no mirrors “in my mind,” though my mind could only reflect what it knew: a palm tree. Naturally then, palm trees multiplied; a world of palm trees reflected the daydream with no mirror in sight. “The mirror” “(prior to obsidian manufacturing ca. 6000 B.C)” “was wherever water” “could be found.” “Its interesting” “mirrors have been around” “before humans—its funny” “animals and humans” “get born into” “a world of mirrors,” “therefore, simulation” “is always already” “a given—” “a sparkly consequence to be born with a dbl.” NOTES 1. Notley, Alice. “Author’s Note” in The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996) 2. Bruns, Gerald L. “ From Intransitive Speech to the Universe of Discourse” in Modern Poetry And The Idea of Language (New Haven & London, 1974), p.75 3. Ibid. p.77 4. Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996). p.3 5. Ibid. p.10 6. Ibid i. p.9 7. Ibid ii. p.16 8. Ibid iii. p.12. (shrink)

Abstract In The Descent of Man (1879), Charles Darwin proposed a speculative evolutionary explanation of extended benevolence—a human sympathetic capacity that extends to all nations, races, and even to all sentient beings. This essay draws on twenty-first century social science to show that Darwin’s explanation is correct in its broad outlines. Extended benevolence is manifested in institutions such as legal human rights and democracy, in behaviors such as social movements for human rights and the protection of nonhuman animals, and (...) in normative attitudes such as emancipative values and a commitment to promote the rights or welfare of animals. These phenomena can be substantially explained by cultural evolutionary forces that trace back to three components of what Darwin called the human “moral sense”: (1) sympathy, (2) our disposition to follow community rules or norms, and (3) our capacity to make normative judgments. Extended benevolence likely emerged with “workarounds,” including political ideologies, that established an inclusive sympathetic concern for sentient life. It likely became as widespread as it is now due to recently arisen socio-economic conditions that have created more opportunities for people to have contact with and take the perspective of a broader cross-section of humanity, as well as other species. (shrink)

In his book The descent of man , Charles Darwin paid tribute to a trio of writers who offered naturalistic explanations of the origin of language. Darwin’s concurrence with these figures was limited, however, because each of them denied some aspect of his thesis that the evolution of language had been coeval with and essential to the emergence of humanity’s characteristic mental traits. Darwin first sketched out this thesis in his theoretical notebooks of the 1830s and then clarified his (...) position in Descent, where he argued that mind–language coevolution had occurred prior to the rise of distinct racial groups. He thus opposed the view of August Schleicher and Ernst Haeckel, who taught that speech had originated subsequent to the geographical and racial dispersion of humanity’s ancestors. As Darwin argued in Descent, this quasi-polygenetic version of coevolution was unable to explain primeval man’s initial dominance over rival ape-like populations. Drawing inspiration from British anthropologists, Darwin made the early development of language, hence mental monogenesis, central to his account of human evolution. (shrink)

Many philosophers have become familiar with Leopold’s land ethic through the writings of J. Baird Callicott, who claims that Leopold bases his land ethic on a ‘protosociobiological’ argument that Darwin gives in the Descent of Man. On this view, which has become the canonical interpretation, Leopold’s land ethic is based on extending our moral sentiments to ecosystems. I argue that the evidence weighs in favor of an alternative interpretation of Leopold; his reference to Darwin does not refer to the (...) Descent, but rather to the Origin of Species, where Darwin discusses the interdependencies between organisms in the struggle for existence. (shrink)

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin proposed a speculative evolutionary explanation of extended benevolence—a human sympathetic capacity that extends to all nations, races, and even to all sentient beings. This essay draws on twenty-first century social science to show that Darwin’s explanation is correct in its broad outlines. Extended benevolence is manifested in institutions such as legal human rights and democracy, in behaviors such as social movements for human rights and the protection of nonhuman animals, and in normative (...) attitudes such as emancipative values and a commitment to promote the rights or welfare of animals. These phenomena can be substantially explained by cultural evolutionary forces that trace back to three components of what Darwin called the human “moral sense”: sympathy, our disposition to follow community rules or norms, and our capacity to make normative judgments. Extended benevolence likely emerged with “workarounds,” including political ideologies, that established an inclusive sympathetic concern for sentient life. It likely became as widespread as it is now due to recently arisen socio-economic conditions that have created more opportunities for people to have contact with and take the perspective of a broader cross-section of humanity, as well as other species. (shrink)

