DESMOND & MOORE 2009 - Sacred Cause

A CAUSA SAGRADA DE DARWIN

1 - The intimate Blackamoor

  • Em Edimburgo. Peckard nos 1770s já questiona a racialização dos negros (am i not a man?) Questionamentos sobre a unidade da espécie humana e contaminação sanguinea seguiriam até os dias de Darwin.
  • Evenutalmente esses questionamentos levaram ao fim da escravidão no império ingles. Alguns dizem que o fator principal foi econômico, mas "For Darwin's family the system was cruel and ending it was a moral imperative, not an economic necessity" Efeitos do unitarianismo: "one blood of all nations"
  • Darwin aprende taxidermia com o blackamoor em Edimburgo.
2 - Racial Numb-Skulls
  • [TRAD] Link fraco, mas interessante: 
    • Within days of Darwin starting the natural history course Jameson was finishing his 200 +-page ‘Geological Illustrations’, appended to the latest edition of his translation of Georges Cuvier's Essay on the Theory of the Earth. Darwin read it. 5 It was innovative, provocative even, at times undergirding the sort of geology that Darwin would eventually fix on.
  • Nos 1820s, ideias anti-escravagistas se misturaram com a sanha classificatória e a frenologia.
  • Frenologistas como Greg e Epps defendiam um continuum of mind entre o homem e os animais.
  • Knox, ainda não tão efusivo nessa época, era ambientalista (raças se adaptavam a seu meio) e monogenista.
  • "Heresy was rampant in Darwin's years in Edinburgh" Se referindo às abordagens materialistas de Knox e Grant.
  • William Hamilton demole a frenologia e suas conclusões racistas no fim dos 1820s
  • Assim
    • So this wasn't the barren period Darwin in his autobiography would have us believe. Issues of environmental versus anatomical determinism, and a self-animated versus a Creatively animated nature, were being thrashed out all around him, issues which would have repercussions for generations, inside and outside Darwin's own work. Arguments about brain sizes, innate dispositions and racial categories were still raging, putting a consensus some way off. Groups were competing to sway the students and Darwin was at the centre of it. But the young innocent probably wasn't so much embroiled as wide-eyed. Still, many of these themes would later resurface in his own work on human racial descent.
3 - All nations of one Blood
  • "At Cambridge the sciences were seen to complent Christianity"
  • John Henslow apoiava a Anti-Slavery Society. "Darwin admired Henslow's moral qualities even more than his encyclopaedic knowledge of botany"
  • Sobre Whewell: "the origin of every species would remain ‘quite inexplicable’. Science either had to ‘contemplate supernatural influences’ or give up looking for causes altogether."
  • "In truth human unity was a closed book in Cambridge, or rather it had never been open. Belief in Adam as the father of mankind was solid and the theological premise of anti-slavery. "
  • Prichard, antiescravagista efusivo, nos 1820s defendia a monogenia dos povos usando inclusive a linguagem.
  • Assim
    • So for Darwin there were choices. As at Edinburgh, where he could have followed the craniologists on their racially determining path, so now in Cambridge he could have seen slavery in anything but a liberationist light. In each case he held fast with racially pliant ‘brotherhood’ science and shackle-breaking ideology in true Whig tradition. He was rejoined by Henslow, who put premillennial pessimism behind him.
  • Em 1830 cai o governo tory e sobem os whigs anti-escravagistas no últio ano de darwin em Cambridge. "Darwin's teachers too knew that reofrm and abolition went hand-in-hand"
4 - Living in Slave Countries
  • Contra Fitzroy questiona se a resposta dos escrevos vale algo na frente de seus mestres: Contudo
    • Despite the politics and row about slavery, Darwin saw eye-to-eye with FitzRoy on most things, not least the primitive tribes they met. All belonged to Lyell's ‘great human family’ and were, as the captain put it, ‘of one blood’. Climate and diet had shaped their bodies, and habit their mental faculties; not that there had been much but superficial change anyway. FitzRoy saw ‘far less difference between most nations, or tribes’, than between the individuals within each. 47 His theology would harden, but for the moment FitzRoy's and Darwin's beliefs about humans were practically at one: the nations comprised a single ‘human race’
    • While Fitzroy and Darwin saw eye-to-eye on human origins, how they judged human nature differed radically
  • Humboldt também era contra a escravidão.

  • No Rio, fica horrizado tanto na cidade quanto no interior. O cerco dos ingleses contra o tráfico apertava cada vez mais em 1832
    • Topic of the hour at consular parties was the Brazilian decree of 12 April that all new slaves from Africa should be shipped back at the traders’ expense. Emancipation wasn't the motive, it was fear of ‘Africanization’ – ‘piling barrels of black gunpowder into the Brazilian mine’, as whites put it, leading to an explosion from below. Darwin almost wished for the bang, ‘for Brazil to follow the example of Hayti’, where, as every abolitionist knew, Toussaint l'Ouverture had led a revolution of ex-slaves to create the first independent republic ruled by blacks. ‘Considering the enormous healthy looking black population, it will be wonderful if… it does not take place’ in Brazil, he told the family. But white fears of dominance by a ‘rude and stupid race’ ran deep.
  • Na Argentina participa de uma ação contra escravos: "whether Despotism is not better than such… anarchy’, even if it was at the black rebels’ expense". E mais tarde "the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the Negros character. – it is impossible to see a negro & not feel kindly towards him…"
  • Lyell não era anti-escravagista, mas no principles era monogenista e materialista com relação ao homem.
  • "Bestialization was implicit in the system ... break humans the way prehistoric peoples had broken horses"
  • Explicação dos pluralistas e como usavam a teoria para justificar a escravidão. Essa visão estragava as intenções civilizatorias e teóricas de Darwin e Fitzroy. "So contact with ‘pluralism’ first forced Darwin to think through the philanthropic image of unity, of shared blood, and what it meant for human relationships. A few months later, during the Beagle's last sojourn at the tip of the continent, he tested his conclusion among the tribes living along the Straits of Magellan." Embora por motivos muito diferentes, ambos acreditavam na capacidade civilizatória dos povos. Efeito dos fueginos quanto a isso em Darwin.
  • Coevolução de raças humanas e parasitas
  • "The analogy he had used in Tierra del Fuego was taking root: civilized people are simply domesticated varieties of the species. And civilized domesticity came by degrees. So the Maori, though evidently from ‘the same family’ as the Tahitian, still had an eye full of ‘cunning & ferocity’, revealing his savagery, while his cousin was a ‘civilized man’ by comparison." Little derrogatory racial judgement in darwin. Mais tarde conhece um hottentot civilizado.
  • Mix of noblesse oblige and humanitarianism to lower orders. 
  • Defesa dos missionários primeiro artigo publicado em 1836
  • Volta ao rio logo depois da revolta dos malês. Powerless as child ouvindo tortura no brasil
  • Quanto a frenologia
    • The young Darwin would have no truck with craniology, no sympathy with its emphasis on the separateness and ranking of races. No skull collecting would mark his science. He would find a very different way of approaching black and white, slave and free.
5 - Common descent: from the father of man to the father of all mammals
  • Para evolucionistas antes de Darwin a evolução de dava em linhas parelas, algumas linhagens de desenvolviam mais que outras. Nesse sentido, as raças humanas eram separados.
  • Nos cadernos darwin refuta isso C138, 204, 217 em 1838
  • "The speed with wich Darwin adopted evolution hints at a gestation on the voyage"
  • Nessa ponto dizia que não havia havido tempo para separação dos humanos em espécies.
  • "As Darwin effectivley bestialized man (in the best sense) he also began to recoil inwards"
  • "How didi wild humans become and stay civilized?"
    • perhaps the children of ‘savages’ were more culturally malleable. Or the adults, civilized and thus altered by changing conditions, produced children already acculturated, because somehow the changes had affected the adults’ reproductive system, enabling them to pass on the changes.
  • Questiona os termos low e high, e o antropocentrismo B18, 74 C72e N arvore cada linhagem segue seu caminho adaptativo, não seguem em direção ao humano. No up or down.
  • Racial interbreeding.
    • This too would play and play as Darwin tried to sort out what really resulted from intermarriages and whether the resulting mixtures fed evolution or, quite the reverse, stopped racial divergence from occurring (because of traits back-blending). What obsessed him was the mechanism which kept the races apart and pushed them further away. ‘No doubt’, he wrote, ‘wild men do not cross readily, distinctness of tribes in T. del Fuego. the existence of whiter tribes in centre of S. America shows this.’ With races only incipient species, how far would ‘black & white’ have to depart before they ‘keep to their type’ and refuse to intermarry or have sterile offspring? 21 These were tantalizing glimpses; trains of thought for the future.
    • Then came the search for clues to how the human races had actually started. Darwin hunted down stories of hairy men, albinos and the afflicted being banished, and speculated that these could found new colonies (all straws were grasped in the early days). More likely, ‘In first settling a country.— people very apt to be split up into many isolated races’, when geography could put up physical barriers to back-blending. 29 If geography didn't, it was the races’ own ‘repugnance’ to one another, something he had seen enough of around the world.
  • Comparação com humanos b40-3, 147
  • Tiedmann também mostrou a igualdade dos cérebros
  • Imunidade a malária. Órgãos vestigiais nos humanos D24 M85-7
  • Abre o caderno M, why not gradation para questões morais tambem? C244
  • It was the iar Darwin Breathed > Martineau, Carlyle, Wedgewoods.
