Desilva 2021- Most Interesting Problem

 

PREFACE - DESILVA

• Pequeno impacto do fóssil de neandertal examinado por Darwin em 1864. Darwin estava doente e o fossil ainda não havia sido limpo. Pode ser falta de exp também. xiv-xvi
• Sometimes the humanity of science leads to great insights. But sometimes it leads to a scientist holding the evidence for a human past literally in his hands without recognizing it. That is why science cannot be done in isolation, by a single individual. It is a collective enterprise that unfolds over generations as we test and retest old ideas and develop new ones to make sense of our world. It stagnates when it is done by homogeneous scientists with similar backgrounds and experiences. It outright fails when it is practiced by inflexible individuals clinging desperately to tired ideas. Darwin knew this. “I had,” he wrote, “during many years, followed a golden rule, namely that whenever published fact, a new observation of thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.”6 While many of us scientists admire Darwin, we do not worship him. He was a brilliant scholar who not only generated new data but could see how his observations were connected under big, overarching ideas with both explanatory and predictive power. He navigated seamlessly between big picture, theory-level thinking and the small, intricate details. In studying orchids, earthworms, and barnacles, he could see both the forest and the trees. But Darwin had flaws, both as a scientist and as a human. “I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality,” he wrote.7 The question he referred to, of course, was evolution or, as he called it, descent with modification. xvii
• highest and most interesting problem 1857 xvii
• origin knowable xvii

INTRODUCTION - BROWNE

• segunda revolução industrial e diversificação da força de trabalho. Relaxamento da igreja. Science and the public. 
• Dissenting and nonconformist Protestant groups claimed the right to worship in their own manner, to educate the young, to be represented in Parliament, and to take public position and have their views heard. The foundation of a nondenominational University College in London in 1826 marked the opening of higher education to every citizen regardless of creed. 5
  By the time Darwin published Origin of Species, the nation was witnessing industrial diversification, commercial and professional specialization, religious tension, intense colonial activity, and among the middle classes much talk of national “improvement” and “progress.” 5
• Motivos para não tratar do homem no Origin
• I shall avoid whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices, though I fully admit that it is the highest & most interesting problem for the naturalist.”10 But perhaps also because there was widespread middle-class unease about any social, political, or intellectual activities that threatened the status quo. Among these threats were notions of self-generated evolution or, as it was then called, transmutation—that is, change and progress without any divine creation or oversight. To adopt transmutation, as was seen with Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844,11 or to promote points of view that advocated self-determination among human beings, such as the doctrine of phrenology,12 was at that time to brand oneself as a dangerous political radical who might favor materialism and political upheaval. Radical thinkers might find biological support in transmutation for rejecting the hierarchical social structure of the United Kingdom and thus destabilize the state. 6
  
• Fuegians "almost another species of man" 8
• Frase de Huxley contra wilberforce já em 1860 9
• Lyell, Huxley (contra Owen) 10
• Wallace
• In the first, saying what Darwin had stopped short of saying in Origin, he argued that natural selection was the primary force in changing apes into people. In the second article, published in the 1869 Quarterly Review, Wallace backtracked and declared that natural selection seemed to him insufficient to explain the origin of humankind’s extraordinary mental capacities. He agreed with Darwin that natural selection pushed our apish ancestors to the threshold of humanity. But at that point, he thought, physical evolution stopped and something else took over—the power of mind. The human mind alone continued to advance, human societies emerged, and cultural imperatives took over. According to Wallace, not every society developed at the same rate, accounting for what he and his contemporaries considered to be visible differences in cultural status. Darwin was thoroughly taken aback. “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child,” he wrote to Wallace in surprise.18 Darwin’s view was that everything that could be considered characteristic of the human condition—language, morality, religious sense, maternal affection, civilization, appreciation of beauty— had emerged in gradual steps from animals. He could not agree with Wallace that some external force—Wallace believed it to be some spiritual power—had made us what we are. 11
• Outros trabalhos: Argyll, Spencer, Haeckel. 11-3
• Pré descent
• The moment at last seemed ripe to Darwin for completing his research on humankind and making it public. He could call on the investigations of prominent anatomists and anthropologists who were favorably disposed toward a secular, biological view of humankind. He was able to consult scientific contemporaries such as Francis Galton, John Lubbock, and Edward B. Tylor, and reach out to knowledgeable colleagues like Haeckel, Pierre Paul Broca, Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages, Édouard Claparède, and Carl Vogt. His immense network of correspondents could help in locating specialists to guide him through relatively unfamiliar areas, such as the likely beginnings of human language, and in gathering further information on a mass of topics from individuals across the globe. The study in his house in Kent was his center of operations—arranged to offer a private and active working space for his many different projects (Figure I.2). He asked his daughter Henrietta Darwin, age twenty-eight, to act as copy editor and proofreader, to correct his grammatical mistakes and help with clarity. Soon Darwin had gathered so much material that he felt obliged to put some of it aside for another book. This additional material concerned the expression of emotions in animals and humans and was published in 1872, one year after Descent of Man, under the title The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. These two books represent Darwin’s most important statements on the evolution of humankind. 13
• Publicação
• John Murray, the publisher of most of Darwin’s previous books, flinched at the subject matter of the scientist’s latest. Despite his familiarity with Darwin’s unorthodox topics and his determination not to let them stand  in the way of a successful business relationship, this book on human ancestry rattled his confidence rather more than Origin of Species had
  done. 13-4 [contra Elwin]
  
