Descent Of Man Research Articles

Challenging Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and the descent of man from the lower animal like a chimpanzee

Challenging Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and the descent of man from the lower animal like a chimpanzee

Учение об инстинктах и эмоциях в монографии чарлза дарвина «Происхождение человека и половой отбор» как основа современной эволюционной психиатрии и психологии

The article presents an analysis of the doctrine of instincts and emotions in Charles Darwin's fundamental work “The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection” from the point of view of its significance for contemporary evolutionary psychiatry and psychology. Darwin believed that man has common instincts with animals (sexual love, self-preservation, maternal, social, etc.) and emotions (fear, suspicion, feelings of competition, sympathy; pleasure, suffering, vindictiveness, good nature, moral sense, etc.), and to substantiate this, he made systematic comparisons of the behavior of humans and animals of different species, arguing that with all the diversity of instincts, their number in humans is less than in animals. Darwin paid particular attention to animals that “gained from living” in close-knit communities. At the same time, Darwin did not see a fundamental difference between the mental abilities of humans and lower animals, noting that some species of higher animals also possess self-awareness. Most of the instincts, according to Darwin, were acquired by both people and animals through natural selection, operating by the “trial method,” because of that errors are often found in instincts. Darwin also believed that animals could suffer from insanity, but to a lesser extent than humans. In «The Descent of Man», Darwin outlined the problem of the existence of altruism and a “high level of morality”, which is relevant for contemporary evolutionary psychiatry and psychology. Аt the individual level of natural selection these traits may not bring any benefit to their owner (and even lead to his death as a result of self-sacrifice), and, it would seem, lead to the disappearance of owners of such qualities in subsequent generations.

The tanan [Chlorocoelus hypericifolius (Stoll 1813): Orthoptera, Tettigonioidea, Pseudophyllinae]re-discovered more than 150 years after the description of the male by Bates and the figuring by Darwin.

In his famous book, The descent of man and selection in relation to sex, Darwin (1871) described the male secondary sexual characters of Orthoptera in some detail. As the most prominent example, he presented a figure of a South American bush-cricket species. It had been described a few years before by Bates and was called, onomatopoetically, Chlorocoelus tanana. Surprisingly, the fascinating species has never been found since this time, although in old collections some additional specimens were located. Based on recently collected material and information on the internet, we clarify the taxonomy of the species and give details of the male stridulatory organ and its distribution. The peak frequency (2.1 kHz) of its resonant disturbance sounds indicates that also calling song may have an unusually low carrier frequency similar to other large bush-crickets with extraordinarily inflated tegmina.

New estimates indicate that males are not larger than females in most mammal species

Sexual size dimorphism has motivated a large body of research on mammalian mating strategies and sexual selection. Despite some contrary evidence, the narrative that larger males are the norm in mammals—upheld since Darwin’s Descent of Man—still dominates today, supported by meta-analyses that use coarse measures of dimorphism and taxonomically-biased sampling. With newly-available datasets and primary sources reporting sex-segregated means and variances in adult body mass, we estimate statistically-determined rates of sexual size dimorphism in mammals, sampling taxa by their species richness at the family level. Our analyses of wild, non-provisioned populations representing >400 species indicate that although males tend to be larger than females when dimorphism occurs, males are not larger in most mammal species, suggesting a need to revisit other assumptions in sexual selection research.

Creatures of Empire in Le Fanu's Uncle Silas

Abstract The interim between Darwin's first publication of the theory of natural selection (The Origin of Species, 1859) and his extended application of it to human development (The Descent of Man, 1871) corresponds with the reign of sensation fiction, a genre built upon older gothic tropes but imbricated with cultural and scientific modernization. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, a novel that straddles generic and national literature categories, typifies the sensation era's uneasy awareness of not only similarity but interdependence across boundaries. While eschewing typical sensation engagement with technology such as trains and telegrams, Uncle Silas reflects theories of species transmutation and particularly Darwin's Origin, which posited a malleability of seemingly distinct categories through species interaction and environmental influence. The plot of Uncle Silas centers on dislocation and efforts to fortify self-identity and reestablish security. Le Fanu's narrator-protagonist, the orphaned English or Anglo-Irish heiress Maud Ruthyn, practices bodily self-regulation and careful discernment to shore up boundaries of nationality and class that sustain her hereditary privilege. She stabilizes her class, national, and gender identity through rational revulsion from her French governess and implicitly Irish cousin. Narrator-protagonist Maud resolutely positions Englishness against foreignness and humanity against animality, but these categorical divisions, which she enforces as a character in the novel's imagined world, are exposed as false by her narration. Uncle Silas presents unregulated animal appetites as threatening to rational community governance, but it also implies that our bestial shared capacity for pain, which crosses boundaries of nationality, class, and even species, enables ethical response.