  • Características raciais pequenas não afetam a luta pela vida. Como ocorrem então?
    • Darwin's thoughts oscillated between race and beauty. He took a masculine view: What makes a woman beautiful? By whose standard? And where does the beau idéal come from? Having once doubted whether animals have ‘notions of beauty’, he now believed that beauty was always in the eye of the beholder – an eye that had evolved. Ideas of beauty differ as much as bodily forms and, indeed, change and evolve with them. ‘Our acquiring […] our notion of beauty & negroes another’ were parts of the same process by which the visible, aesthetic racial differences – skin colour, hair type, and physique – had emerged. This was the crux. Each race possesses its own beau idéal. Voyaging round the world, dreaming of ‘white petticoats’, he had found this to be true. A Negro born out of his native land would ‘think [a] negress beautiful’ anywhere, just as the homesick Beagle itinerant lost in the tropics had longed for ‘an English lady… angelic & good’. 65 Darwin was no idealist. Beauty lay not just in the beholder's eye; it was incarnate in each race, making the sexes mutually attractive. Fearing himself ‘repellently plain’ and wondering what Emma saw in him, he began to consider how external (or ‘secondary’) sexual characteristics evolved. As usual, he sought the answer by analogy, focusing first on vertebrate males like himself.
    • He had ‘natural selection’ in place, but there were doubts whether it could account for human aesthetic traits. Now ‘beauty’ was entering the picture: and the need for a further cause to explain those alluring characteristics – from plumes to physiognomy, songs to sexy shapes – that made the males and females of each race mutually attractive.
  • AS como NS como SS. Man as a self-breeder.
6 - Hybridizing humans
  • BAAS não gostava de race science porque era polêmica.
  • Genocide and knowledge lost Pritchard; Genocide and providence Greg
  • "Human racial blending might be good in the short term"
    • However, after reading Malthus, Darwin's imagery became much bleaker. Malthus's depiction of human competition for scarce resources highlighted how wars and famines act as a ‘great check amongst men’. It galvanized Darwin into rationalizing the darker side of tribal contacts.
    • He didn't see the incongruity as his science took on a Malthusian life of its own, shaped by the race-judging attitudes of his culture: the civilizational goal, the superior intellects, expansion as a means of progress. His science was becoming emotionally confused and ideologically messy. Malthus's ‘grand crush of population’ resulted in conflict and conquest, and Darwin began to naturalize the genocide in these terms. He was assuming an inevitability that had to be explained, not a socially sanctioned expansion that had to be questioned. 
    • Darwin was turning the contingencies of colonial history into a law of natural history. An implicit ranking – with the white man accorded the ‘best’ intellect – ensured the colonist won when cultures clashed. Already Darwin was accepting it as an evolutionary norm. Wedded so early to his evolutionary matrix, this supremacist image would itself be brought to justify later ethnic-cleansing policies, however abhorrent to Darwin's own humanitarian ideals. Darwin's gentlemanly class equated a greater intellect in whites with their cultural achievements. From Argentine barracks to Australian sheep stations, it seemed self-evident that work-shy, untrustworthy ‘savages’ were good-for-nothings according to civilizational norms. In a ‘Taxonomy of primitivism’ – where ‘ugly’ physiognomies (to European eyes) disguised still uglier moralities, and cranial deviations revealed degraded intellects – they came off very badly. So seemingly obvious was all this, that it gave ‘the colonial gaze the character of scientific truth’. 14 And Darwin was fortifying that truth, even while he was making the races kin and refusing to place humans above other animals.
    • By biologizing colonial eradication, Darwin was making ‘racial’ extinction an inevitable evolutionary consequence. Disappearing natives were put on a par with the fossils underfoot: Argentine dynasties had turned to dust before, the megafauna with its giant capybara Toxodon and ground sloth Megatherium, whose fossils he had found. Races and species perishing was the norm of prehistory. The uncivilized races were following suite, except that Darwin's mechanism here was modern-day massacre. ... Races were being anihilitaed, but it was according to explicable 'principles'
    • He was turning it round to make immigration, invasion and struggle essential. They were the honing process, the crucible: the victorious ‘destroyers’ survived to breed, while they further adapted to their new-won terrain. Imperialist expansion was becoming the very motor of human progress. It is interesting, given the family's emotional anti-slavery views, that Darwin's biologizing of genocide should appear to be so dispassionate. True, close up, his heart strings were tugged,
    • Shards of such rationalization pierced Darwin's thought, but for him the ‘progress’ was writ on a grander canvas – the benefit was to the entire species. Extermination was an axiom of nature – ‘strictly applicable to the universe’, as he said. Nature herself moved forward, crushing skulls underfoot. ‘The varieties of man seem to act on each other; in the same way as different species of animals – the stronger always extirpating the weaker’, he wrote in his Journal. Natural selection was now predicated on the weaker being extinguished. Individuals, races even, had to perish for progress to occur. ... Prichard's warning about aboriginal slaughter was intended to alert the nation, but Darwin was already naturalizing the cause and rationalizing the outcome.
  • Presumed shocked, expugnating the good results of genocide.
  • "Caldwell was trying to make Prichard look ludicrous by trusting him into the transformist's camp" > Darwin "Do not slave holders with to amke the black man other kind?"
  • Greg dava um argumento economico para manter a escravidão.
  • "The savage ways of the 'lowest' races were, concluded martin parapharasing Darwin, capable of being 'ameliorated by civilization'"
7 - This odious deadly subject
  • 1840 closed notebooks to let theory mature. Going public was not an option.
  • 1844 no draft os humanos são naturalizados mas não ancestralizados. Atenção focada em breeding. trazendo novamente a conexão AS-NS-SS e o homem.
    • In 1844 Carpenter's view (shared of course by Darwin) was that once naturalists cracked how fancy and farmyard stock was formed, they could explain human diversification. 
  • "He hated the 'sin' and despised Lyell for not hating it as much" "I thank god, I shall never again visit a slave-country" "Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter"
    • Lyell's attitude to slavery had not changed. ‘If emancipated’, the blacks ‘will suffer very much more than they gain’, as the rootless northern Negro seemed to show. If the Free States ‘really desired to accelerate emancipation, they would begin by setting an example to the Southern States, and treating the black race with more respect and more on a footing of equality’.
  • Sobre spp
    • Darwin was more equivocal on what distinguished the two. In fact, he flatly stated that ‘we must give up sterility… as an unfailing mark by which species can be distinguished from races, i.e. from those forms which have descended from a common stock’. .... He thought in 1844 that race crossings provided a ‘copious’ source of new races, and that in subsequent generations these mongrels would ‘vary exceedingly’, providing the raw material for selection to adapt them differentially. What exactly happened to crossed human races had been intensely interesting to Darwin since 1837.
8 - Domestic animals and domestic institutions
  • Hibridação e fertilidade.
    • My theory would give zest to recent & Fossil Comparative Anatomy, & it would lead to study of instincts, heredetary. & mind heredetary, whole metaphysics.— it would lead to closest examination of hybridity to what circumstances favour crossing & what prevents it—[.]
  • Darwin adcommodated the hybrids within his prichardian migrate-and-adapt framework ... Darwin's sophisticated alternative would be built on many more variables, in time and space, and take account of sheer chanciness, as newcomers made the best of each situation in their migrations. He had a lively sense of historical contingency lacking in his friends.
  • Tretas
    • Harder racist attitudes were spreading through the classes down to the gutter. Bruisers such as Knox in England and Nott in America were defiantly secularist. Now urban ‘infidel’ activists tapped this freethinking vein to exploit pluralism at street level. Here it became even more transparently ideological.
  • Aparece o problema das formigas escravagistas que ele não poderia deixar se tornar uma parelelo natural para a escravidão humana.
  • Conclusão do capítulo
    • whether ‘the perfect Negro and the perfect European, seeing the strong contrasts and diversities they exhibit, can be rightly deemed of the same species’, was a foregone conclusion. Anatomy, physiology and interracial fertility answered ‘yes’. But the sheer ‘exuberance of the subject’ of domestic analogies showed that these were set to hammer the answer home. Here, among the dogs and fowls and pigeons – with their astonishing array of shapes and bustles and bone sizes – lay the convincing proof of human unity. This final word ‘will be understood by every one’. 59 Darwin knew it.
9 - Oh for shame Agassiz!
  • Agassiz ajudou no annus mirabilis de Darwin em 1854-5
  • Hooker empurra darwin para o programa das cracas. Darwin precisava de credenciais.
  • [RECEP] Medo de que a segunda ed do journal tivesse o trecho sobre escravidão censurado.
  • [TRAD] Hotze, agente da guerra cultural sulista traduz Gobineau com propósitos políticos.
  • Contexto
    • It is ill-recognized but  atruism: concepts like 'unity of descent' and 'common descent', so famiilar to us today through Darwinian saturation, emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century in debates over race relations and slavery. The concepts were at the centre of countless contested books and reviews. ‘Unity’ and ‘common’ implied consanguinity and closeness, precisely what the ‘American School’ of anthropology denied. Indeed, between British-colonial slave emancipation in the 1830s and the American Civil War such emotive racial signifiers were largely the preserve of these two hostile camps. The terms were familiar through the multiple editions Prichard's works. In these, languages were traced to common origins which ‘can bear no other explanation than that of an original unity of descent’. Such was denied by Agassiz and his followers, for whatever the spiritual unity in the eyes of God, it ‘may exist without a common origin, without a common descent, without that relationship which is often denoted by the expression “ties of blood”
    • [CAP 12] Hotze was a master: the ‘sickening moral degradation’ evident in some human races meant that much had to be left out of the Gobineau translation for fear of upsetting Southern sensibilities. This pro-slavery advocate was actually paid to promote the South's benevolent view of their ‘peculiar institution’.