• Murray bravely went ahead. He printed 2,500 copies of Descent of Man, publishing the book in early 1871. Three further print runs were issued during the same year, bringing the number of copies available to readers up to 8,000. Darwin made small changes in the texts of each reprint. For bibliophiles, there are some interesting variants. Darwin’s own copy, for example, was ready by December 1870 and has that date printed on its title page. Murray published a second edition in 1874 with corrections and emendations. By 1877 Murray’s firm recorded that it had issued a total of 11,000 copies. The American publishing house of D. Appleton and Company simultaneously published Descent of Man in New York in 1871 and continued to match the English editions pretty closely. In Europe, the Franco-Prussian War would seemingly have obliterated any prospect of overseas editions and foreign translations. Yet—astonishingly, in view of the political situation, especially during the Siege of Paris and the dreadful events around the Commune of Paris—Darwin’s book was translated into Dutch, French, German, Russian, and Italian in 1871, and into Swedish, Polish, and Danish shortly thereafter, a testimony to the fortitude of Darwin’s European colleagues and general interest in evolutionary affairs. 14
• fairy tales of science 15
• continuismo 15
• relatividade moral e civilização 17
• civilização 17
• he declared, he would rather be descended from a heroic little monkey that sacrificed her life in this manner than from a savage 18
• Darwin found it difficult to apply an actual evolutionary tree to humans. ...  for the second edition of Descent of Man, Darwin asked Huxley to fill this gap with an up-to-date essay about fossil finds 18
• SexSel
• An important part of Descent of Man was Darwin’s account of human racial diversification. He believed that sexual selection held the answers. “I do not intend to assert that sexual selection will account for all the differences between the races,” he wrote in Descent.30 Nonetheless, he told Wallace in a letter in 1867 that he felt certain that it was “the main agent in forming the races of man.”31 As early as 1864 he had in fact explained to Wallace that sexual selection could be “the most powerful means of changing the races of man that I know.”32 .... It was a system, he stressed, that depended on individual choice rather than survival value. Darwin devoted nearly one-third of Descent of Man to establishing the existence of this sexual selection in birds, mammals, and insects. In animals, he argued, the choice of mate was determined by the female: the female peahen did the choosing. When he came to humans, he reversed that proposition and insisted that men did the choosing.33 Darwin used sexual selection to explain the divergence of early humans into the racial groups that Victorian physical anthropologists described. Skin colors were for him a good example. Early men, he suggested, would choose their mates according to localized ideas of beauty. 19
• Darwin argued that sexual selection was not confined to physical attributes such as hair or skin color. According to him, sexual selection among humans would also affect mental traits such as intelligence, maternal love, bravery, altruism, obedience, and the “ingenuity” of any given population; that is, heterosexual human pairing choices would go to work on the basic animal instincts and push them in particular directions.
• These views were utterly embedded in Darwin’s personal social circumstances. While he made a good attempt to be culturally relativistic, he still drew on the conventional ideas of his era and social position about human pairing behavior, choice, and gender. For example, he believed that sexual selection had fostered built-in male superiority across the world. In early human societies, he argued, the necessities of survival had resulted in men becoming physically stronger than women and in their intelligence and mental faculties improving beyond those of women. In civilized regimes it was evident to him that men, because of their well-developed intellectual and entrepreneurial capacities, ruled the social order.
• In this way Darwin made human society an extension of biology and saw in every human group a “natural” basis for primacy of the male. After Descent of Man’s publication, early feminists and suffragettes bitterly attacked this doctrine, feeling that women were being “naturalized” by biology into a secondary, submissive role.35 Indeed, many medical men asserted that women’s brains were smaller than those of men, and they were eager enough to adopt Darwin’s suggestion that women were altogether less evolutionarily developed and that the “natural” function of women was to reproduce, not to think. For several decades, AngloAmerican men in the medical profession thought that the female body was especially prone to medical disorders if the reproductive functions were denied. Something of this belief can be traced right through to the 1950s and beyond.
• In Descent of Man, Darwin also made concrete his thoughts on human cultural progress and civilization. The notion of a hierarchy of races informed his discussion and took added weight from being published at a time when the ideology of extending one nation’s rule over other nations or peoples was unquestioned. Darwin stated that natural selection and sexual selection combined with cultural shifts in learned behavior to account for the differences that he saw between populations. The racial hierarchy, as Darwin called it, ran from the most primitive tribes of mankind to the most civilized and had emerged over the course of eons through competition, selection, and conquest. Those tribes with little or no culture (as determined by Europeans) were, he thought, likely to be overrun by bolder or more sophisticated populations. “All that we know about savages, or may infer from their traditions and from old monuments,” he wrote, “shew that from the remotest times successful tribes have supplanted other tribes.”36 Darwin was certain that many of the currently existing peoples he called primitive would in time similarly be overrun and perhaps destroyed by more advanced races, such as Europeans; he had in mind particularly Tasmanian, Australian, and New Zealand aboriginal peoples. This to him was the playing out of the great law of “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,” as expressed in the subtitle of his earlier book On the Origin of Species. Such an emphasis on the natural qualities underpinning social cultural development explicitly cast the notion of race into biologically determinist terms, reinforcing then contemporary ideas of a racial hierarchy.
• Partly because of Darwin’s endorsement and partly because of the influential writings of others, these views intensified during the high imperialism of the early twentieth century. Herbert Spencer’s doctrine of “survival of the fittest,” as used by Darwin, Wallace, Spencer, and others, in Descent of Man and elsewhere, became a popular phrase in the development of social Darwinism. Embedded in powerful class, racial, and gender distinctions, social Darwinism used the prevailing ideas of competition and conquest to justify social and economic policies in which prosperity and success were the exclusive aim.37 “Survival of the fittest” was a phrase well suited to encourage hard-nosed economic expansion, rapid adaptation to circumstance, and colonization. Karl Pearson, a committed Darwinian biologist, expressed it starkly in Britain in 1900: no one, he said, should regret that “a capable and stalwart race of white men should replace a dark-skinned tribe which can neither utilise its land for the full benefit of mankind, nor contribute its quota to the common stock of human knowledge.”38
• Several of Darwin’s remarks in Descent of Man captured anxieties that were soon to be made manifest in the eugenics movement. Darwin feared that what he called the “better” members of society were in danger of being numerically swamped by the “unfit.” In this latter category Darwin included men and women of the streets, the ill, indigents, alcoholics, and those with physical disabilities or mental disturbances. He pointed out that medical aid and charity given to the sick and the poor ran against the fundamental principle of natural selection. Evidently torn between his social conscience and what he understood about evolutionary biology, he went on to declare that it was a characteristic of a truly civilized country to aid the sick and help the weak. 
• In these passages Darwin anticipated some of the problems that his cousin Francis Galton would try to alleviate through the eugenics movement. Galton was an enthusiastic convert to Darwin’s theories and had little hesitation in applying the concept of selection to human populations. He aimed to improve human society though the principles of natural selection: in essence, by reducing the rate of reproduction among those he categorized as the poorer, unfit, profligate elements of society and promoting higher rates of reproduction among the middle classes. Galton hoped that the men he called highly gifted—the more successful men—should have children and pass their attributes on to the next generation. Galton did not promote policies of incarceration or sterilization ultimately adopted by the United States, nor did he conceive of the possibility of the whole-scale extermination of “undesirable” groups as played out during World War II. But he was a prominent advocate of taking human development into our own hands and the necessity of improving the human race. Darwin referred to Galton’s point of view in Descent. 
• While Darwin’s Descent of Man can hardly account for all the racial stereotyping, nationalist fervor, and prejudice expressed in years to come, there can be no denying the impact of his work in providing a biological backing for notions of racial superiority, reproductive constraints, gendered typologies, and class distinctions.
• Darwin’s Descent of Man could nowadays be considered something of a period piece in the style of argument, the use of evidence, and the conclusions put forward. Yet, as this volume of essays shows, it opened one of the first genuinely public debates about human origins to stretch across general society. The critiques, scientific responses, and thoughtful debates originally generated were evocative of the social diversity of the nineteenth century and remind us that the introduction of new and culturally difficult ideas is rarely straightforward. Moreover, Darwin’s book encouraged important long-term further investigation, both in the lab and in the field, for many different audiences and in many different languages. This continuing work is a remarkable tribute to the lasting power of Darwin’s vision and the ideas themselves. 20-3