From one Darwin to another: Charles Darwin’s annotations to Erasmus Darwin’s ‘The Temple of Nature’

In the history of evolutionary thought, it has often been said that ideas on the transformation of species found in the work of Erasmus Darwin, principally as set forth in his The Temple of Nature (1803), inspired his grandson’s theory of evolution. However, little historical evidence has been produced to back up this claim. Based on a physical examination of Charles Darwin’s own copy of The Temple of Nature, this paper presents the 25 markings Darwin made in the book as evidence of his interest in and familiarity with Erasmus Darwin’s ideas on the change over time across species. This finding contradicts previous statements reporting only two annotations, which suggested he had little to no interest in the book. This paper purposes that Charles Darwin’s annotations indicate his and his grandfather’s shared interest in the competition for reproduction (sexual selection) and point to a more remarkable resemblance between Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature and Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) rather than to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection (The Origin of Species), to which Erasmus’s ideas are more often compared.

Darwin translated into Turkish with a Marxist agenda: a sociological inquiry into the agents of translation

ABSTRACT This paper studies the agents of translation who introduced Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) into Turkish more than one hundred years after their original publication in England. Elaborating on the agents’ motives for translating and publishing Darwin’s works in the Turkish (leftist) publication field, the study considers translator Öner Ünalan (1935–2011) and publisher Muzaffer İlhan Erdost (1932–2020), within the framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of action. The findings of the study epitomize the ‘two-way relationship’ between the habituses of the agents of translation and the social dynamics of the field(s) in which they operate. The article demonstrates that Ünalan and Erdost’s translatorial interest in Darwin’s works was closely linked to the strong influence of Marxism on their social dispositions and to the dynamics of the Turkish publication field between the 1960s and 1980s. As a result, Ünalan and Erdost’s Darwin translations contributed to an increase in the scientific and social distinction of both the Marxist movement and the Turkish leftist publication field during a period of growing tension between right – and left-wing ideologies in Turkey.

