Race before Darwin: Variation, adaptation and the natural history of man in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh, 1790-1835.

Bill Jenkins

doi:10.1017/s0007087420000217

Abstract

This paper draws on material from the dissertation books of the University of Edinburgh's student societies and surviving lecture notes from the university's professors to shed new light on the debates on human variation, heredity and the origin of races between 1790 and 1835. That Edinburgh was the most important centre of medical education in the English-speaking world in this period makes this a particularly significant context. By around 1800 the fixed natural order of the eighteenth century was giving way to a more fluid conception of species and varieties. The dissolution of the 'Great Chain of Being' made interpretations of races as adaptive responses to local climates plausible. The evidence presented shows that human variation, inheritance and adaptation were being widely discussed in Edinburgh in the student circles around Charles Darwin when he was a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1820s. It is therefore no surprise to find these same themes recurring in similar form in the evolutionary speculations in his notebooks on the transmutation of species written in the late 1830s during the gestation of his theory of evolution.

Highlights

In Darwin’s Sacred Cause Adrian Desmond and James Moore have written of Charles Darwin that ‘[h]uman evolution wasn’t his last piece in the evolution jigsaw; it was the first.’[1]
The evidence presented show that human variation, inheritance and adaptation were being widely discussed in Edinburgh in the student circles around Charles Darwin when he was a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1820s
It is no surprise to find these same themes recurring in similar form in the evolutionary speculations in his notebooks on the transmutation of species written in the late 1830s during the gestation of his theory of evolution

Summary

Introduction

In Darwin’s Sacred Cause Adrian Desmond and James Moore have written of Charles Darwin that ‘[h]uman evolution wasn’t his last piece in the evolution jigsaw; it was the first.’[1]. The professors and students of the University of Edinburgh have left us a rich record of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries debates on the nature and origins of the races In those years the University’s medical school was the most important centre for medical education in the English-speaking world. It was principally to medical or natural-historical authorities such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–77), Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and John Hunter (1754– 1809) that the Edinburgh medical men looked for answers to the questions they raised.[10] The one notable exception to this is Kames, his ideas were for the most part discussed only in order to refute them This debate on race that took place in and around the University of Edinburgh’s medical school was extremely significant for the development of ideas on the mutability of varieties and species later in the nineteenth century. A better understanding of the questions being asked and answered in Edinburgh regarding the mutability of the human species in this period can only add to our knowledge of this background and shed important light on the development of the ideas that were to radically restructure knowledge of the natural world in subsequent decades

Species and varieties in late Enlightenment natural history

Variation and adaptation

Conclusion