1 THE FETUS, THE FISH HEART, AND THE FRUIT FLY - ROBERTS

• Atavismo. Rudimentos. Vestígios. 27
• Fisiologia. compartilhamento de "chemical composition" 29
• Recapitulação
• by the turn of the twentieth century, experimental embryology and genetics had comprehensively demolished the theory of recapitulation. Embryological development was more complicated than the theory suggested, and genetic changes could kick in and alter the program of development at any point. The crucial ideas behind recapitulation—that extra features could be added only at the end of embryonic development, and that embryos passed through stages equivalent to the progression of adult ancestors—no longer stood up to scrutiny. Even though we now know recapitulation to be wrong, there are links between embryological development and evolutionary history. Haeckel was mistaken—animals don’t have the equivalent of their adult ancestors telescoped into their embryos. But Darwin realized that the resemblances between embryos were still meaningful. They revealed important clues about evolutionary relationships between animals—clues that were often lost or obscured in adult animals. 34
• Seleção de coisas inúteis
• If an anatomical structure falls out of use completely, it is likely to disappear over time. Its disappearance is hastened if it causes a disadvantage to the organism, in which case natural selection will favor variants that lack the particular characteristic or indeed possess a smaller version of it. The disadvantage could be purely energetic—it’s costly to grow and maintain body parts that are no longer useful. But Darwin was perplexed as to how natural selection could completely eliminate a structure. Once the structure was too small to be particularly costly, the selection pressure against it would surely be minimal. He was left at a loss because he didn’t know the precise mechanism of inheritance. But we now understand the influence of processes other than natural selection in evolutionary change and especially the role that chance plays. Particularly when there is no selection pressure to maintain something, genetic drift can mean that features that are no longer useful are quickly lost through chance affecting which individuals survive and reproduce. On the other hand, it may prove overwhelmingly difficult to eliminate a particular feature. The molecular control of development is complicated, and tinkering with the program of embryological development is fraught with risk. 35-6
• orelha externa 37
• olfato 38
• nakedness 39
• dentes 40
• apêndice 41
• In some ways, Darwin seems to have wandered off on an intellectually interesting but potentially distracting diversion when he writes about vestigial features in each sex. After all, his main aim is to lay out the evidence for humans as an evolved, not created, species. But of course, for creationists, males and females were also separately created—and there should be no reason the human male and female should each bear vestiges of the other’s organs. The fact that they do hints strongly at underlying mechanisms and constraints of development and inheritance. The appearance of vestiges among the sexes implies mutability and the existence of a biological mechanism by which it would be perfectly possible to modify structures over time. 43
  