Darwin argued for the biological basis of morality in his Descent of Man (1871). Beginning with the thesis of the continuity of man and animals, he tried to explain the origin of the moral sense, or conscience, as understood as an ability to discern right and wrong, and to feel guilty if one realizes to have done wrong. His argument is that, in any animal with social instincts and sufficient intellectual powers, a moral sense would be developed. Although Darwin's (...) argument had some missing links, I try to show that his argument can be consistently reconstructed, in view of the recent development of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology. As I understand, Darwin's basic tenet is reductionism via evolutionary processes (natural selection, in particular): morality can be reduced to a combination of non-moral factors, each of which can be shared with other animals; you do not have to assume that morality is sui generis. (shrink)

Quite early in the construction of his theory, Darwin realized that he had to explain the distinctive features of the human animal to forestall the return of the Creator. For most British intellectuals, what distinguished man from animals was not reason, an operation in which faint sensory images followed the rules of association, but moral judgment. Thus, shortly after he first formulated the principle of natural selection in the fall of 1838, Darwin began a decades-long struggle to bring human moral (...) judgment under his advancing theory. The fruition of that work came in Descent of Man, where two long chapters are devoted to an evolutionary understanding of moral behavior in man and its antecedents in animals. Since that time, numerous efforts have been made by biologists, psychologists, and philosophers to fol-. (shrink)

The voyage of the Beagle -- On the origin of species by means of natural selection -- The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex -- The expression of the emotions in man and animals.

Historians are now generally agreed that the Darwinian recognition and institutionalization of the polygenist position was more than merely nominal.194 Wallace, Vogt, and Huxley had led the way, and we may add Galton (1869) to the list of those leading Darwinians who incorporated a good deal of polygenist thinking into their interpretions of human history and racial differences.195 Eventually “Mr. Darwin himself,” as Hunt had suggested he might, consolidated the Darwinian endorsement of many features of polygenism. Darwin's Descent of (...) Man was published in the same year that the Anthropological Institute was founded, and it was no coincidence that it was broadly congruent with Knoxian/ Anthropological race science. Recent scholarship has stressed the derivative character of the Descent, and Darwin's views on race were clearly influenced by the earlier interpretations of the abovecited Darwinians.196However, although the Descent was written in the light of the anthropological struggles of the 1860s, it is essential to acknowledge its origins in Darwin's notebooks of the late 1830s and early 1840s. A good deal of the congruence between Darwinian and Knoxian conceptions of race may be traced back to these early notebook constructions. As these document, Darwin, like Knox, brought to his very earliest conceptions of human evolution a “commitment to the idea of human races as discrete biological units with distinct moral and mental traits.”197 The young Darwin had been concerned with the same sorts of questions on racial biological and cultural differences that preoccupied Knox around the same time, and he was committed to as ruthless a naturalism. Apart from their individual and independent debts to Quetelet's “moral statistics,” both Darwin and Knox drew heavily on the general themes of struggle and adaptation in the contemporary “common context” of biological and social thought.198 Given their common context, the broad general similarities between the Knoxian laws of race antagonism and subordination and the Darwinian struggle for existence between races need occasion no strained historical explanation of direct influence.199Nevertheless, in more explicit ways, the Descent does show the conflation of Knoxian/Anthropological and Darwinian racial views, and Darwin located his discussion of these issues squarely within the dispute “of late years” between polygenists and monogenists.200 His mature views on race were shaped by the contemporaneous confrontations and negotiations between the Darwinians and the Anthropologicals. It is within this context that the minor historical puzzle of Darwin's failure to acknowledge Knox's “generic descent” may be explained. Apart from the difficulties of integration and interpretation of his scattered theoretical writings, Knox, through his adoption by Hunt and the Anthropologicals, became identified with anti-Darwinism and therefore with antievolutionism.201 Moreover, Knox, the disreputable and marginal “savage radical” and lately resurrected and equally unsavory “Anthropological,” was hardly an acceptable “precursor.” Yet, paradoxically, it was via the antithetical medium of the Anthropological platform that Knox's race science made an indirect and unacknowledged, but lasting, impact on the Darwinian anthropological model.In the Descent, Darwin argued that racial traits arose very early in the prehistory of man, were not biologically adaptive, and were therefore relatively fixed in character. By viewing race formation as a distant and closed episode of human history, Darwin endorsed the Knoxian categories of race as fixed and unalterable types. Although he thought it irrelevant whether human races were called species or subspecies, he conceded more to the Knoxian view than Huxley by granting that a naturalist confronted for the first time by specimens of Negro and European man “might feel himself fully justified in ranking the races of man as distinct species.”202 Consistent with the Knoxian interpretation, struggle, competition, and survival occurred between racial units rather than between individuals and, in Darwin's view, accounted for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and the inevitable triumph of the more intellectual and moral races over the lower and more degraded ones.Darwin was as insistent as Knox on the biological basis of intellectual and moral differences, and, through his tendency to reduce social and cultural differences to biology, he maintained the essential Knoxian/Anthropological link between race and culture.203 For above all, the Descent did much more than offer a naturalistic explanation of human evolution: it proffered social interpretation, justification, and prescription, and its timely appearance gave a powerful boost to the “moralizing naturalism” of Huxley and Galton, and to Spencer's “Social Darwinism.”204 We may draw a straight line from Knox's “moral anatomy,” through Hunt's “anthropology,” and on to “Social Darwinism” and the “social surgeons” of the eugenics movement.The Darwinians did not, of course, we their tendency to naturalize existing economic and social relations to Knox or Hunt and the Anthropologicals—they were simply reflecting the same general intellectual trend that had affected Knox and the Anthropologicals as well. And in the larger context, the forces that had created a climate receptive to Knox's racism had intensified: in the seventies, the need to justify white imperialism and class and racial inequalities was greater than ever. Scientific racism no longer appeared an aberration but the very essence of the scientific study of man, taking on a newfound respectability in the “new” evolutionary anthropology. But in more specific ways, through the struggle between the Darwinians and Anthropologicals for scientific and ideological hegemony, Knox's “moral anatomy” was institutionalized and perpetuated in late Victorian scientific racism. In the process, the delicate balance that Knox had maintained between his radicalism and his racism was outweighed by conservative institutional and social needs, and his “moral anatomy” was retooled — first by Hunt, and then by the Darwinians — to fit those needs. (shrink)