  • Agassiz como bete noire. Lyell como go between.
  • Experimento das sementes pós cracas como resposta aos centros de criação de Agassiz. Havia uma justificação para escravidão aí. Sai num artigo de 1855. Gray age como agente de Darwin nos EUA.
  • A segunda parte do ataque ao programa racial eram os pombos e a demonstração de sua unidade. E mudanças haviam ocorrido desde a antiguidade. "Show you my pigeons! which is the greatest treat in my opnion which can be offered to a human being".
  • Isolamento reprodutivo em humanos por motivos estéticos, levando a formação de raças
  • Darwin, Lyell e Agassiz
    • confessed his heresy on human evolution. Having viewed cultured man as ‘Time's Noblest Offspring’, Lyell now faced a pedigree sullied by the prospect of ancestral black blood and a more revolting ape parentage. His private notes testified to his agony as he tried to swallow his racial pride. Still he clung to counter-evidence. If domestic dogs came from more than one wild species could we not envisage ‘many races like Man being equal to species’? It was a good point. ‘You remember,’ he asked Darwin, ‘a passage in Agassiz about negros being black where the Chimpanzee is black, & yellow in Borneo? where the orang is yellow’. But Darwin stuck with his pigeons and unity. Of all the theories, Agassiz's, ‘that there are several species of man’, did not help ‘us in the least’. Even if domestic dogs came from multiple species (as Darwin conceded), his pigeon varieties were traceable to a single origin. Lyell left from his tour of the lofts staggered: had Darwin's fancy pigeons been wild, an ornithologist would have recognized ‘three good genera and about fifteen good species’. 66 So much spread in one species – it tipped the scales in favour of a common human descent. If the strategy convinced Lyell, Darwin knew it would work in the Origin of Species.
  • Darwin responde o Types of Mankind nas margens. Darwin se mantinha firma no common stock para a humanidade.
10 - The contamination of Negro Blood
  • Lyell
    • Life's ‘progressive development’ was anathema to Lyell. He knew that Darwin was working on natural selection, but little enthusiasm went into Lyell's own dossier on evolution as he grappled with its implications. It lacked the ‘let's-suppose-it's-true’ thrill that shot through Darwin's old pocket notebooks. As Lyell opened a second and a third notebook, he stared bleakly into the face of a gibbering ape. Where Darwin saw a common ancestry humbling the mighty and subverting slavery, Lyell saw degradation, a loss of nobility. Darwin's moral advance would, for Lyell, be mankind's ruin. As the fabric of his lofty world-view tottered, he dreaded the fall. He filled page after page with worries, wondering ‘what if it were true?’ If mankind's history were the earth's history, then whither the soul? If Shakespeare or Newton could grow from a mewling brat, then couldn't a white man develop from a black savage, or a chattering chimpanzee? Nobility lay in the result, not the journey. Or did it? Round and round he went, with Darwin nipping at his heels. There seemed to be no escape from painful ‘night thoughts’ about chance and design, law and providence, body and soul, death and eternity, men and apes. But Lyell equally shunned Agassiz's multiple centres of creation, though agreeing that the crowning event in time was the recent appearance of man. By what means he appeared Lyell didn't know, but it was no miracle, pace Agassiz. ... he was being driven into Darwin's arms. Black and white belonged to the same family and, given the chance, Negroes could be brought up to the Caucasian standard – this belief was as much a part of Lyell's Christian heritage as Darwin's. But the only viable defence of human unity – the only alternative to Agassiz's multiple creations – was beginning to look like Darwin's evolutionary ‘common descent’.
  • Lyell apontou a questão do tempo necessário.
  • "... he warned Darwin time and again 'to be cautious about man'". "He [Darwin] knew that it had to deal a fatal blow through overpowering detail"
  • [RECEP] "Darwin needed allies in high places, particulary in American, in the anti-Agassiz camp"
  • Huxley. Via negros como inferiores, mas a escravidão desumanizava os brancos.
  • [RECEP] fearing the book would be horridly imperfect... with many mistakes.
  • Versão primeira da seleção sexual na formação das raças. Earliest use na marginalia de 1856 no livro Races of Men de Knox
    • In the early drafts of his theory, Darwin worked out how this sexual differentiation occurred. He saw animals tending to manifest traits at the same age as their ancestors acquired them. Competition for scarce resources in nature led to the selection of the best traits to adapt animals to changing environments. That was natural selection, his primary agency of change. In addition, males competed for females, and this resulted in the ‘second agency’ of Darwin's 1844 draft. At sexual maturity, the ‘most vigorous males’ – in birds, those which had developed more appealing songs, looks or courtship displays – mated more successfully and left more offspring. Males continually honed and passed on their attributes – horns, antlers and so on – and courtship behaviours to their male offspring, who also manifested them at sexual maturity. These altered ‘sexual characters’, designed for fighting or displaying, were added to the adaptive traits males and females possessed in common. 32 So the females, as every Victorian paterfamilias knew, remained weaker, passive and suited to rearing the young. In reacting to the racist books Darwin now gained a greater insight into the role that ‘beauty’ played in leading the races along their divergent paths.
    • Why did white males find white females beautiful, and black males black females? Wherein lay ‘beauty’? More to the evolutionary point, if the ‘beauty’ of form was non-adaptive – not aiding survival – how could it be selected? Pondering these racial castigations helped Darwin fix firmly on his secondary evolutionary mechanism. Partners were choosing mates on aesthetic criteria, leading to a divergence in non-adaptive but desirable traits. A different ideal characterized each human race. Indeed, since all animals shared a sense of beauty, it ran right through nature – through all races.
    • Picking pleasant features was subjective in each race. Lips, ears, noses, forehead, they could all be changed by this self-selecting process, even though minuscule variations in the ear lobe or lip shape could probably not be seen as adaptations.
  • SS aparece antes para humanos e depois na natureza. "sexual differentiation process – covering his theory of separating sexes from hermaphrodite ancestors as well as human beauty and rutting males."
  • Sobre prichard "how like my book all this will be"
  • "In my note on man" em marginalia primeiro sinal de que humanos seriam abordados no livro. Em outra lista características humanas que seriam afetadas por SS. "
  • It seems that ‘Man’ – the human races – were destined for chapter six of his treatise, which would also contain the explanation of their original divergence, ‘sexual selection’". Mas até o começo 1857 não havia nada no manuscrito até que ele finalmente escreveu a Theory applied to the races of man explicando a SS. Ver NS 213
  • Sobre variation under domestication
    • Into these chapters would go his breeding know-how, to give ‘Natural Selection’ the confident authority absent from the Morton-Nott propaganda. He would show the ubiquity of infinitesimal variations, the age they appear in squabs, and how they are selected with the effect ‘of adding up small changes’. ... And its message was this: crossing fancy breeds proves that they are all of one species. Species can be stretched artificially so much that, were they wild, a naturalist might rank its races as different genera. But they weren't different genera: their ancestry (indeed that of cats and rabbits and ducks) could be tracked through ancient breeders’ manuals. ... This tree image explained how animals and plants should be grouped and classified: genealogically. Unity came from blood and ancestry.
  • Sobre os termos monogenista e poligenista. Foram criados em 1857 por Gliddon para atacar os religiosos monogenistas, contra os racionais poligenistas.
  • Em 1857 Darwin começa a descartar a passividade feminina.
  • Ainda em 1857
    • Even as he was rethinking sexual selection, so he was re-strategizing what it was safe and expedient to publish. He simply would not expose himself without overwhelming evidence. ... ‘I think I shall avoid [the] whole subject’, as it was too ‘surrounded with prejudices’, even if humans do pose ‘the highest & most interesting problem for the naturalist’. 54 Suddenly, mankind, the ultimate problem threatening fearful repercussions, had disappeared from the projected magnum opus. The raison d'être of much of Darwin's work was to be concealed. He would take his science out of the house and into the garden, and restrict his public talk to pigeons and plants, which were safer.
    • But Darwin's withdrawal of mankind from the book had another possible rationale. His modus operandi had always been to amass an overpowering amount of evidence. He could not describe one barnacle; he had to describe them all. In dealing with humans this was simply critical. Darwin's inflammatory racial divergence theory would touch on the deepest social taboos and, with Agassiz on the rise and huge polygenist books being praised, Darwin had to pile on crippling quantities of detail, as Prichard had in his magnum opus. His correspondence network worldwide had poured information into Downe, but time was needed to discern which racial features had survival value and which were sexual choices. He wanted to be absolutely sure that iridescent plumes and skin complexion did not adapt birds and humans to some niche; rather they were courtship accoutrements, possibly to charm choosy females. Off went more letters to the colonies on complexion and constitution.
  • Efeito de Owen, Wallace e outros que punham muita enfase na excepcionalidade intelectual humana.