• Sem arquétipo
• , “It is no scientific explanation to assert that [mammals] have all been formed on the same ideal plan.”16 The explanation for the similarities wasn’t an abstract ideal or archetype but
  something very real indeed: shared ancestry, or as Darwin put it, “community of descent. 44
  

2 REMARKABLE BUT NOT EXTRAORDINARY: THE EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN BRAIN - HERCULANO-HOUZEL

• Nada interessante para mim.

3 THE DARWINIAN ROAD TO MORALITY - HARE

• Nada interessante para mim.

4 CHARLES DARWIN AND THE FOSSIL EVIDENCE FOR HUMAN EVOLUTION - HAILE-SELASSIE

• Move o capítulo sobre origem do homem da quarta opara a segunda posição na segunda edição.
• Neandertal novamente
• He identified tool use, reduction in canine size, bipedality (walking on two legs), and increase in brain size as the most important characteristics distinguishing us from other primates. However, Darwin could not test his hypothesis of transitional forms or clearly understand the basic processes of human evolution, largely due to lack of evidence (ancient fossils) during his time. At the time Darwin wrote Descent, human fossils had been recovered from caves in Belgium, Gibraltar, and the Neander valley of Germany. It was not clear to Darwin and the rest of the scientific community whether these fossils represented a distinct human species or were just pathological modern humans. We know now that all these fossils belong to Neanderthals. 83
• Asia não africa até 1924. 84

5 A CENTURY OF CIVILIZATION INTELLIGENCE, AND (WHITE) NATIONALISM - KILLGROVE

• Wallace 1864. Monogenic vs Polygenic.
• Wallace begins by largely espousing a monogenic perspective on human origins, one that reads much like contemporary anthropological understanding and fits with Darwin’s perspective as well. The mid-nineteenth century was, of course, a period in which evolution through natural selection was becoming well accepted but the mechanism of heredity was still unknown. It was also a period in which human culture was assumed to be under the influence of natural selection in the same way that human biology was,5 and this assumption comes through clearly in Wallace’s essay: “Tribes in which such [high] mental and moral qualities were predominant would therefore have an advantage in the struggle for existence over other tribes in which they were less developed, would live and maintain their numbers, while the others would decrease and finally succumb.”6 Wallace has difficulty, however, reconciling humans’ sociality and empathy with environmental checks on population, which would be necessary for his hypothesis about natural selection of mental and moral qualities to be borne out. Specifically, Wallace notes that even “in the rudest tribes, the sick are assisted at least with food” and that the weaker individuals “do not suffer the extreme penalty [death] which falls upon animals so defective.”7 In order to further his argument in favor of the natural selection of human culture, Wallace tries his best to relate known primate qualities of sociality and empathy to humans’ “intellectual and moral faculties.” If social qualities evolve with mental capacity, he writes, “the better and higher specimens of our race would therefore increase and spread, the lower and more brutal would give way and successively die out, and that rapid advancement of mental organisations would occur, which has raised the very lowest races of man so far above the brutes, and, in conjunction with scarcely perceptible modifications of form, has developed the wonderful intellect of the Germanic races.”8 107
• Civilizations, Wallace avers, do not die out from one specific cause but rather are subject to “the inevitable effects of an unequal mental and physical struggle”10—that is, to cultural evolution. And who has reached the pinnacle of cultural evolution, according to Wallace? “The intellectual and moral, as well as the physical qualities of the European are superior,” he concludes,11 conflating cultural and physical differences and reifying white Western supremacy for his mid-nineteenth-century audience of educated white men. Wallace therefore believed that natural selection could operate on culture, albeit in a different way than it operated on biology, and wrote about the “inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come in contact.”12 The audience’s responses, however, to Wallace’s monogenic take on how “races of man” were the result of natural selection of biology and culture made for a “chilly reception,” according to historian Jeremy Vetter, who has traced Wallace’s conflicts with both ethnologists and anthropologists. The 1864 paper was a turning point for Wallace, Vetter argues, as it presented new research material “under the strong influence of Herbert Spencer’s social evolutionism as presented in Social Statics, which [Wallace] had recently read and also enthusiastically recommended to Darwin.”13 108
• intelectual faculties. biological foundation for human culture but that he also saw culture as constrained and brought about by both a natural and a built environment ...  intellectual powers are advanced through natural selection 109
  