This paper examines Charles Darwin’s idea that language-use and humanity’s unique cognitive abilities reinforced each other’s evolutionary emergence—an idea Darwin sketched in his early notebooks, set forth in his Descent of man , and qualified in Descent’s second edition. Darwin understood this coevolution process in essentially Lockean terms, based on John Locke’s hints about the way language shapes thinking itself. Ironically, the linguist Friedrich Max Müller attacked Darwin’s human descent theory by invoking a similar thesis, the German (...) romantic notion of an identity between language and thought. Although Darwin avoided outright contradiction, when he came to defend himself against Müller’s attacks, he undercut some of his own argumentation in favor of the coevolution idea. That is, he found it difficult to counter Müller’s argument while also making a case for coevolution. Darwin’s efforts in this area were further complicated by British and American writers who held a naturalistic view of speech origins yet still taught that language had been invented by fully evolved homo sapiens, thus denying coevolution. (shrink)

In focusing on the story of Darwin's religious doubts, scholars too often overlook Darwin's positive contribution to the study of religion. J. David Pleins traces Darwin's journey in five steps. He begins with Darwin's global voyage, where his encounter with religious and cultural diversity transformed his understanding of religion. Surprisingly, Darwin wrestles with serious theological questions even as he uncovers the evolutionary layers of religion from savage roots. Next, we follow Darwin as his doubts about traditional biblical religion take root, (...) affecting his career choice and marriage to Emma Wedgwood. Pleins then examines Darwin's secret notebooks as he searches for a materialist theory of religion. Again, other surprises loom as Darwin's reading of Comte's three stages of religion's development actually predate his reading of Malthus. Pleins explores how Darwin applied his discovery to the realm of ethics by formulating an evolutionary view of the "Golden Rule" in his Descent of Man. Finally, he considers Darwin's later reflections on the religion question, as he wrestled with whether his views led to atheism, agnosticism, or a new kind of theism. The Evolving God concludes by looking at some of the current religious debates surrounding Darwin and suggests the need for a deeper appreciation for Darwin as a religious thinker. Though he grew skeptical of traditional Christian dogma, Darwin made key discoveries concerning the role and function of religion as a natural evolutionary phenomenon. (shrink)