Evolution, Adam, and the Catholic Church

Evolution, Adam, and the Catholic Church Kenneth W. Kemp (bio) Key Words Science and Theology, Evolution and Theology, Paleoanthropology, Adam and Eve, Monogenesis, Human Exceptionalism, Human Antiquity, Human Origins, Genesis We read in our central theological texts—in Genesis and in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, in the decrees of the Council of Trent and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church—references to Adam. We see him depicted on the walls and windows of our churches. Was he a historically real person, genealogically the father of us all? Or is he the father of us all only in the way that George Washington was the father of his country? Or is he not even a real person at all, but only a literary character, like Gilgamesh or the Good Samaritan? I will address three questions connected to the idea of a historically real Adam. The first is the question of whether the human race evolved from a prehuman species—the question of Adam and his ancestors. This is, of course, a general question about anthropogenesis, one that will arise no matter what position one takes about Adam. The second is the question of whether there was a single human couple who were the ancestors of all other human beings who ever lived—the question of Adam and his cousins. The third is the question of whether we can say anything about when Adam lived—the question of Adam and the cavemen. The term “cavemen” is, of course, not a scientifically approved taxon and I am not really focused precisely on cave-dwellers, but on what scientists used to call hominids, and at the moment are [End Page 22] calling hominins—those of our ancestors, and their relatives, who are not also ancestors of the great apes. These three questions—the questions of animal ancestry, of singularity, and of antiquity—are all mixed questions, answers to which will have to draw on, and draw together, the conclusions of science, philosophy, and theology. I. Adam And his Ancestors, or, The Question of Animal Ancestry Where did Adam and Eve come from? A. The Scientific Extension of Common Ancestry to Man The general idea that biological species originate by descent with modification from earlier species, Darwin pointed out in his work On the Origin of Species in 1859, explains a wide array of facts: the distribution of plants and animals in time and space (paleontology and bio-geography), the morphological and embryological similarities found in superficially quite different species (e.g., the structural similarity of bat wings and whale flippers), and the fact that biological species, unlike, say, chemical elements, can be neatly classified as groups within groups. Does this theory also explain the origin of the human race? Darwin argued that it does. He recognized, of course, that the defense of his thesis would be a two-part task, and he discussed, in The Descent of Man, both bodily structure and mental faculties.1 Following his example, I will address the two points of comparison separately. Darwin began with the human body and cited, as evidence for animal ancestry, “three great classes of facts”: “That man and all other vertebrate animals have been constructed on the same general model, [that] they pass through the same early stages of development, and [that] they retain certain rudiments in common.”2 Subsequent research has only added to the evidence cited by Darwin. When Darwin wrote of a “general model” shared by various species of living things, he was referring to morphology, such as the skeletal similarities just noted. More recent research has revealed the same pattern of similarity at the biochemical level. The protein cytochrome-C is [End Page 23] found in both animals and in plants. Differences in detail increase as one goes from man to monkey to mackerel to moth to marigold. And similarly for chromosomes. Most primates have twenty-four pairs. Although humans have only twenty-three, there is strong evidence that human chromosome-2 is the product of the fusion of two separate primate chromosomal pairs. The antievolutionist objection that common features merely show evidence of a common designer who used...

Expressivism, Pluralism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”

Expressivism, Pluralism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”

Evolution, “Pseudo-science,” and Satire: Edith Wharton’s “The Descent of Man”

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

The Descent of Man by C.R. Darwin. A continuous debate since 1871

Il contributo fa parte degli Atti "1871: Firenze capitale...dell'Antropologia Italiana", redatti a seguito della giornata di celebrazioni dei 150 anni dalla fondazione della Società Italiana di Antropologia e Etnologia - Firenze, 15 Febbraio 2022

Perceptions of War in a Darwinian Perspective

Representations of war cannot be separated from moral perceptions of human conflicts. Whether war is deemed a normal phenomenon for human nature ‒ “wars have always existed and will always take place” ‒ or on the contrary is regarded as the unleashing of outrageous atrocities that could be avoided, has implications on how conflicts are remembered and commemorated. After the epoch-making publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), and the consequential flood of ill-advised books and articles which constructed what has been termed “social Darwinism”, war was perceived as the legitimate manifestation of “the survival of the fittest” both for nations and individuals. The reason for wars could be found in evolutionary biology (Crook, 1994). Yet other writers chose to read peace into Darwin’s writings, and pointed to the notions of solidarity and philanthropy present in such publications as Descent of Man (1871). Reassessing Darwinism on the basis of the “reversionary effect of evolution” (Tort, 1983) leads to delegitimizing war time violence through the deconstruction of socio-biological arguments and gives a case for such anti-warmongering war memorials as Gentioux-Pigerolles in France which reads ‘Cursed be War!’

Culture–gene co-evolution: Darwin’s other theory comes into view

Abstract The concept of ‘natural selection’, as proposed in The Origin of Species (published in 1859), refers to the better known of Charles Darwin’s two distinct theories of evolution. Darwin’s other theory was originally associated with his predecessor, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. (Darwin used the shorthand phrase, the ‘use and disuse of parts’, to characterize this alternative theory.) Lamarck’s theory was rejected (and even mocked) by many 20th century theorists, who instead adopted a gene-centred, one-way, bottom-up model of evolutionary change, called the modern synthesis. (It has also been termed neo-Darwinism.) Darwin was more receptive to Lamarck’s approach, and in his second great work, The Descent of Man (published in 1874), he applied this Lamarckian theory particularly to human evolution. He ascribed our remarkable evolutionary success to our behaviour: social cooperation, innovation (and tools), morality and cumulative culture. Neo-Darwinists called it Darwin’s biggest mistake. However, an ever-increasing body of evidence, inclusive of cultural phenomena in many other species, suggests that it was, in fact, their mistake. Often called gene–culture co-evolution theory, the reverse order (as used here) might be a better way of characterizing the underlying causal dynamics. The ‘purposeful’ behaviour (teleonomy) of living systems has exerted a major influence on the trajectory of biological evolution.

