Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection

Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection

Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection

Evelleen Richards

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43690-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43706-4 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437064.001.0001

Published with support of the Susan E. Abrams Fund

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Richards, Evelleen, author.

Title: Darwin and the making of sexual selection / Evelleen Richards.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016036765 | ISBN 9780226436906 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226437064 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882. | Sexual selection—History.

Classification: LCC QH31.D2 R45 2017 | DDC 576.8/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036765

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of my mother,

who saw to it that I got the education she was denied

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE / An Awful Stretcher

Part I: Beauty, Brotherhood, and Breeding: The Origins of Sexual Selection

ONE / The Ugly Brother

TWO / Good Wives

THREE / Bliss Botanic and Cocks Heroic: Two Darwins in the Temple of Nature

FOUR / Beauty Cuts the Knot

FIVE / Reading the Face of Race

SIX / Good Breeding: The Art of Mating

SEVEN / Better Than a Dog Anyhow

EIGHT / Flirting with Fashion

NINE / Development Matters

Part II: For Beauty’s Sake: The Making of Sexual Selection

TEN / Critical Years: From Pigeons to People

ELEVEN / Putting Female Choice in (Proper) Place

TWELVE / The Battle for Beauty: Wallace versus Darwin

THIRTEEN / Writing the Descent: From Bird’s-Eye View to Masterful Breeder

FOURTEEN / The Post-Descent Years: Sexual Selection in Crisis, Female Choice at Large

EPILOGUE / Last Words

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Prologue: Peacock feather from the Descent

1.1  Fuegian by Conrad Martin

1.2  Jemmy Button and wife

2.1  Emma Darwin

2.2  Darwin’s study

3.1  The fertile goddess of nature, frontispiece to Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature

4.1  Venus and Cupid with a Lute-Player by Titian, 1560

4.2  The Voyage of the Sable Venus, from Angola to the West Indies

4.3  Love and Beauty: Sartjee, the Hottentot Venus

5.1  From Ape to Apollo

5.2  Chimpanzee disappointed and sulky

6.1  Fancy pigeons

6.2  Short-faced English Tumbler

6.3  Darwin’s bird’s-eye view

7.1  Bell’s image of devotion and dog in a humble and affectionate frame of mind

7.2  Walker’s three species of facial beauty

7.3  A vital beauty

7.4  A woman whose locomotive system has been developed at the expense of her vital system.

7.5  Walker’s law of selection

8.1  The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt, 1851–53

8.2  The Girl of the Period! Or, Painted by a Prurient Prude

8.3  Crinoline Convenient Sometimes

8.4  The Fast Smoking Girl of the Period

8.5  I would I were a bird

8.6  Mr. Punch’s Designs after Nature

8.7  Australian spotted bowerbird

9.1  Darwin and son William

9.2  Embryos from Descent 1871

9.3  The principle of divergence

10.1  Crystal Palace—Some Varieties of the Human Race

10.2  Woodcuts from Types of Mankind

10.3  Knox and the performing Bushmen

10.4  Darwin’s notes on Knox’s Races of Men

11.1  The recovered pages from Darwin’s big book

11.2  Hummingbirds

11.3  A woman contemptuously says no

12.1  Miss Mill Joins the Ladies

12.2  Diagram of the two male forms of Tanais

12.3  Natives of Aru Shooting the Great Bird of Paradise

13.1  Polish fowl and modish woman’s hat

13.2  Beauty of monkeys

13.3  Argus pheasant feathers

13.4  Australian Aboriginal Marriage Ceremony

13.5  Head of a New Zealander and Head of a male Mandrill

14.1  A Logical Refutation of Mr. Darwin’s Theory

14.2  That Troubles Our Monkey Again

14.3  Darwin’s letter to Bradlaugh

Epilogue: Peacock feather from the Descent

Abbreviations

Collections are listed below, as well as abbreviations for works that are cited frequently in the notes. See the bibliography for publication details of the titles below and in the notes.

Acknowledgments

This book has been almost as long in the making as sexual selection and has almost as checkered a history. Over the years I have accumulated many debts of gratitude, some too deep to be acknowledged adequately here.