• Altruismo resultante da culpa e reconhecimento. .. Patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy are therefore all the result of natural selection, in Darwin’s mind 110-1
• Progresso civilizacional. 111
• Medo de endocruzamento 112
• Natural social checks
• Natural checks to this “downward tendency,” as Darwin calls it, also include a high rate of mortality among the “intemperate” men, as well as a high rate of mortality among women who marry at younger than twenty years of age and among both men and women who are “profligate.”30 Marriage in general is viewed as a civilizing force, and one that keeps both men and women—but mostly men—healthier and surviving to an older age. If the various checks Darwin specified “do not prevent the reckless, the vicious, and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men,” he concludes, “the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule. 113
• Admite que a cultura é complicada 113 the evolution of human culture is both part and parcel of human progress and, in his view, a transition from savagery to barbarism to civilization, 114
• Civilização
• Both Broca and Blumenbach were pioneers in cranial anthropometry (skull measuring), which ultimately formed the basis for scientific racism in early biological anthropology, when physical traits were used to justify cultural and structural violence, including slavery, patriarchy, and colonialism. Three major issues with Darwin’s use of intelligence in explaining culture and civilization are: 1) his assumption that brain size is a proxy for intelligence, 2) his assumption that intelligence can be quantified, and 3) his inference that quantifications of intelligence reflect heritable and immutable traits in humans. These assumptions can in part be traced to the works of his aforementioned cousin, Francis Galton, a prolific polymath. In the field of statistics, Galton figured out how to quantify the normal distribution, or bell curve, with standard deviation; he invented the regression line r for representing the correlation coefficient; and he coined the term “regression to the mean.” In forensics, Galton was the first to study heritability in fingerprints and to work out the statistical likelihood that two people would have the same pattern. Francis Galton was also intrigued by his cousin Charles Darwin’s ideas on variation within species and sought to measure human variation in both biology and behavior, or, as he called it, “nature and nurture.” This latter desire led Galton to measure “desirable” human qualities and to attempt to figure out which were heritable traits, a research plan that Darwin himself disagreed with. Galton devised one of the first known intelligence tests, suggesting that human intelligence could be objectively quantified through measuring such things as head size, vision and hearing accuracy, and reaction time. Following Darwin’s death in 1882, Galton began calling his research into those people who were “born well” by the Greek-based neologism “eugenics.” 116
• Goddard eugenista QI 117
• Politica
• campaigns for reduced government spending on social programs, or at times of fear among ruling elites, when disadvantaged groups sow serious social unrest or even threaten to usurp power. 118
  
• Darwin clearly shares with Herrnstein and Murray these a priori assumptions about intelligence and similarly conflates intelligence with socioeconomic superiority, health, and well-being in the form of longevity, civilization, and progress. 118
  
• Decoupling of civilization and progress a partir de 1910s contudo voltou nos 1950s e hoje se expressa na forma de determinismo ambiental.120-1
• complex societies and archeology 121-2
• What anthropology has taught us, since the time of Darwin and Wallace, is that the Enlightenment ideal of human progress and the capitalism and inequality arising from the industrial revolution that underlie many early theories about human society are not “natural” nor are they necessarily something all humans on the planet should strive for. 124