  • "In any debate over transmutation the question of racial-and-then-ape-unity would be the first flashpoint for American. Agassiz made sure of it" ... "And so, despite his own revultion at slavery, caution and events in India forced him to delay publishing on mankind"
11 - The secret science drifts form its sacred cause
  • Wallace pensa em Malthus para resolver o problema dos malaios ao seu redr.
  • 50 anos depois a escravidão estava voltando.
  • Henry Buckle
    • Valiant heroes, glorious victories, slavery and its abolition – all of Albion's greatness was, to Buckle, the statistically certain result of natural laws of progress. Martineau, who had never believed in free will, loved his sense of fate; Erasmus sent her the book. Some deplored the implication that conduct was beyond individual control, others that all science and history was underwritten ‘by one glorious principle of universal and undeviating regularity’. But, unlike Knox, there would be no racial primordiality for Buckle, only a natural Prichardian separation of nations to suit clime and time. Indeed his metropolitan liberalism went against the crasser racist dictates of the age (he dismissed talk of an idle ‘Celtic race; the simple fact being, that the Irish are unwilling to work, not because they are Celts, but because their work is badly paid’). ... Darwin, a fact-indexer himself, eventually read Buckle's History twice but doubted whether its ‘laws’ were ‘worth anything’. Everybody considered Buckle a crashing bore. Emma nursed her own nefarious thought: if ‘personal character’ didn't count in history, how to explain ‘the abolition of slavery’? Would ‘Buckle… say that if Garrison had not arisen’ in America, history would have thrown up ‘somebody else’ of equal stature to purge the sin?
    • sobre buckle ver Semmel 1976 e Hesketh 2011.
  • Sobre apresentação Wallace-Darwin
    • ‘sexual selection’ was not mentioned by name, let alone as an explanation of human racial divergence. Darwin talked in passing of a ‘second agency’ producing changes, ‘namely, the struggle of the males for the females’ (there was no clue that he was beginning to swing to female choice) – a struggle by means of battle, beauty or song to win favours. Tussling between males led to sexual differentiation, but there was no elaboration or explanation, and no mention of selection in the formation of racial traits.
  • [RECEP] Isso trigga darwin a escrever o Origin. Popular book. Para Murray, vende o peixe:
    • Lyell floated a proposal to his own publisher, John Murray, with Darwin promising ‘my Book is not more un-orthodox’ than needs be, meaning ‘I do not discuss origin of man’ or ‘bring in any discussion about Genesis’.
  • [RECEP] Sobre o título e raças e marketing
    • Murray didn't care for ‘Natural Selection’ in the title, but Darwin insisted on it because ‘selection’ was ‘constantly used in all works on Breeding’ – and this was a book that would begin with fancy pigeons. They settled on ‘Natural Selection or the preservation of favoured races’, which Murray liked. Everybody knew about race, and not just the pigeon variety. Racial Anglo-Saxonism was sweeping Britain and America, with proselytizers such as Knox and Nott only the extremist tip of a ‘manifest destiny’ ideology that was digging deep into both cultures. The plight of one enslaved race in America was about to lead to war, and was stirring abolitionist breasts at home, thanks to Punch cartoons and a million copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin. 22 Racial contact, racial preservation, racial fate were the great arguing points of the age. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life may not have discussed the ‘origin of man’, but a signifier word in Darwin's title, ‘races’, put the book at the centre of the greatest moral debate of the moment.
  • Huxley
    • Huxley still doubted life's progression through geological time; ... 
    • Huxley found Darwin difficult. Softly, softly, as always, was Darwin's way, as he Socratically probed Huxley's thought. But it was hard work, as Huxley dismissed Darwin's ‘genealogical trees’ for animals and plants: ‘Your pedigree business’, Huxley responded, ‘has no more to do with pure Zoology – than human pedigree has with the Census’. This was as bad as Agassiz, totting up all the species in a place rather than tracing their family ties. Darwin was less interested in a zoological headcount; common descent to him was the real ‘plan on which the Creator… worked’, ... then do you not think that most would prefer as the best classification, a genealogical one [?]
    • Lyell himself pressed Huxley hard. If fossils did show life ‘progressing’ after all, he warned, then mankind might turn out to be the descendant of a long series of primates. ‘A race of savages… with small cranial development’ would have appeared first, ‘& out of this the negro & white races & others… extinct or yet to come’ would be ‘evolved in the same way as permanent varieties are formed’. 27 Where the Origin was silent, Lyell spoke – and he was reading the writing on the wall. His worry now was how to revise his own Principles of Geology to keep up.
  • "Such were the evils sanctified ny polygenism" Caça a negros
  • Sobre humanos no origin
    • ‘Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.’ One short sentence in the Origin's final pages covered him against accusations of concealing his deeper beliefs. He knew everyone would read ‘mankind’ into the book. Those twelve words meant that ‘Man is in [the] same predicament with other animals’. This would be an open secret, as he admitted to Lyell. 32
    •  But the full explanation of human racial origins was omitted because Darwin lacked the overwhelming evidence to convince a sceptical world. As it was, he had to plead that he came to natural selection without ulterior motive, seeking only the truth. But no special pleading would help if he published on humankind. A crushing weight of evidence would be needed to show not only sexual selection splitting the races, but how the ancestral humans were descended bodily from beasts – vastly more than he could muster in such haste. 
    • Only a third of ‘Natural Selection’ had been shoehorned into the Origin. It had been his plan for the ‘big Book’ to cover human racial origins, with one volume's worth, at least, on domestic races, hybrids, mongrels and artificial selection. This seemed critical as slavery propagandists published their own huge books separating the many human species and America plunged towards war. But in the rush to the Origin and priority, Darwin's race-interests were necessarily put on ice. Edward Blyth's dried-up well of evidence was partly to blame; for, as Darwin said in the Origin, paying handsome tribute, he valued Blyth's opinion on racial ancestry ‘more than that of almost any one’. 
    • Darwin slipped another telling sentence into a passage on non-adaptive differences between domestic breeds. ‘I may add that some little light can apparently be thrown on the origin of these differences’ – including differences between the ‘races of man’ as domestic breeds – ‘chiefly through sexual selection of a particular kind, but without here entering on copious details my reasoning would appear frivolous.’ It was understated in that quiet English way: ‘some little’ meant quite a lot. But the race-making power of sexual selection was to be kept under wraps, even if in another passage Darwin teasingly revealed the kind of sexual choice he had in mind. 
    • We know he believed that human males had seized the power of choice, though he would not say so in the Origin; selecting females for their beauty, just as ‘man can give elegant carriage and beauty to his bantams’. Then he looked beyond the male alligators behaving ‘like Indians in a war-dance’, or cock birds singing and displaying, to the females judging these strength or singing pageants. He now hinted that they were the ones who ‘at last choose the most attractive partner’. Females, by ‘selecting, during thousands of generations according to their standard of beauty’, in effect were responsible for picking male gaudiness. 33 His mechanism for differentiating races from one another was still being thought through, but either way, male or female choice, animals in the Origin acted as their own breeders, their own race-makers. Then he clammed up again: ‘I cannot here enter on the details necessary to support this view.’
    • ... Darwin confessed himself uncertain ‘about the share males & females play’ until ‘I compare all my notes’. More digging was needed, more evidence. He feared being ‘cut up’ about males and females, birds and butterflies, before he ever got to the subject of human unity.
    • ... about man. He knew that as natural selection was granted, white humanity's fortress would be breached. He admitted it while reading the proofs, telling Darwin: ‘It is this which has made me so long hesitate always feeling that the case of Man & his Races & of other animals & that of plants is one & the same & that if a “vera causa” [true cause] be admitted for one… all the consequences must follow.’ Fearful still, he wanted moral safeguards. Above all, he needed God to guarantee a lofty pedigree by using ‘creative power’ to underwrite selection in changing ‘an orang into a Boscheman… to a Newton’. By having ‘the White man [supersede] the Negro’, God would show that His chosen race was in His mind from the outset. 
    • No such hauteur for Darwin, though. God wasn't involved in creating white superiority, as Lyell's Southern gentry believed. Evolution elevated the human mind by operating on ‘the races of man; the less intellectual… being exterminated’. This looked like the line he had taken in his post-Malthus notebooks: that some races, notably the white, were more ‘intellectual’ and would supplant the natives during colonization. But apparently not, for Darwin took exception to Lyell's example of competition between the ‘negro & white in Liberia ’. Struggle on foreign soil was not primarily between single races or species but among whole ‘groups or genera’ of invaders taking on the locals. He also said he was thinking of ‘the almost certain future extinction of genus Ourang by genus Man, not owing to man being better fitted for climate, but owing to the inherited intellectual inferiority of the Ourang-genus – man-genus by his intellect inventing fire-arms & cutting down forest’. It was as if Darwin was frightened by his own consequences. The ‘intellectual’ line – if it meant those with guns – had ominous implications for racial contact. What is the point of freeing the slaves only to naturalize their death? Darwin, as always, hastily shut down the subject, declaring again that there was no ‘space to discuss this point’. 35 It would be the dilemma for the 1860s. 
    • Lyell wouldn't let go. How then to explain ‘the distance between the European, Negro, Hottentot & Australian races’? If climate was discounted, did competing intellects alone account for the diversity? (He still knew nothing of sexual selection.) He thought again of Divine intervention, which raised the spectre of Agassiz's separate racial creations: ‘I… am told that they probably may have sprung from several indigenous stocks or species settled in remote & isolated regions’. In desperation Lyell was resorting to Agassiz's primordial races as a last ditch attempt to retain some white dignity. Indeed, didn't the Origin play into Agassiz's hands by allowing that ‘our dogs have descended from several wild stocks’? 36 Didn't this subvert the beautiful proof that fancy pigeons, like people, had a common ancestry? 
