The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
Charles Darwin, 1871
Why do humans have useless ear muscles, a conscience and a sense of beauty? Charles Darwin gathered the evidence that man descended from an ancient animal ancestor by the same laws as every other living thing. You will learn what our mind has in common with the mind of a monkey or a dog, how conscience grows out of social instincts, and why a bird has splendid feathers that get in the way of its life. And you will see where Darwin himself went wrong.
Who it is for
For anyone who wants to understand where we came from and why we have so much in common with animals, from the build of the ear to conscience.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Notes he did not want to publish
For many years Charles Darwin collected notes on the origin of man and was firmly resolved not to publish them. He thought he would only add to the prejudice against his views. In On the Origin of Species he allowed himself a single sentence: this work will throw light on the origin of man and his history.
Then a lot changed. A well-known naturalist said from the platform in Geneva that in Europe nobody any longer dared to defend the separate creation of each species. Most young scientists had accepted evolution. So Darwin gathered his notes into a book to test whether his conclusions fit one particular species: ourselves.
He asked three questions. Did man, like every other creature, descend from some earlier form? How exactly did it happen? And what is the value of the differences between the so-called races? Many insisted that the answer could never be found. Darwin replied that it is usually those who know little who speak so confidently.
Ahead of us are a little point on the human ear, monkeys that cannot resist peeping into a bag with a snake in it, a swallow that abandoned her nestlings, and a pheasant with feathers painted like a picture. The book's main idea, our kinship with all living things, has stood the test of time. But the book also holds its era's views of peoples and of women, which science long ago abandoned. We will not hide them, and we will not pass them off as truth either: where Darwin went wrong, we will say so plainly.
The little point on the ear
The sculptor Thomas Woolner was modelling a figure of Puck and gave him pointed ears. This led him to examine the ears of various monkeys, and then the ears of people more closely than before. And he noticed in many men and women a small blunt point on the inward-folded rim of the ear. It is there from birth, sometimes on one ear only. Darwin found the same in a spider-monkey at the London Zoo, and a colleague saw it in a chimpanzee. In Darwin's view, it is what is left of the tip of an ear that was once upright and pointed.
Darwin calls such an organ a rudiment. It is there but works hardly at all or not at all. Many animals move their ears, and all that humans have left of this is a few muscles that only a few people can control. Darwin was told of a French family: its head, as a young man, could pitch several heavy books off his head by moving his scalp alone, and won wagers that way. His father, uncle, grandfather and three children had the same skill. And a distant relative, from a branch that had split off eight generations earlier, when asked, showed the same trick on the spot.
The list is long. In the koala the caecum is more than three times as long as the whole body, while in humans it is short, and all that remains of its shortened part is the appendix: useless, and sometimes even deadly if hard seeds get into it. In an early embryo the coccyx sticks out freely, like a tail. And a human embryo at an early stage can hardly be told apart from the embryo of a dog.
Darwin asks a simple question: why all this, if man was created separately? Then rudiments would be, in his words, a mere snare laid to entrap our judgment. But if we had animal ancestors, what is useless in the body at once makes sense: these are the remains of organs that worked in them.
What follows is Livria's suggestion for putting this into practice. Run your finger down the rim of your ear from top to bottom. If you feel a small bump, you are holding the very witness Darwin called on.
About the author
Charles Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist, creator of the theory of evolution by natural selection. The Descent of Man came out in 1871, twelve years after On the Origin of Species, and in 1874 Darwin published a second, revised edition.
All books by this author: Charles Darwin
Terms from the book
- Beagle
- natural selection
- sexual selection
- rudiment: An organ that is present in the body but works hardly at all or not at all. For example, the muscles with which most people cannot move their ears.
- embryo: A developing young creature at an early stage, still inside the egg or in the mother's womb.
- coccyx: A few fused vertebrae at the very bottom of the human spine. Darwin saw in it the remains of a tail.
- Woolner: Thomas Woolner (1825–1892), English sculptor and poet. He told Darwin about a small point on the rim of the human ear.
- Brehm: Alfred Brehm (1829–1884), German zoologist and traveller, author of the many-volume Life of Animals. Darwin often cites his observations of monkeys.
- retriever: A hunting dog trained to bring back shot game whole and undamaged.
- Humboldt: Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), German naturalist and traveller, explorer of South America.
- Müller: Max Müller (1823–1900), linguist and scholar of Sanskrit, professor at Oxford. He argued with Darwin about the origin of language.
- Argus: A large pheasant from the forests of South-East Asia. The male has huge wing feathers covered in a pattern of “eyes”.
- bower-birds: Australian birds. The males build bowers of twigs on the ground and decorate them with bright objects to attract a female.
- Batokas: A people of southern Africa described by the traveller David Livingstone.
- Mungo Park: Mungo Park (1771–1806), Scottish traveller, explorer of West Africa and the river Niger.
- Kalmucks: A people of Mongol origin who roamed the steppes by the Volga and the Caspian Sea.
All terms
Similar books
- The Genesis Machine, Amy Webb, Andrew Hessel
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Nir Eyal
- The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen
- The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
- Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark
- On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
- Designing the Future, Jacque Fresco
- Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett, Dave Evans
Read in Livria