6 A CENTURY OF CIVILIZATION INTELLIGENCE, AND (WHITE) NATIONALISM - KILLGROVE

• " If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception." 125
• Darwin argued that humans fall within the “anthropomorphous” apes and that a natural classification must be based upon genealogical relationships, not novel features found in humans alone. A second topic was Darwin’s insistence upon the value of nonadaptive traits for identifying relationships. Darwin acknowledged that adaptive features like upright walking and large brains were important to humans, but he argued that vestigial or apparently useless traits are more reliable for understanding our affinities. Third, Darwin took a step beyond any previous scientist with his novel biogeographic hypothesis that humans had originated in Africa. It is for the last of these that Darwin won his current reputation as an oracle of human origins. Against the prejudices of his time, he recognized that humanity began not in Eden, nor in Asia, but in Africa. 126
• Sobre o diagrama, ver Archibald (2014).
• This tree diagram from Darwin’s notes corresponds closely to his description of primate relationships in Descent. Darwin placed the “anthropomorphous” apes— what we today call the great apes—upon a single branch with a threeway split between the chimpanzees and gorillas, the orangutans, and Hylobates, or gibbons. The stem of this branch also gives rise to a second branch leading to humans. At first Darwin labeled this “Homo,” then scratched out the Latin term to replace it with “Man.” Deeper in the tree, this branch connects to another leading to the Old World monkeys, with the labels “Cercopithecus,” “Macaca,” “Baboon,” and “Semnopithecus.” Even deeper, a branch leads to the New World monkeys, and at the deepest point in the tree, a branch leads to “Lemuridae.” At the very base of the tree is the label “Primates.” 127
• Proliferation of names for primate groups 135
• Ranks are arbitrary 136
• Darwin, who argued in favor of common descent as a basis for classification, faced the same problem. Other naturalists—even friends like Lyell and Huxley who accepted common descent—ranked humans apart because such a ranking was useful to them. Among the metaphysical commitments underpinning pre-Darwinian classifications was a notion of symmetry between the natural world and the human world. Placing humans at a high taxonomic rank made it possible to elevate the differences among human races as equivalent or even greater than those among other primate groups. It is no accident that the order Bimana for humans was devised by Blumenbach, who is much better known for his classification of human races. Cuvier’s discussion of human races in Régne Animal is more extensive than his presentation of New World primates and several times longer than his presentation of lemurs. As the study of anthropology developed during the early nineteenth century, specialists treated human races at even greater length. Charles Hamilton Smith expanded Cuvier’s tripartite classification of races into a 450-page volume.40 Owen, by raising humans to the subclass Archencephala, set them, with their moral and reasoning senses, apart from other mammals and at the same time made room for himself to distinguish human groups on the same grounds.41 Haeckel, in the second edition of Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, published in 1870, provided a graphic illustration of his views on the variation of human races and primate species, with two opposing ranks of facial profiles.
• Darwin discussed his views of races and their evolution elsewhere in Descent (see Chapter 7 of this book). Here, it is relevant simply to note that even though he advocated for the demotion of humans to a lower taxonomic rank, Darwin did not think that the differences among human races were small. Just within Chapter 6, he anticipated a time when “the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”42 As noted earlier, he also speculated that humans had diverged from other anthropoids in the Eocene. Darwin may have borrowed this idea of extreme antiquity for humans from Alfred Russel Wallace. In 1864, Wallace had addressed the Anthropological Society of London, a group that had splintered from the Ethnological Society in part because its founders sought explanations of human variation more in terms of race history. The majority of the Anthropological Society’s members would come to favor the idea that human races had separate and distinct origins, a nowdiscredited idea known as polygenism. Wallace’s address reflected his views that the origin of humans was extremely ancient, so that the races had been diverging for an extremely long time.43 Darwin disagreed with Wallace about the mechanism of human evolution—Wallace thought that natural selection could not affect cultural beings, while Darwin saw the potential for greater competition in social systems. But Darwin did imagine that human evolution was as ancient as Wallace supposed. What Darwin intended with his arguments was to establish classification on the grounds of genealogy, thereby refocusing ideas of human descent onto the shared features with other primates, rather than unique features found in humans alone. 138-9
• Traços inúteis como muito informativos 139
• Conclusão
• It is sometimes said that Darwin demoted humans from the top of the natural order. From the pinnacle of creation, he made humans into an insignificant twig on a vast tree of life. In Darwin’s era even those naturalists who were innovators or rapid converts to evolution, such as Lyell, Huxley, and Wallace, nonetheless reserved a special place for humans in their classification. Darwin synthesized the known information about nonhuman primates and concluded that humans deserve a lowly rank. Insisting upon a classification based on common descent, Darwin found that humans are barely a subfamily. He was not the first to hold this view, but his rationale would be adopted by later biologists. The challenge of making biological classification match the branches of the tree of life continues, as does the discovery of new groups of organisms and deeper knowledge of their genomes. These discoveries have continued to drive a steady demotion of the human tribe, as our relationships to the other apes become more and more resolved. Darwin did not perceive our demotion in rank as a reduction in status. Instead, he saw it as an elevation of the status of our true lineage. 142

7 "ON THE RACES OF MAN": RACE, RACISM, SCIENCE, AND HOPE - FUENTES

• Consistent bias against africans 147
• He sees as a scientist, even if briefly, what he cannot see as a Briton immersed in structures and histories of European racism and bias: that the differences between people might not be what the “science” of the time states that they are.149
• This is right; if one is trying to use skin color to define races, it cannot be done. However, if one rejects the racial classification and just asks, “Is there a correlation between skin color and certain very broad geographic patterns?” then the answer is clear: yes. Skin color varies in accordance with the relationships between latitude, UV light intensity, and many other factors. To his credit, as a scientist, Darwin noticed this. To his fault, as a biased Briton and European, he did not follow it to the logical conclusion: skin color cannot be used to differentiate humans into racial groups.
• “If, however,” Darwin realized, “we look to the races of man, as distributed over the world, we must infer that their characteristic differences cannot be accounted for by the direct action of different conditions of life, even after exposure to them for an enormous period of time.”10 He also noted, “Nor can the differences between the races of man be accounted for, except to a quite insignificant degree, by the inherited effects of the increased or decreased use of parts.”11 And he even went so far as to state, “Not one of the external differences between the races of man are of any direct or special service to him.”12 In this section of the chapter, Darwin clearly acknowledges that none of the overt physical characteristics used to separate humans into “races” has an obvious or identifiable biological or evolutionary explanation supporting a racial classification. But then he reveals his bias by suggesting: “The intellectual and moral or social faculties must of course be excepted from this remark.”13 Darwin remained committed to the premise that humans are divided into significantly distinct “races”—even when his own scientific analyses suggests otherwise. 
• So then, how does Darwin conclude that the human “races” formed? “We have thus far been baffled,” he admits, “in all our attempts to account for the differences between the races of man; but there remains one important agency, namely Sexual Selection, which appears to have acted as powerfully on man, as on many other animals.”14 However, he goes on to clarify that sexual selection likely cannot explain all racial differences,* but he remains committed to the unsupported assumption that biological “races” exist in humans. This section of Chapter 7 is the clearest example of how the power of bias can conceal what is right in front of us. 151-2
• Raças
• He argues that the scholars of his time cannot agree on how many “races” there are (noting sources for designating between two and sixty-three) and that bodies and morphologies show much more similarity than difference; thus he is forced to come down on the side of human “races” not being different species. In fact, he states that an understanding of the processes of evolution clearly demonstrates that the polygenists are wrong and that all humans share a distant common ancestor. 148
• características mentais mais importantes 148
• “Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race with race.” 153
  