    • It was a valid point, and not an easy one for Darwin. ‘You overrate [the] importance of multiple origin of dogs’, he replied. ‘I shd infinitely prefer the theory of single origin in all cases; if facts would’ allow, but they didn't. Darwin's unitarist commitment ran deep, and the pigeons were his simple exemplar; dogs complicated his public presentation. He did believe that domestic dogs came from a number of wild species. These wild dogs must have hybridized successfully, or done so after being domesticated. Race differences among their descendants were thus part natural and part artificial. But all canines came ultimately from ‘some one very ancient species’ – it was just further back. Darwin told his sister Caroline, worried by the same problem, as much: the hybridization of dogs was a ‘distinct question’ from ‘whether these wild species have descended from one aboriginal stock as I believe has been the case’. 37 
    • Darwin sometimes felt like cutting an inflated Lyell down to size, but his old mentor was still an ally and had to be kept sweet. All canines came from one progenitor, and for Darwin ‘the only question is whether the whole or only a part of difference between our domestic breeds has arisen since man domesticated them… The Races of Man offer great difficulty: I do not think [the] doctrine… of Agassiz that there are several species of man, helps us [Darwin was tactfully including Lyell] in the least… Much too long a subject for letter.’ Darwin was losing patience. ‘With respect to the Races’, he said, ‘I have one good speculative line, but a man must have entire credence in N[ atural]. Selection before he will even listen to it.’ That ruled Lyell out. He was not to hear how sexual selection made the races because his belief in natural selection was in doubt, even if he had come some way on transmutation. 38 Nor it seems did Darwin tell Hooker and Gray. Spelling out sexual selection prematurely would forearm critics, hurting its chances of success. Potentially, Darwin had solved a problem polarizing science, fuelling racial antagonism and dividing the human family; and no one cared more about these things than he. With the United States marching to war, the time might have been ripe to set out all the implications of sexual selection; but no, he waited. Judging by Lyell the world would have enough trouble swallowing natural selection, and Darwin lacked the copious detail needed to finish off sexual selection.
  • Sobre as epígrafes. Escolheu Whewell que unificava teologia com o mundo natural.
12 - Cannibals and te confederacy of London
  • Questão racial era a chave para a recepção do Origin.
  • Saria da sombra do homem? Conversa com Kingsley que não era um problema pra ele, mas pra outros. Fear of Black blood. Darwin concorda que as raças superiores exterminariam as inferiores > "While slavery demanded one's active participation, racial genocide was now normalized by natural selection and rationalized as nature's way of producing ‘superior’ races. Darwin had ended up callibrating human 'rank' no differently from the rest of his society. After shunning talk of 'high' and 'low' in his youthful evolution notebooks, he had ceased to be unique or interesting on the subject"
  • Darwin procurava alguém para fazer o trabalho de discutir o homem por ele.
  • Martineau. Muitos acenos a deus no Origin, mas a teoria era boa.
  • Questão das formigas retorna. Darwin se recusava a fazer paralelos.
  • Questão do panfleto de Gray e sua propaganda na próxima edição.
  • "If the Victorians had never read the Origin, but only its reviews, they would hardly have guessed that humans were absent. ... Darwin's kinfolk approach to nature was grasped immediately. Reviewers saw something that wasn't in the book because they too were looking at an enlarged human genealogy.
  • Charles Loring Brace traz a questão das línguas em 1863
  • Lyell decepciona
    • It was the other end of the argument that upset Darwin. Lyell, never able to go the last mile, let creation back in. Ultimately, in Darwin's view, Lyell lacked the courage of his convictions: ‘half-hearted & whole-headed’, were Hooker's words. Lyell had topped off the Antiquity by adding a ‘creational law’ to confer ‘the moral and intellectual faculties’ on humankind. This supreme ‘law’ had cut in after untold millions of years of nature trundling along unaided: suddenly, it bestowed the first ‘soul’ on an animal, making it human. ... Never quite relinquishing his Southern sympathies, Lyell even used the ‘creational law’ to explain ‘the origin of the superiority of certain races of mankind’. 
    • Lubbock pergunta: "Why must the races necessarily progress?" Darwin fica muito desapontado.
  • Huxley: 
    • ‘I have not the smallest sentimental sympathy with the negro… But it is clear to me that slavery means, for the white man, bad political economy; bad social morality; bad internal political organization, and a bad influence upon free labour and freedom all over the world.’
    • The corrosive system was dehumanizing for whites, let alone blacks. But Huxley justified abolition on economic grounds."
    • He dismissed the ‘fanatical abolitionists’ who thought the Negro an equal. But this ‘aberration’ was as nothing to ‘the preposterous ignorance, exaggeration, and misstatement in which the slave-holding interest indulges’
    • The older Darwin was an abolitionist, perhaps even fanatical. For him economic reasons never entered into it: the issue was cruelty. Cruelty to all creatures:
    • Contudo, "So much of Darwin's life and science had been bound to this hatred of slavery: a science that, in its ‘brotherhood’ aspect, looked impeccable. Huxley saw it. When it came to human unity – a bloodline connecting blacks and whites via a common ancestor – Huxley ‘was pleased to be able to show that Mr Darwin was for once on the side of orthodoxy’." Defendia que as direnças raciais eram pequenas e portanto defendia Darwin.
  • Guerra racial no Alabama, com Agassiz em Boston e com Nott, Knox e Hunt na sociedade antropológica de Londres. O incio da Guerra Civil american em 1861 colore isso tudo.
  • [TRAD E RECEP]
    • Against Darwin and Huxley, the Anthropologicals threw every Continental authority – not merely threw, but translated, edited, introduced and published under Society auspices. Half a dozen weighty tomes appeared in order to prove immutable difference and cross-racial sterility. Titles such as Georges Pouchet, The Plurality of the Human Race (1864), and Paul Broca, On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo (1864), told their own story. And each got round the problem: Pouchet had life not only spontaneously emerging at the start, but continuing to do so, providing each white and black line with its own originating point. This was too far-fetched, even for the editor. It might have been acceptable in Europe and used to avoid Darwin's human unity and single origin for all life (it was by the discoverer of the Neanderthal skull, Hermann Schaaffhausen), but no British anthropologist adopted it. 54 
    • By contrast, another of their translations did provide a rallying point. The Fellows had ‘shown unanimity’ against the Darwinians' common racial descent, and there could be no advance ‘in the application of the Darwinian principles to anthropology until we can free the subject from the unity hypothesis’. But they displayed little fear of transmutation, and even some sympathy for ape extraction. ‘No one (except Agassiz and his confreres) will deny the possibility of the descent of man from the ape by some unknown law of development’, said the President in his opening address. The way out was provided by Professor Karl Vogt at Geneva 
    • in his Lectures on Man (translated by Hunt in 1864). Vogt was more pugilistic than Huxley, and more scurrilous – an atheist who delighted in calling certain ‘simious’ heads ‘Apostle skulls’ on the grounds that they resembled St Peter's. And he, too, tentatively questioned why ‘only one stock [of ape] should possess this privilege’ of evolving into humans. Probably in each tropical region the local ape had. Vogt's multi-ape ancestry was firmed up in the Anthropological literature. Giving one ape ancestor per human race made him ‘a logical Darwinite’ in their eyes. 55 What Down House thought is not known. Correspondents pointed Vogt out, telling Darwin he would ‘be amused at his Huxleyan outspokenness’. Darwin, scouring the translation, was made well aware of Vogt's ‘origin of Man from distinct Ape-families’. But the Anthropologicals were dressing Vogt's image in Confederate grey (Vogt himself stoutly opposed slavery) and ignoring his ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’. Though enamoured of Darwinism, said the Anthropologicals, Vogt ‘entirely repudiates the opinions respecting man's unity of origin, which a section of Darwinians in this country are now endeavouring to promulgate.’ This multi-ape theory was the ‘sound and philosophical’ way forward – the science to counter the ‘antiquated doctrines’ of blood relations and genealogy that Huxley had inherited from Darwin. 56
  • "The polygenists had the power to put their own stamp on ‘Man's Place in Nature’. And many now pulled behind Vogt to confront Darwin." ... "Allan took from Vogt multiple ape ancestors, one in each of Agassiz's ‘racial realms’, and used Knox's racial antagonisms and ‘Mr. Darwin's grand hypothesis’ of natural selection to explain not merely why America presents ‘a huge battle-field’, but the ‘antipathy between the races continually at war with one another’. All this made Allan ‘a polygenist and a Darwinian’, showing that there was no coherency yet to the ‘Darwinian’ label. 60 It was still up for grabs."
  • Em resposta a anthropological Huxley e outros se encastelam na Ethnological society
  • Oddball Wallace. Moralidade fundamental para o homem. Wallace had freedom said Hooker.
