The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

Beschreibung

What Darwin Left Out of the Origin. First edition, first issue of the book in which Darwin finally gave his public account of two ideas he had withheld from the Origin of Species: the descent of Homo sapiens from pre-existing forms, and - his more original and more contested contribution - the mechanism of sexual selection. The Origin had deliberately excluded man from its argument ("light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history"), and had mentioned sexual selection only briefly, as a special case within natural selection. Twelve years later, with the evolutionary argument secured in the scientific literature and the public polemics largely past, Darwin set out the two positions he had kept in reserve. The first made him famous; the second, neglected for a century, is now recognised as one of the most powerful explanatory frameworks in evolutionary biology. The twelve-year delay was not accidental. Darwin had been collecting notes on human descent since the Beagle years of the 1830s, but had withheld them for strategic reasons. He had written to Wallace in December 1857 that he would avoid the subject of man as surrounded by too many prejudices, even while admitting that it was the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist. By 1871 the climate had changed. Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863) had done much of the defensive work; Lyell's Antiquity of Man (1863) had established deep human prehistory; and Haeckel's Generelle Morphologie (1866) had pushed the evolutionary argument onto the Continent and drawn the first explicit phylogenies of the human line. The Descent therefore arrived not as an opening salvo but as the master's own statement, delivered at a moment when the main resistance had already been absorbed. The storm that had greeted the Origin did not repeat itself in 1871; Darwin wrote to a friend that he was surprised to find everyone talking about the book without being shocked, and took this as a measure of the increasing liberality of the age. The first volume opens with a page that would prove diagnostic. On page 2, in the introduction, Darwin refers to the principle of gradual evolution - the first appearance of the word evolution in any of his published works, a year before its appearance in the sixth edition of the Origin. The word had hitherto belonged to embryology and to Herbert Spencer; Darwin had avoided it in the Origin in favour of descent with modification and natural selection, partly because evolution still carried its older sense of the unfolding of a preformed germ, and partly because Spencer's usage had given it metaphysical baggage Darwin preferred not to inherit. That he now allowed the word onto his own page marks a small but real shift in nomenclature: from 1871 forward, the subject would be called evolution, and the Descent is where Darwin formally joined the convention he had helped to make inevitable. The first volume and the opening chapters of the second are devoted to the argument for the descent of man from a pre-existing form. The strategy is cumulative: no single piece of evidence is decisive, but each addition narrows the space of alternative explanations. Darwin begins with the homologies of bodily structure between man and the other mammals - the bones of the hand, the arrangement of the viscera, the musculature - arguing that these resemblances are inexplicable except as the signature of common descent. He proceeds to embryonic development, where he reproduces the famous side-by-side comparison of a human embryo with that of a dog (the Ecker-Bischoff figure, Vol. I p. 15), arguing that in their early stages the two are practically indistinguishable, and that embryology therefore preserves, in miniature, the shared ancestry of the vertebrate body plan. He turns to rudimentary organs - the vermiform appendix, the musculus auricularis, the coccyx, the tubercle on the outer edge of the ear - as fossil evidence carried in the living body, struc.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 6679

Verkäufer kontaktieren

Diesen Artikel melden

Bibliografische Details

Titel

The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

Verlag

John Murray, London

Erscheinungsjahr

1874

Auflage

Second edition.

Verkäuferkataloge

• Chemistry, Medicine, Biology