• Mudança importante na segunda ed
• In the first edition of Descent (1871), Darwin spends little space on this section, offering a summary of his thoughts on the matter rather than a more comprehensive review of information. However, it is extremely relevant in this one instance to mention what Darwin added to this section of Chapter 7 in the second edition of Descent, published a few years later, in 1874, which is the version most commonly reprinted and read. He lengthened the section and offered multiple examples in support of his assertions, more expansively arguing his case. He also crystalized his erroneous, but powerful, “natural” argument for genocide and colonialism. In the second edition, a chunk of this section outlines “case studies” of the post-European-contact devastation of the Tasmanians, the Maori of New Zealand,* the New Hebrideans (today Vanuatuans), the Andaman Islanders, and others. In these pages, as Darwin describes the crashes and extinctions of populations, he also clearly documents the horrors and atrocities of European colonial contact. He describes massive stress leading to widespread infertility and infant mortality. He identifies the introduction and impact of infectious diseases, acknowledges displacement and forced movements, and suggests the inability of the indigenous populations to adapt. Darwin sets up these genocides to be seen as outcomes that ensue due to natural selection, the natural outcome of competition between “races.” He argues that the entire process can be compared to the functioning of systems of the “lower” animals, maintaining that certain animals do better, are better able to adapt to challenging circumstances, and possess higher levels of health and vigor than others (citing his earlier work in that vein). He compares indigenous populations to certain lower animals, suggesting that “savages” are likely to respond poorly when challenged with a sudden change of lifeways. He claims, “Civilised races can certainly resist changes of all kinds far better than savages.”21 Here Darwin comes very  close to asserting that the genocidal effects of expansion and colonialism are the logical and expected outcomes of natural laws. 154-5
  
• Clusters of patterns não raças 157
• Contudo
• While “race” is not a biological category, race as a social reality—as a way of seeing people, structuring societies, and experiencing the world—is very real. Societies construct racial classifications not as units of biology but as ways to lump together groups of people with varying historical, linguistic, ethnic, religious, and other backgrounds. These categories are not static. They change over time as societies grow and diversify and alter their social, political, and historical makeups.
  
• However, while “race” is not biology, racism† can certainly affect our biology, especially our health and well-being. Substantial research demonstrates that racialized social structures, from overt oppression and physical subjugation to access to health care to economic and educational discrimination to histories of segregation and material deprivation to one’s own racialized self-image as a result of such systems, can impact the ways our bodies, immune systems, and even our cognitive processes react and develop.31 This means that “race,” while not a biological division, can have important biological implications because of the effects of racism. The belief in “races” as natural divisions of human biology and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs are among the most damaging elements of the human experience both today and 150 years ago. 158
• t is well documented that Darwin was an abolitionist and saw slavery and general race-based cruelty as horrific and unjust.35 However, if “racism” is any prejudice against someone because of his or her race, when those views are reinforced by systems of power,* then yes, Darwin was racist. His overt bias in regard to the mental, moral, and social capacities of humans from the continent of Africa, Afro-descendant populations, and indigenous peoples of the Americas was clear in Descent of Man and other writings. Darwin’s racism was neither intentional nor malicious, but it is an example of how racism is maintained—not by the vitriolic screaming and overt acts of violence by a minority but rather by passive acceptance of a particular “reality” and promulgation of the status quo by a majority 160
• We have thus far been baffled in all our attempts to account for the differences between the
  races of man. 160
  
• Darwin man of his time
• Yet he stuck to it. One does not have to harbor malice for one’s racism to have truly malevolent and significantly damaging effects. If one has respect and prominence, then the damage is done. And Darwin had both. His words in Chapter 7 acted to bolster racist (and false) ideologies. To this day racists and nationalist/separatist ideologues use Darwin’s words and general arguments as basis for their erroneous and intentionally hurtful and hateful positions and actions. Darwin was, like much of humanity, a biased human being who’s at least a little bit racist. So many humans are that way because the societies that raised them are deeply structured with racist, classist, and gendered divisions central to their histories and contemporary functioning. Life experiences in such environments shape minds and bodies.36 And like Darwin, most of us often sense, even if subconsciously, that the realities that racist structures try to force us all to see are not an accurate description for the diversity of the human species. Nor do such racist structures represent the only way we can live together. Careful analyses and thorough investigation, even when their results do not sit well with one’s preconceived notions of how the world “is,” move science forward. It is in the close reading of Chapter 7 that we can see what Darwin got right as a good scientist and why that matters and offers hope. His scientific eye caught the inconsistencies and misrepresentations in the assertion that “races” are biological divisions of humanity, even if his general worldview did not change to reflect this insight. Today, in 2021, with access to the contemporary data on human biological diversity and evolutionary history, Darwin would not have concluded, “We have thus far been baffled in all our attempts to account for the differences between the races of man.” He would have affirmed, conclusively, that the division of humans into biological races has no support from the biological and evolutionary sciences. 161