    • This sort of insight became the foundation of Wallace's Darwinian compromise between polygenism and monogenism. It was a virtuoso performance at the Anthropological in 1864. He pushed racial origins far back in time. Humans might have lived for a hundred thousand centuries alongside now-extinct mammals. So it was no surprise that Egyptian tomb walls show recognizably modern Negroes, or that redskins have not changed since the ‘very infancy of the human race’. Natural selection takes an inordinately long time. Wallace even believed that anatomical changes had ceased in humans. Care, sympathy and altruism even in the ‘rudest of tribes’ allowed them to escape competition, while technology allowed them to circumvent changing conditions: using furs to keep warm, arrows to kill distant game and fires to prepare food. Therefore the ancestral ‘homogeneous’ group of widespreading pre-humans had split into races in very remote times, when natural selection was still operating. Possibly even as far back as the Eocene, just after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The races' common ancestor at that time, without speech, without ‘moral feelings’, was still at the animal stage, still an ape under selection's influence. Then all the derived lineages developed larger brains and became human as natural selection continued to operate on the mind (somewhat differentially, causing distinct skull shapes). Hence the races have varied aptitudes, language abilities, technological capacities and social attitudes. 
    • Using Darwin's theory – and his – Wallace had got round Morton, taken care of Hunt and kept a converging bloodline, all in a bravura show. He then infuriated the clique by suggesting that, in his socialist vision, natural selection would go on to perfect ‘the social state’. It would bring all the ‘higher’ races up to scratch to displace the ‘lower’, improving them ‘till the world is again inhabited by a single homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity,’ 65 when freedom will prevail and coercive government die away. 
    • The white-supremacists could hardly condone such anarcho-socialist Utopianism. Hunt was incredulous. The Anthropological was the apotheosis of Anglo-Saxonism, Knoxian racial antagonism and the pro-slavery ‘niggerology’ of a South now at war. The ‘mischief’ in thinking Darwinism could produce ‘from one homogeneous race all the diversity now seen in mankind’ was infinitely worse for threatening to re-homogenize it! The idea of a ‘homogeneous’ race – smacking so much of the reviled amalgamation or miscegenation inflaming relations in America – left Hunt furious. True, Wallace had pushed the original union further back than Huxley had, to a stage when the ancestor had neither speech nor ‘moral feelings’. But still these were ‘startling assertions’, and even more so given Vogt's query, ‘why must mankind once have been of one race?’ Later Hunt recalled that Wallace ‘did not find a single supporter’ for his ‘eloquent dream’. But that was not entirely true, and the odd listener saw Wallace's paper ‘constituting a new era in anthropology’. 66 
    • Darwin had some misgivings about the paper: he denied, for example, that selection ceased among civilized men. But he was happy to see someone else stand in the spotlight. Sensitive to criticism, valuing his standing among the gentry, he himself suffered qualms about publishing on that inflammatory subject, human transmutation. Accusations of bestialization and worse would fly. But Wallace, the Mechanics' Institute-educated specimen-seller, was fearless. He had nothing to lose professionally. The poor ex-surveyor and tropical traveller had no social standing to forfeit, no children whose good names needed protection.
    • Wallace knew that Darwin had been deterred, and so ploughed ahead himself. They might have shared (almost) joint billing at the inaugural presentation of natural selection at the Linnean Society, but Darwin scarcely understood his socially distant ‘co-author’. A Utopian paradise was hardly where he saw evolution headed. 67 Now he made a bigger miscalculation. 
    • In May 1864 Wallace sent Darwin his ‘little contribution to the theory of the origin of man’ – the Anthropological Society paper. Darwin's marginalia show his problems with it. Since he (unlike Wallace) had never lived among ‘savages’, he doubted their altruistic behaviour and therefore saw natural selection working on them still. Against Wallace's statement that, whereas animals show no ‘mutual assistance’, ‘the rudest of tribes’ sympathize with the vulnerable and ill and protect them from selection's scythe, Darwin jotted: ‘Does not act… only civilized men!’ So uncivilized individuals, Darwin believed, were still being played off against each other. They were not shielded from selection by their altruistic acts. 
    • Despite this difference he still saw Wallace as a Cinderella among the ugly Anthropological sisters. He was hoping Wallace might be like Gray or Huxley – the propagandists who stood forth to fight a shrinking Darwin's battles for him. Wallace could be another sympathizer who could shoulder the burden, if rightly approached. He replied praising the paper: ‘the great leading idea is quite new to me’, and it was surely true that competition between the modern races ‘depended entirely on intellectual & moral qualities’ – meaning that the morally and technologically superior whites were vanquishing all others. 
    • Then, out of the blue, Darwin revealed his theory of racial origins. This was his idea that aesthetic choices had created the different physical features of the races. Sexual selection had caused him a mental struggle, and he was proud of his theory. He told Wallace, 
    • I suspect that a sort of sexual selection has been the most powerful means of changing the races of man. I can show that the diff t races have a widely diff t standard of beauty. Among savages the most powerful men will have the pick of the women & they will generally leave the most descendants. I have collected a few notes on man but I do not suppose I shall ever use them. Do you intend to follow out your views, & if so would you like at some future time to have my few references & notes? I am sure I hardly know whether they are of any value & they are at present in a state of chaos… [P.S.] Our aristocracy is handsomer (more hideous according to a Chinese or Negro) than middle classes from [having the] pick of women… 68 
    • Darwin was hoping Wallace would take over the subject. But regaling a plebeian socialist with talk of ‘our’ handsome aristocracy was courting disaster. The self-deprecating sales pitch failed. Wallace had no intention of relieving him. Worse was his undiplomatic response. 
    • Wallace did not understand how proprietorial Darwin was about his hard won sexual selection, nor therefore the honour implied by the offer. Wallace emphasized how little natural selection could affect human evolution; how sexual selection would have ‘equally uncertain’ results. And, sticking up for his order, he doubted ‘the often repeated assertion that our aristocracy are more beautiful than the middle classes’. ‘Mere physical beauty, – that is, a healthy & regular development of the body & features approaching to the mean or type of European man, – I believe is quite as frequent in one class of society as the other & much more frequent in rural districts than in cities.’ The patrician Darwin hardly wanted to hear that, even less Wallace's seeming snub: should he go further into the question some day, he would accept the notes. 
    • Etiquette was always a sticking point with Darwin, and the earthy Wallace had come unstuck. Darwin withdrew the offer, exclaiming that Wallace was probably right, except ‘about sexual selection which I will not give up’, adding the snippy, ‘I doubt whether my notes wd be of any use to you, & as far as I remember they are chiefly on sexual selection.’ First Lyell, now Wallace; the disappointments were mounting.
    • ... Darwin now feared that Wallace was going astray. ‘As for the Anthropologists being a bête noir to scientific men’, they were indeed for Darwin, who loathed their coarseness and conceit as much as their pro-slavery science.
  • Assim, things going downhill. Colapso de dois journals. "No one was going to relieve him"
13 - The Descent of the Races
  • Em 1866 as questões da Jamaica motivam Darwin a falar sobre o homem.
  • Caracteres raciais não afetados por NS. Unity hypotheis as an article of faith, a dogma.
  • Crescimento do espiritualismo. Pega Wallace e sua necessidade pela excepcionalidade humana. Explica seu posicionamento no Scientific aspect of the supernatural. Pode ter motivado Darwin também.
  • Em 1866 decide botar o homem novamente no NS agora sob a forma do Variation.
    • as such the human races would appear in Variation, as self-made: not just in an annexe to a chapter, but having a chapter in their own right to round out the book. ‘Man’ was to make his debut as a self-selecting ‘domesticated animal’.
    • He began knitting the new material into an old ‘rough draft’ left over from the ‘note on Man’ planned for the ‘Natural Selection’ manuscript ten years earlier. But by Christmas he was ‘much perplexed’ at trying to fit it all in; a month later, he braced his publisher John Murray: the ‘Chapter on man will excite attention & plenty of abuse’, which ‘is as good as praise for selling a Book’. 27 Yet he had only reached sexual selection, and from that moment on the subject started to balloon. Not surprisingly, for sexual selection was the point of the chapter. It would explain how male competition and female choice produced the human races from one ancestral stock; how men and women picked the desirable traits in their partners, just as breeders picked the traits in their pigeons. The chapter grew too large. In February 1867 he finally decided that his materials on human ancestry and racial divergence by sexual selection were so rich that they would have to make a self-contained ‘small volume, “an essay on the origin of mankind”  ’.
    • Hooker was the first to hear why the book was so important. ‘I have convinced myself of the means by which the Races of man have been mainly formed’, Darwin announced, apparently revealing the significance of sexual selection to his friend for the first time. ‘I do not expect that I shall convince anyone else,’ he added, no doubt recalling Wallace's rejection. That had been ‘the heaviest blow possible’, but Darwin was dogged when it came to Wallace. He told Wallace that his ‘sole reason’ for tackling man was to prove that ‘sexual selection has played an important part in the promotion of races’. 29 The provocations were riling: not only Hunt's challenge that Darwin should come clean in his views on racial development, but Wallace's snubbing his prize explanation for human diversity. Darwin would put his utmost into sexual selection because the subject intrigued him, no doubt, but also for a deeper reason: the theory vindicated his lifelong commitment to human brotherhood.
  • Arvore dos primatas se junta a árvore dos pombos.
  • A camuflagem de Wallace deve ser respondida no Descent
    • Darwin remained prima donna-ish about his theories, and on sexual selection particularly. No one was paying much attention. Despite the allusion to it in the Origin, most critics had ‘shown an utter ignorance of, or disbelief in, the whole matter’. Lyell thought Darwin had exaggerated its importance. Wallace, doubting its worth, was looking to the exceptions, while working up a rival theory of camouflage and coloration. He noted that many tropical butterflies mimicked distasteful species (enough to fool birds and collectors alike). The colours of these had nothing to do with sexual selection.