Darwin Versus Wallace: Esthetic Evolution and Preferential Mate Choice.

Dominant theorizing and research surrounding the operation of intersexual selection in evolutionary psychology tends to be guided by an adaptationist framework and aligned with models of sexual selection involving direct benefits (e.g., parental care) and indirect “good gene” and condition-dependent benefits. In this way, evolutionary psychologists more often espouse Alfred Russel Wallaces’ utilitarian viewpoint that traits become attractive because they honestly signal vigor and vitality, which gives priority to natural selection. In doing so, Darwin’s esthetic perspective originally articulated in The Descent of Man and alternative models of sexual selection (e.g., Fisherian runaway), are given less consideration. This is despite some informative reviews on the topic in evolutionary psychology. In the current conceptual analysis, we discuss the potential of Prum’s Lande-Kirkpatrick (LK) null model of sexual selection to help make sense of some of the mixed evidence regarding the links between attractive traits and purported markers of phenotypic and genetic condition. We then consider how the implications of the LK null model can help to shift theoretical assumptions and guide future work in evolutionary psychology on intersexual selection.

Broca’s legacy: fame not shame

I read the article ‘Paul Broca: from fame to shame?’ with great interest.1 Its balanced presentation compels the readership to weigh in on one view or the other—especially since the title ends in a question mark! Broca, born and raised in the Bordeaux region of France, was unquestionably one of the great clinical neuroanatomists of the 19th century. This recognition led to naming a neuroscience building at the University of Bordeaux after him; this decision is now questioned because of his beliefs in physical anthropology.1 The Broca example is more useful to study if we begin by placing his ideas into the context of his time. Before race became ‘a baseless social construct,’1 intellectual elite and religious scholars had already been discussing the origin of ‘mankind’ (note, the use of the currently preferred term ‘humankind’ would be anachronistic) for centuries. Charles Darwin’s Origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life was published in 1859 and his second major work on evolution, The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, was published in 1871. These works, and their spirited discussion among religious and secular scholars, quickly and radically changed thoughts about mankind’s origin. These discussions in Paris were further complicated by an ongoing battle between secular savants and the Roman Catholic Church; as the 19th century progressed, French society became progressively more secular.2,3 Contemporary scholars, who were not strictly wedded to a literal interpretation of creationism, were split between two opposing, but not directly testable, theories: monogenism (humanity had a single origin) and polygenism (human races are of different origins). Monogenism was compatible with scientific variations on creationism that were proliferating; polygenism was incompatible and almost uniformly embraced by secular French scholars by the 1820s. Atheist members of the lay public favoured polygenism because it contradicted the biblical account of human creation and because it appeared more scientific. It should be remembered that Broca had founded a society of ‘freethinkers’ (at the time, essentially a synonym for atheists) in Paris in 1848 and the Société d’anthropologie de Paris in 1859, the year Darwin published Origin of species.2,3

A Conversation with Darwin on Man Revisited: 150 Years to The Descent of Man.

A Conversation with Darwin on Man Revisited: 150 Years to The Descent of Man.

Darwin’s and Wallace’s Fascinations With Oversized Morphology and the Question of Developmental Plasticity

