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Second edition published in 1879 by John Murray, London
First published in Penguin Classics 2004
Editorial material copyright © James Moore and Adrian Desmond, 2004
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the editors have been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-33621-2
Note on the Text
Introduction
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.
Further Reading
Chronology
Biographical Register
Acknowledgements
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CLASSICSCHARLES DARWIN was born into an upper-middle-class medical family in 1809. He was destined for a career in either medicine or the Anglican Church. However, he did not complete his Edinburgh medical education and after leaving Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1831, his future was entirely changed when he joined HMS Beagle as a self-financing, independent naturalist. On returning to England in 1836 he began to write up his theories and observations which culminated in a series of books, most famously On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection of 1859. He married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839. In 1842 they moved to Down House in the north Kent countryside where Darwin lived for the rest of his life. During this time he was socially reclusive and continually ill. He died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
JAMES MOORE has degrees in science, divinity and history, with a PhD from Manchester University. He has taught at Cambridge, Harvard, Notre Dame and McMaster universities and is currently Reader in History of Science and Technology at the Open University in Milton Keynes. His books include a study of Protestant responses to evolution, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (1979); a source-book, Religion in Victorian Britain (1988); a series of essays, History, Humanity and Evolution (1989), The Darwin Legend (1994) and with Adrian Desmond, Darwin (1991). He is working on a biography of Alfred Russel Wallace.
ADRIAN DESMOND is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Biology Department at University College London. He studied at London and Harvard Universities, has higher degrees in vertebrate palaeontology and history of science, and a PhD for his study of the radical evolutionists of Darwin’s younger day. He is the author of a two-volume biography Huxley (1994, 1997) and co-author with James Moore of Darwin (1991). His other titles include The Politics of Evolution (1989) and Archetypes & Ancestors (1982). He is currently co-editing the T. H. Huxley family correspondence for multi-volume publication.
For detailed creative feedback we would like to thank Pietro Corsi, John Greene, Randal Keynes, Greg Radick, Evelleen Richards and Frank Turner. Points of biographical information were kindly provided by Berit Pedersen, Sofia Åkerberg and Michael Palmer. For translations of passages in Darwin’s text we are grateful to Helen Constantine (French), Tania Gergel and Samantha Evans (Latin), and Timothy Perrott and John and Cordula Van Wyhe (German). Finally we are indebted to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, and the John Murray archives, for allowing us to study Darwin manuscripts and publishing ledgers respectively.
1807 Trade in slaves is abolished by Act of Parliament. Slavery still flourishes in the British colonies and elsewhere.
1809 Charles Darwin is born at Shrewsbury. The Darwins and Wedgwoods are prominent in the anti-slavery movement.
1825–7 Darwin studies medicine at Edinburgh University. He hears heretical views about the similarity of human and animal mental functions. He is taught to stuff animals by the freed black slave John Edmondston.
1828–31 Moves to Christ’s College, Cambridge, and prepares for a Church career.
1831–6 Gentleman companion to Captain FitzRoy aboard HMS Beagle. Marvels at Fuegian ‘savages’ and the diversity of the human races. Witnesses slavery for the first time and abhors it.
1833 Slavery is abolished throughout the British Empire, but slaves still have to work out a seven-year indenture.
1837–42 Darwin lives in London. He privately lambasts those who consider slaves as sub-human and accepts a common ancestry for black and white human races. All life is descended in a ‘tree’-like fashion from a common primeval ancestor. Darwin develops his theory of natural selection to explain this. From the first he embraces human physical and mental evolution. He begins to approach the origin of the human races by means of male sexual competition.
1842 Writes a short sketch of his theory. He moves to Down (later spelt Downe) in Kent with his wife Emma Wedgwood, whom he had married in 1839, and the first two of their ten children.
1844 Finishes a 189-page account of his evolution theory and provides for its publication in case of his death.
1856 Starts writing a huge book, ‘Natural Selection’, against a backdrop of racist and abolitionist turmoil in America. A chapter is to be included with ‘sexual selection’, explaining the evolutionary divergence of the human races from one stock.
1857 Indian Mutiny cuts off his supply of information from Edward Blyth on sexual characters. The anti-evolutionist Richard Owen erects a special sub-class for mankind. Darwin drops mankind from ‘Natural Selection’.
1859 Rushes into print with On the Origin of Species, an ‘abstract’ of his big book, after receiving an outline of a similar theory from Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin now sees a more active role for females in sexual selection.
1861–3 Debates rage between Richard Owen and T. H. Huxley over the similarity of human and ape brains.
1861–5 American Civil War is fought over the issue of slavery. In Britain, an evangelical revival hardens the argument against the old ‘nigger philanthropists’; pro-slavery members of the Anthropological Society (founded 1863) depict the races springing from separate ape species.
1863 Charles Lyell collates the discoveries of prehistoric stone tools in his Antiquity of Man but fails to endorse human evolution, distressing Darwin.
1864 Alfred Russel Wallace explains the emergence of the human races by natural selection at the Anthropological Society.
1865 Mankind’s rise from savagery is portrayed in John Lubbock’s Pre-historic Times and Edward Tylor’s Early History of Mankind.
1866–7 Wallace turns to spiritualism and effectively puts human mental powers beyond natural explanation. He sees natural selection as all-powerful in explaining the physical body, and denies any role for sexual selection. Darwin, upset by this, is finally galvanized into writing on racial divergence by means of sexual selection. He starts assembling information and projects a full-length book.
1867 Second Reform Act increases the scope of democracy in Britain. This and Irish republican violence prompt Darwin’s student friend W. R. Greg to warn that the unfit will swamp society, defying the law of natural selection.
1869 Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton publishes Hereditary Genius to support his belief (which he later calls ‘eugenics’) that racial improvement can be achieved by breeding from gifted families. John Stuart Mill publishes On the Subjection of Women. Wallace finally removes mankind, body and mind, from Darwinian explanations of natural or sexual selection; he argues that the savage body was pre-adapted for a civilized existence by a higher ‘Power’.
1870–71 Franco-Prussian war leading to the formation of the Paris Commune. On 5 July 1870 all but the last chapter of the manuscript of the Descent of Man are ready for the printer. Darwin corrects proofs from early September. On 11 January 1871 the publisher sends the title page for approval.
1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex is published on 24 February.
1872 Publication of a spin-off from Darwin’s research on human descent, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
1873 George Darwin (Charles Darwin’s second son) writes an article supporting Galton’s eugenics breeding proposals, causing a public row with the Catholic comparative anatomist St George Mivart.
1877 Two atheists, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, subpoena Darwin to appear before the Lord Chief Justice in the Queen’s Bench Court in London on 18 June in their defence against the charge of having published birth-control advice – on the grounds that he had shown the human misery caused by Malthusian over-population. He refuses.
1877 Cambridge University awards Darwin an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.
1882 Darwin dies on 19 April and is buried in Westminster Abbey after pressure from Francis Galton, John Lubbock and T. H. Huxley.
1883 Galton coins the term ‘eugenics’.
1900 The expression ‘Social Darwinism’ gains currency in English.