The design argument for the existence of God took a probabilistic turn in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. Earlier versions, such as Thomas Aquinas' 5 th way, usually embraced the premise that goal-directed systems (things that "act for an end" or have a function) must have been created by an intelligent designer. This idea – which we might express by the slogan "no design without a designer" – survived into the 17 th and 18 th centuries, 1 and (...) it is with us still in the writings of many creationists. The new version of the argument, inspired by the emerging mathematical theory of probability, removed the premise of necessity. It begins with the thought that goal-directed systems might have arisen by intelligent design or by chance; the problem is to discern which hypothesis is more plausible. With the epistemic concept of plausibility characterized in terms of the mathematical concept of probability, the design argument was given a new direction. The new probabilistic perspective did not extinguish the older idea of "no design without a designer." The two conflicting approaches coexisted, often with less than perfect clarity about their fundamental difference. At the same time, the details of how the probabilistic perspective ought to be articulated were slow in emerging. These characteristics of uneven development are exemplified in a debate that took place in the 18 th century among three probabilists – John Arbuthnot, Nicholas Bernoulli, and Abraham DeMoivre – on the proper explanation of human sex ratio. Arbuthnot proposed a probabilistic version of the design argument, claiming that it is intelligent design, not chance, that provides the better explanation of why slightly more boys than girls are born each year. Bernoulli rejected Arbuthnot's argument. DeMoivre defended Arbuthnot against Bernoulli's criticisms. The problem of explaining sex ratio, both in human populations and in the rest of nature, experienced another transformation after 1859 --it became a problem for the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin (1871) addressed the question in the first edition of The Descent of Man but withdrew his suggestion in the second (Darwin 1874). Carl Düsing (1884) provided a mathematical model that moved beyond the explanation Darwin offered. Fisher (1930) added the new idea of parental expenditure. Williams (1966) argued that the sex ratios found in nature provide the opportunity to test hypotheses of group selection against hypotheses of individual selection. Hamilton (1967) constructed a model that generalizes Fisher's approach and represents the effects of both group and individual selection. The theory of natural selection gradually developed the ability to predict sex ratios, not just explain them post hoc. (shrink)

In the history of zoology the English anatomist Morrison Watson (1845–1885) is considered to be the discoverer of the masculinized sexual organs of the spotted hyena. Beginning in 1877, Watson had published a series of anatomical studies on the spotted hyena (Watson, 1877, 1878, 1881, Watson and Young, 1879), in which he, in which he for the first time made public the anatomical peculiarities of the female spotted hyena’s genitalia. This scientific achievement is well documented. But now we can also (...) state that a hundred years before Watson the Dutch amateur zoologist Robert Jacob Gordon (1743–1795), while serving in the Scots Brigades at the Cape of Good Hope, had already made the same discovery and merely unfortunate personal circumstances prevented publication. During his stay at the Cape, Gordon had studied spotted hyenas intensively and recorded his observations in accurate drawings and comments. These drawings have been preserved as part of a large collection of animal drawings entitled Gordon Atlas. With his discovery, Gordon actually was the first to provide empirical evidence of a “curious and inexplicable case of dimorphism” (Darwin on a beetle) in mammalians, long before Étienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (Cours de l’histoire naturelle des mammifères, 1829) started examining masculinized sexual organs in the mole or Darwin recognized the importance of sexual dimorphism (Descent of Man, 1871). In this paper we reproduce for the first time all hyena drawings from the Gordon Atlas, including Gordon’s handwritten notes in the margins in the original Dutch and in translation. Additionally, we briefly delineate the knowledge about the South African spotted hyena in Gordon’s time and indicate that we doubt Watson’s explanation for the age-old confusion about the hyena. (shrink)