8 RESOLVING THE PROBLEM OF SEXUAL BEAUTY - RYAN

• Contexto histórico
• Wallace was not the only one of Darwin’s contemporaries to reject his theory of sexual selection. For many, the idea of males competing “red in tooth and claw”22 for access to females seemed a proper extension of the theory of natural selection. The notion, however, that females had strong preferences for males based on the details of their courtship behavior and morphology, details that seem only to hasten the male’s demise, was a real stretch. The Victorian notion that male mate choice reigned supreme in our own species made it seem improbable that in other species it was the females who wielded similar powers. It is notable that, contrary to these Victorian biases, Darwin implicitly, and sometimes even explicitly, endowed female animals of many species with superior power in the mating game. But at the same time it is confounding that, like a typical Victorian, he viewed women as inferior and devoid of such power, as is clearly documented in the next chapter by Holly Dunsworth. Wallace too was a Victorian, so how did he explain these traits of sexual beauty, such as the sexual dimorphism in plumage coloration in birds? Rejecting Darwin’s idea that sexual selection favored males with bright colors, Wallace suggested that natural selection favored females with dull colors because of the advantage being camouflaged afforded them. The second criticism of sexual selection by female choice was that Darwin did not offer a cogent explanation for why females would have such preferences for males. His suggestion that females had an aesthetic sense much like our own seemed to be kicking the can down the road. It led only to the question of why the females would have a taste for the beautiful. When Wallace did give female choice some credence, he suggested that females were assessing traits that indicated a male was vigorous not beautiful. 173
• Algumas hipóteses: reconhecimento de sp, display de saúde, genetic hitchhiking 175-6
• Conclusão
• Darwin proposed his theory of sexual selection to explain how elaborate, sexually dimorphic traits used in courtship could evolve, despite being maladaptive for survival. Although sexual selection by male-male competition was readily accepted, the same was not true for sexual selection by female choice. The theory’s strongest critic was Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Initially, Wallace was skeptical of female choice in general, doubting that females would base consistent mate preferences on nuances of male courtship behavior and morphology. When he did grant some credence to female choice, he suggested choice was based on traits that indicated male vigor. Darwin, on the other hand, suggested that female animals have a “taste for the beautiful,”46 that they possess sexual aesthetics not all that different from ours. His theory lay dormant for 100 years and was resurrected in the 1970s, primarily by Trivers’s theory of parental investment. Since then, there have been hundreds of studies to demonstrate clearly the efficacy of female mate choice, thus validating Darwin’s primary prediction about sexual selection. Disagreements still exist as to what causes the evolution of female mate choice, echoing the fundamental disagreement between Darwin and Wallace. There are now a number of studies supporting Wallace’s utilitarian view that females acquire direct and indirect benefits from their mate choice. Other studies support Darwin’s notion of sexual aesthetics by documenting the sensory, neural, and cognitive biases that underlie female mate preferences. The recent trend in the field has been to delve deeper into mechanisms of mate preference to further document the female’s taste for the beautiful. 181-2

9 THIS VIEW OF WIFE - DUNSWORTH

• Where there was once God’s plan that we must carry out, now there was selection’s. Talk about stringing the same data together with two different narratives. From this view, cutting-edge science justified limiting the freedom of all but upper-class white men. Women evolved to be wives (and not scientists or scholars) and to carry out evolution’s plan. Natural and sexual selection conveniently favored what society already did. The scientific value of Descent is impossible to untangle from the oppression that it inspired. Perhaps more than any other science, evolutionary science is a “collection of stories about facts.”* These stories are difficult to separate from the facts and, indeed, become the facts without as much burden of proof placed on them as some facts. 199
• Part of the trouble is that “light” tends to privilege the hard sciences and their male-dominated traditions at the expense of other important knowledge. So, science continues to be deemed necessary to counter Darwin’s science-less views on human differences and their sociocultural implications—for example, to demonstrate that women and people of color are not inferior, less evolved, closer to nature, less deserving of opportunity, influence, and admiration than white men. While many scientists and scholars have met Darwin’s bias, racism, and sexism with science, science is not the only, or even a necessary, way to demonstrate humanity. That is partially because science does not yet represent humanity. 201

10 DINNER WITH DARWIN: SHARING THE EVIDENCE BEARING ON THE ORIGIN OF HUMANS - GIBBONS

• Lifetime of observations, correspondents 206
• Neandertal não reconhecido 206-7
• “But we must not fall into the error of supposing that the early progenitor of the whole Simian
  stock, including man, was identical with or even closely resembled any existing ape or monkey.” 209