    • A sensitive Darwin saw this mimicry explanation undermine the power of his presentation. Wallace's camouflage theory only compounded the problem. While Wallace accepted sexual selection in some groups, notably birds, he explained it very differently. In his view ‘the primary action of sexual selection is to produce colour pretty equally in both sexes, but… it is checked in the 
    • females by the immense importance of protection and the danger of conspicuous colouring’. A countervailing natural selection had operated on the female, to ensure that she, sitting unobserved on a nest, had lost any gaudiness. Had she no need of drab camouflage, she too would be gaily coloured. Worse was Wallace's continuing rejection of any application of sexual selection to human races, the very rationale of Darwin's work. Wallace doubted ‘if we have a sufficiency of fair & accurate facts to do anything with Man’. There spoke a spiritualist who was looking to the wrong realm. 
    • Edgy, self-protective – or in his own words ‘flat’ – at the thought of his work ‘being almost thrown away’, Darwin now virtually shut the door on Wallace, again, announcing that he had collected his notes and intended ‘to discuss the whole subject of sexual selection, explaining as I believe it does much with respect to man’. 32 
    • By March 1867 sexual selection was ‘growing into quite a large subject’. It had become the cause of human racial divergence, and every corner of the animal kingdom was ransacked in search of supporting proof. Correspondents worldwide were tapped on everything from beetle armour to polygamy in birds and boars; plumage in poultry and pugnacity in partridge cocks – always with an eye, now, to female choice as well as male courtship and combat. Then there were the oddball suggestions, about staining tail feathers or pigeon breasts to test the effects on the paramour. And through it all were the queries about the criteria on which ‘savage’ women select, their sense of beauty, and so on. May 1868 found him putting it all together, in that encyclopaedic way of his, ‘working up from the bottom of the scale’. ‘Sexual Selection, which turns out a gigantic subject’, was taking on a life of its own. Even he was getting ‘sick of the… everlasting males and females, cocks and hens’. 33 
    • The more he explored adornments and colours through the animal world, the more lopsided the project became. It was hardly looking like a book on ‘man’ at all. By May he had ‘as yet only got to fishes’.... Darwin was now ‘driven half mad’ by these collateral points which required investigation. The title was firming up: he told his young German admirer Ernst Haeckel that the book was ‘on the Descent of Man & on sexual selection, which will appear to you an incongruous union’. It was getting more incongruous by the day, as the tail threatened to wag the dog. Humans were being swamped, simply to prove the pervasiveness of sexual selection. This was partly to overwhelm Wallace's rival camouflage theory (which made reef fishes gaudy to match the background corals , an explanation Darwin rejected). 34 Thus Wallace once again takes credit for pushing Darwin, or at least for the topsy-turvy nature of his book.
    • Huxley offered to read Darwin's proofs, which raised Darwin's spirits, and he sped on with a new ‘feeling of satisfaction instead of vague dread’. They were lifted higher by Haeckel, who was drawing crowds with his lectures on Darwinismus and looking himself at the ape origins of mankind: he told Darwin that he was ‘awaiting your book on the descent of man with great impatience. I, too, believe that the “Sexual Selection” plays a very important role in it’. In truth, he meant in producing humans from apes. It seems from his own publications that he had no idea that Darwin was using sexual selection to explain the races.
  • Livros preencheram o gap deixado por Darwin. Lubbock, Tylor, Argyll (naturaliza religião), isso gera um problema
    • Given how much Darwin was relying on books published in the sixties, it is not surprising that he accepted their linear human scale. He too now thought of the distance between ‘savage’ morality and intellect and its highest expression in Europeans, and of the possibility ‘that they might pass and be developed into each other’ through innumerable gradations. He too could broach the series of stages from fetishism through polytheism to monotheism, as if all cultures passed through them. It suggested that white men had progressed further, leaving their superstitions as ‘the remnants of former false religious beliefs’. 38 As he wrote the Descent, he adopted the prevailing cultural ladder, with the ‘lowest’ races on the first rung. It fitted with society's hardening attitudes towards blacks and the view that they could never be made into gentlemen – at least not for a very long time. Tylor explained why. He accepted that the mind was the same in all cultures, whether of Stone or Steam Age. Thus he admitted a Darwinian unity at root. The difference stemmed from accumulated education and technological prowess, which took centuries to acquire. The culture ‘improved’ at different speeds on its track from ‘Stone’ to ‘Steam’. Those travelling slowly could not jump the huge evolutionary distance to the destination overnight. By falling into line, Darwin was actually backpedalling. He had softened his brilliant view of life's adaptive spread. Back came those ‘high’ and ‘low’ calibrations which he had forsworn in the 1830s.
    •  Darwin was cobbling together his anthropology mainly from second-hand sources. But the Descent's rationale was always human sexual selection, and that was being justified by evidence from across the entire zoological spectrum. Darwin himself admitted wearily that it was a ‘gigantic subject’. And it was all in aid of explaining the human races, what Tylor named as among the ‘most important problems’ of anthropology: ‘the relation of the bodily characters of the various races, the question of their origin and descent, the development of morals, religion, law’. The ‘mind’ might have been common across cultures, but subtle variations in the appreciation of beauty – the beau idéal – had led to a divergence from the common stock. 
    • Finally, in 1869, one hindrance to the acceptance of his work was removed, with Hunt's premature death. This would also clear the way for Huxley and Lubbock to capture and decapitate the Anthropological Society as the new decade dawned, amalgamating it with the Ethnological as the ‘Anthropological Institute’.
  • MLennan questiona a percepção de beleza dos selvagens. Lubbock também. Wallace em 1869 defende um poder preadaptador do cérebro humano branco. Darwin expected to find more to differ.
    • The onus was on Darwin to make human mental evolution plausible. He would present the interbreeding races as close in mental make-up. That was proved by their independent invention of similar artefacts. Stone tools and arrowheads were common to cultures through history and across the globe. He would not countenance Wallace's compromise idea that these mental attainments were reached by the various races after they had crossed the human threshold. Darwin was adamant:
    •  all the races agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities, that these can be accounted for only through inheritance from a common progenitor; and a progenitor thus characterised would probably have deserved to rank as man. 42 
    • He would never capitulate on this core issue, so constitutive was it of his lifelong ‘brotherhood of man’ belief. It pushed him perhaps harder into proving mental evolution, as he finished the long journey. Now it was imperative to stump Wallace: to prove not only that the big brain had evolved naturally, but that Malthusian selection had gone on honing the social and moral faculties from ‘savage’ through civilized tribes. 
    • So strong was his belief in its continuance that Darwin saw natural selection still working in the classes of modern society (‘ Social Darwinism’ this would later be called). His nature and society had always been Malthusian, based on excess mouths and a scramble for limited resources. His governing Whigs in the 1830s had cut the outdoor charities and forced the able-bodied poor to compete; to the same end, Darwin's evolution thrust individual animals and plants in an overpopulated nature into rivalry. But now he incorporated the statistical and eugenic work of his cousin Francis Galton and old friend W. R. Greg (whose conservative migration away from his Edinburgh radicalism was complete). In the 1860s Galton and Greg both reapplied natural selection to society and raised fears of degeneration, because ‘we do the utmost’ to care for ‘the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick’. Darwin echoed their fears about the ‘poor and the reckless’ breeding early and increasing the number of gutter urchins: ‘Thus the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members.’ This was the hardening belief of the 1860s’ middle classes. As a statistician tabulating working-class mortality, who assumed his own class's intellectual superiority, Galton's data reinforced his cousin's patrician beliefs. Darwin hoped that the ‘weaker and inferior’ would marry less frequently to help ‘check’ this enfeeblement of society. But, ever the humanitarian, he still declared that we must bear the consequences of the weak surviving ‘without complaining’. Indeed, to curtail ‘the aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless’ would no less cause a ‘deterioration in the noblest part of our nature’. 43 
    • Darwin's book also endorsed the ethnic stereotyping so characteristic of mid-Victorians. He quoted Greg on the ‘careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman’ from a race which ‘multiplies like rabbits’. The Knox-ish xenophobia simply oozed into the text – that Middle England dislike of the Irish Catholic working classes. Darwin even refrained from removing the offensive quotation when an Irishman politely asked him to. 44 So Darwin's transference of Malthusian competition from politics to animal populations gave rise to a piece of supposed ‘hard’ science that was then reapplied to society in the Descent of Man, bolstered by the bigotry of the day. 
    • Darwin knew that, however charming his iridescent birds and jewelled butterflies in the sexually coy selection chapters, he could expect outrage at an evolutionary derivation of mind and morality. Having natural selection account for religious devotion would only add insult to the injury. He tried applying balm by making an ‘ennobling belief in God’ an evolved virtue among the highest races – a gesture diplomatically tuned to a devout culture, for Darwin had long shed his own Christianity. This was where the worry lay, and before publication he started softening up his critics and readers. Out went a series of self-abasing letters. He warned an old Beagle shipmate that the book would ‘disgust you’. An old adversary was told that ‘I shall meet with universal disapprobation, if not execration’. And Wallace? Darwin thought it ‘will quite kill me in your good estimation’. Even from Asa Gray he expected ‘a few stabs from your polished stiletto of a pen’ for broaching the evolution of morality.