AbstractDarwin in his book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, described his fascination with a male Chiasognathus grantii Stephens (Coreptera, Lucanidae), a stag beetle species with enormous mandibles. Wallace in his book, The Malay Archipelago, recorded his enchantment with a male Euchirus longimanus L. (Coreptera, Scarabaeoidae), a ‘chafer’ species with ‘immense fore-arms’ (tibia or femora). These oversized traits have been interpreted as the results of allometry through sexual selection. Both Darwin and Wallace were aware that there was a large variation in these oversized traits intraspecifically, leading to the question of the role of variability in species-level evolution. To answer this question, I studied the variation in developmental plasticity (DP; the individual ability to react to external environment) of the stag beetles, which shows a great variation in external morphology. These observations indicated that 1) DP (measured in body length) is independent of allometry of the mandibles, 2) allometry of the mandibles had been ingrained in most members of the Family before the differentiation of DP took place, 3) DP is indirectly related to sexual selection through elongated mandibles that are used for fighting or securing the mate, as evidenced by the close correlation of DP with the mandible length, and 4) the enormous mandibles of stag beetles are the product of enlarged DP through allometry and sexual selection. From these results, I add enhanced DP as an independent element in the evolution of seemingly oversized traits seen in many beetle species.

Darwin and the French: The species question and ‘man’ in Oceania

Reading Darwin with a strong sense of déjà vu, French scholars often give him a long French intellectual genealogy. So the physical anthropologist Topinard averred in 1876 that ‘transformism is of French origin … the honour is entirely due to M. Lamarck’ and defined Darwinism as ‘Natural selection through the struggle for existence, applied to Lamarck's transformism’. Using detailed exegesis, this article traces antecedents, intersections, rebuttals, appropriations, shifts, and mutual misunderstandings in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transmutationist thinking in France and Britain. With specific reference to unstable concepts of evolution and species, the article samples French and francophone reception and interpretation of Darwin's writings and his responses to critics or supporters. Relative to ideas of race or civilization, human unity or diversity, and the interplay of empirical or deductive logic, I compare Darwin's work with that of the French physical anthropologist Broca in debates on racial ranking, extinction, and the ‘descent of man’, particularly in Australia and Oceania more widely. I conclude that, notwithstanding Darwin's personal humanitarian values, his science of man made important contributions to the theoretical underpinnings of the science of race, or raciology, which had emerged and developed mainly in France in the half century after 1800.

Evolution by Sexual Selection

Charles Darwin published his second book “Sexual selection and the descent of man” in 1871 150 years ago, to try to explain, amongst other things, the evolution of the peacock’s train, something that he famously thought was problematic for his theory of evolution by natural selection. He proposed that the peacock’s train had evolved because females preferred to mate with males with more elaborate trains. This idea was very controversial at the time and it wasn’t until 1991 that a manuscript testing Darwin’s hypothesis was published. The idea that a character could arise as a result of a female preference is still controversial. Some argue that there is no need to distinguish sexual from natural selection and that natural selection can adequately explain the evolution of extravagant characteristics that are characteristic of sexually selected species. Here, I outline the reasons why I think that this is not the case and that Darwin was right to distinguish sexual selection as a distinct process. I present a simple verbal and mathematical model to expound the view that sexual selection is profoundly different from natural selection because, uniquely, it can simultaneously promote and maintain the genetic variation which fuels evolutionary change. Viewed in this way, sexual selection can help resolve other evolutionary conundrums, such as the evolution of sexual reproduction, that are characterised by having impossibly large costs and no obvious immediate benefits and which have baffled evolutionary biologists for a very long time. If sexual selection does indeed facilitate rapid adaptation to a changing environment as I have outlined, then it is very important that we understand the fundamentals of adaptive mate choice and guard against any disruption to this natural process.

Darwin’s “Beautiful”: Coadaptation as a Problem in Evolutionary Aesthetics

Abstract Where does our sense of beauty come from? Traditional interest in evolutionary aesthetics has proceeded by an almost exclusive focus on Darwin’s Descent of Man, which theorizes the origin of the human aesthetic sense as an instrumental feature of sexual desire. But what if the Descent only gives us half of the story? I argue that we have overlooked a key element in Darwin’s aesthetics that is more readily available in On the Origin of Species, a form of aesthetic experience he associates with “cultivated men.” Instead of an explicit scientific theory of aesthetic pleasure, the Origin provides evidence of this “cultivated” beauty as a narrative practice of aesthetic judgment with specific reference to an evolutionary phenomenon Darwin calls “coadaptation.” I conclude by addressing the demands this new evidence makes on any valid understanding of evolutionary aesthetics and suggest a preliminary model of aesthetic education that could facilitate collaborative dialogue in an increasingly recalcitrant two-cultures debate.