  • Descent vende bem. Torn to pieces by people wanting copies. "The book was received in a ‘storm of mingled wrath, wonder, and admiration’. ‘Wrath’ was reserved for the moral debasement, and ‘admiration’ for the collation of nature's charming ways of wooing."
  • Descent
    • The Descent of Man presented a sort of ‘pinnacle’ view of the past. A male norm was assumed, and Darwin too saw his British class at the apex of civilization. But he also displayed a gentleman's liberal sensitivities (‘ some savages take a horrid pleasure in cruelty to animals’). And like many, Darwin equated ‘savagery’ in its ‘utter licentiousness’ and ‘unnatural crimes’ with the values of his own under-class (two groups which the socialist Wallace held in higher regard). But by lowering ‘savage’ morality and raising ape capabilities, Darwin made the continuum towards civilization seem more feasible. For a moment, too, he could mute his rampant Malthusian individualism and replace the goal of individual success and happiness with ‘the general good or welfare of the community’. And thereby he extended his explanation to account for the social evolution of what he held to be the highest virtue of civilized Europeans: their humanity towards other peoples and species. 48 It was a humanitarianism that Darwin took pride in. His anti-slavery and anti-cruelty ethic was inviolate. Yet the incongruity of his class holding this ethic sacrosanct while disparaging the ‘lower’ races (even as colonists displaced or exterminated them) is impossible to comprehend by twenty-first century standards. 
    • However, the evolution of morals was a side engagement. Darwin had focused overwhelmingly on sexual selection to prove that all peoples could be extracted from one stock. It left an idiosyncratic book with the oddest centre of gravity. ... sexual selection as explaining mans racial ancestry ...
    • But this trajectory cannot be understood from the text itself. True, the book contains hints. Even the title is a tell-tale sign: ‘Descent’ had been Darwin's favoured word from the first, to convey a human-style hereditary ancestry for nature. The newer buzzword ‘evolution’ was coming into vogue around 1870, but Darwin kept the ‘common descent’ signification in the title. Few understood; some saw only negative connotations. Even Hooker wished it had been simply titled the Origin of Man. 49 But title and content evinced a deeper 1830s' provenance and meaning.
    • Then he tackled mankind's ape descent in an old-fashioned way, familiar to students of comparative anatomy for three decades. He resorted, for instance, to rudiment ary organs, those inherited relics, like the coccyx, as pointers to human parentage. Or, with Haeckel's help, he  delved into the womb, where the five-month human foetus had a visibly hairy pelt, as a sign that our ancestors were furry. With more ingenuity he studied the anatomy of throwbacks: he relayed disconcerting stories of people still able to wrinkle their scalps like baboons or twitch their ears. He piled on such anecdotal evidence, lost in a normalizing biology. From all of this he developed his infamous image of our ancestor (grist for so many caricatures) as ‘covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail’. 51 
    • Darwin deliberately forewarned readers that there were ‘hardly any original facts’ in these earlier human evolution chapters, inviting the readers to skip straight to sexual selection. Not merely nothing new, there was almost nothing at all on fossils. His only positive citing was the discovery by Albert Gaudry from the Paris Natural History Museum of the primitive Greek Miocene monkey Mesopithecus. Darwin made Mesopithecus the ancestor of macaques and langur monkeys (as had Vogt). But he introduced the fossil to illustrate how ‘higher groups were once blended together’ – how two primate lineages could be traced to a same starting point. 52 Divergence from a ‘common stock’ was the rule. The fossil was used to illustrate a principle, not trace the primate route.
  • Omissões
    • there eas nothing on them [fosseis humanoides] in Darwin's book ... the omision [of neaderthals] is interesting. 
    • As is the lack of discussion of the ape brain. Acrimonious exchanges over the uniqueness of the human brain had first alerted polite society to the possibility of human transmutation in the early 1860s. Huxley had categorically denied Owen's claim that the ape's cerebral hemispheres lacked features found in humans (and called him a liar to boot). The two had clashed at the Royal Institution and the British Association, and sometimes weekly in the literary intelligentsia's Saturday paper, the Athenaeum. Owen's strategy had been to make bestial transmutation the issue and prejudice readers against Huxley. Darwin himself had come to despise ‘the fiend, Owen’, but he still put nothing about the proximity of human and ape brains in the Descent of Man.
    • ... So while gorillas and mammoth-hunting humans had coloured reviews of the Origin of Species, Darwin ignored them in his book on human descent. What was missing only served to emphasize his single-minded approach.
    • Instead he moved the manuscript on gingerly to his idée fixe, the cause of human racial change. He was diverting all eyes towards sexual selection. And it dominated the text, running above 550 pages in print. He cleared rival explanations of the racial differences first: changing environments, greater exercise of certain parts, even natural selection, because it could only augment ‘beneficial variations’ and as ‘far as we are enabled to judge… not one of the external differences between the races of man’ was other than aesthetic. For Darwin they were skin-deep and a matter of preference. He presented scenarios for apes standing erect and being counted men, with all the correlated changes in the pelvis, spine, skull, hands and feet; but the most peculiar human attribute, hairlessness, he believed, served an ornamental purpose. Partners were increasingly chosen with thinning pelts. For Darwin pink or black skin had an aesthetic appeal, like hair type and face shape – people simply preferred these slightly divergent looks. And where the antagonistic Argyll in Primeval Man refused to believe that competition for the fittest could produce an ‘unclothed and unprotected’ helpless being (let alone that morality could emerge from troop instincts), Darwin countered that our ancestors' exposed state might have been the impetus for that cohesion so characteristic of human society. Our social-huddling progenitor would have taken strength in the ‘sympathy and the love of his fellow-creatures’. 56
  • Recepção
    • Historical judgements on the Descent of Man can be quite skewed. (A late doyen of Darwin studies declared that ‘there was no compelling reason that a book-sized manuscript on the subject of Sexual Selection must be combined with a book on the descent of man.’) Yet the London press twigged the connection immediately. They encountered the Descent in its post-Civil War context where the hottest topic for a generation had been the ‘Unity versus Plurality’ debate. The Daily News pre-empted publication by a day and on 23 February 1871 launched favourably into Darwin's ‘courageous, if hazardous, speculation’. His ‘minute and painstaking observation’ on sexual selection, with natural selection, was ‘intimately related’ to his explanation of ‘the origin of man’ by means of ‘a pedigree extending rather beyond the time of William the Conqueror’. 57 Darwin's talk of apes got the larger ‘common descent’ message across.
    • With natural selection failing to ‘explain the differentiation of the various races of man’, Darwin had resorted to sexual selection to account for physique and physiognomy. ‘He thinks that females have entertained a preference for males, or males for females, possessing certain specialities of form either for use or ornament, and have thus exercised an unconscious but continuous selection in favour of such peculiarities. To support this theory he passes in review the whole animal kingdom.’ 59 There was no doubt here about the book's raison d'être.
  • SS e humanidade again
    • He extended a sense of beauty, thought by many to be uniquely human, to the birds, and he subtly suggested that there was an interchangeable appreciation. ... This sexual selection running up through nature carried on to prove human unity.
    • The variability of the races explained why polygenists had been confused on the number of human types – suggesting anything from two to sixty-three species (Agassiz reckoned eight, Morton twenty-two). Anyone who ‘had the misfortune’ to monograph a zoological class and be cursed by every family's variability (‘ I speak after experience’ said the barnacle expert) would not be surprised at human variation. And in this variation lay the answer to the big question, the one so ‘much agitated’ of ‘late years’. The polygenists had to ‘look at species either as separate creations or as in some manner distinct entities’. They were fixed, invariable. But those who accepted evolution, wrought by selection from the variations to which humans are prone, ‘will feel no doubt that all the races of man are descended from a single primitive stock’. 61 Human genealogy was more than a metaphor for Darwin's common-descent evolution. It was the prototype explanation. 
    • So many points of racial anatomy spoke of this shared origin, so many shared ‘tastes, dispositions and habits’; so much coincidence in a common love of ‘dancing, rude music, acting, painting, tattooing’. In short, body, mind and manners could not ‘have been independently acquired, they must have been inherited from progenitors’ who possessed them. As final proof of this unity, the 62-year-old Darwin took readers all the way back ...
    • .... In the Descent he talked of the moral ‘scale’ and the heights achieved by mankind. The intellectual distance between a savage and ‘a Newton or Shakspeare’ was huge, but bridged by every conceivable intermediate. As was the ‘moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping a basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or Clarkson’.
    • ... Darwin's ‘common descent’ image of evolution was foundational to all of this. It was anathema to the scientific-pluralism-and-slavery lobby because it had originated in an Adam-and-Eve monogenist text. And to a certain extent, they were right: the Christian ‘brotherhood of man’ was ultimately constitutive of common descent in Darwin's day. Sympathizers knew that his scientific support for racial unity, now detached from its religious roots, was inimical to the pluralist pro-slavery message. As one Darwin and anti-slavery supporter spelled it out, ‘Many of our narrow prejudices and false theories in regard to Race – ideas which have been at the base of ancient abuses and long-established institutions of oppression – are removed’ by Darwinian ethnology. This was Darwin's dream too. ‘Finally’, he said in the Descent of Man, ‘when the principles of evolution are generally accepted… the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death.’

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