My earliest debt must be to my parents, great readers both, who encouraged a love of books and kept a battered old copy of The Descent of Man (I have it still) in the family bookcase. I’d like to say it excited an early interest in sexual selection, but though my doctoral thesis was in the history of evolutionary theory, that specific impetus did not come until much later, when I became involved in setting up the first women’s studies course at the University of Wollongong. I then published my first paper in the area, Darwin and the Descent of Woman (1983). I revisited the field periodically, but family and my major research commitment to the sociology of clinical trials preoccupied me. When I eventually returned to matters Darwinian, it was with the idea of a more detailed examination of Darwin and the woman question. As I read and wrote, this focus came to seem too constricting, and the project expanded ambitiously into a history of the making of sexual selection. Along the long and tortuous road of research and writing, I have been encouraged and assisted by many companions and colleagues.

First and foremost, I must thank Adrian Desmond. It was he who initially inspired the book, gave unstintingly of his encyclopedic knowledge and experience, egged me on when I flagged, read and commented on early drafts of chapters, and generously encouraged the ways in which the work unfolded, even when it ran counter to his own interpretations. I can only hope, in emulation of my celebrated subject, that the finished product will not quite kill me in [his] good estimation. I am also extremely grateful to James Secord for unfailing intellectual, professional, and personal support. Jim discussed critical issues, pointed me toward vital sources, and found time in his overcrowded schedule to read through the whole manuscript; his perceptive comments and advice helped shape its final structure. I owe special thanks to Jon Hodge, who in long-distance telephone calls and e-mails dissected various aspects of draft chapters, shared his vast knowledge of things Darwinian, sharpened my understanding, and saved me from several egregious blunders. Particularly helpful and insightful comments on the entire manuscript were also provided by John Schuster and by referees for the University of Chicago Press. Gowan Dawson, Paul White, and Gregory Radick looked critically over various chapters, which are much improved as a result. Others who offered suggestions and contributed advice and references include Harry Allen, Ruth Barton, Peter Bowler, Janet Browne, Roderick Buchanan, John Docker, James Endersby, Mario di Gregorio, Ian Hesketh, David Kohn, Bernard Lightman, James Moore, Jane Munro, James Paradis, Diane Paul, Anne Secord, and John van Wyhe. At a critical stage, Gillian Fuller came to the rescue with a stern subedit and some much-needed suggestions for pruning. The responsibility for what remains is mine.

I have benefited considerably from invitations to present my ideas at conferences and seminars. These include the Dyason Memorial Lecture at the Annual Conference of Australasian Association for History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science, 2015; the Darwin 2009 Festival, University of Cambridge; and the From Generation to Reproduction Seminar Series, University of Cambridge, 2007. Early drafts of chapters 1 and 4 underwent lively criticism at two workshop sessions under the auspices of the Past versus Present Project of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group in 2007.

A number of institutions gave crucial support. In its very earliest incarnations, the project was supported by two Australian Research Council grants that enabled international travel and leave for research. The Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney has been a stimulating and supportive place to pursue research and to debate related issues with staff and students. I wish especially to thank Rachel Ankeny, Paul Griffiths, Ofer Gal, Hans Pols, and Stephen Gaukroger for helpful comments and searching questions. Over the years, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge has been a generous foster home for research and collegial interaction and dialogue.

Many libraries and archival collections have provided material and assistance over the course of the project. The two collections I have relied on most and their always helpful staff require particular thanks: the University of Sydney Library, Rare Books and Special Collections; and, above all, Cambridge University Library with its unrivaled collection of Darwin manuscript material, correspondence, annotated books, journal articles and pamphlets. I owe special thanks to the editors of the Darwin Correspondence Project, especially Shelley Innes, Alison Pearn, and Paul White, who on occasion shared morning tea, ungrudgingly lent their expertise to deciphering Darwin’s more cryptic jottings, and helped access vital transcriptions and illustrative material. I owe thanks also to Nick Gill, who obligingly chased up and explained some obscure marginalia.

I would like also to thank staff of the British Library; the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London; the Mitchell Library and the State Library of New South Wales; the Australian National Library; and the University of New South Wales Library. I am very grateful to those libraries and archives that allowed access to unpublished manuscript material in their possession; notably the Bradlaugh Papers in the Bishopsgate Institute; the Huxley Papers in Archives, Imperial College London; the Richard Owen Papers and Alfred Russel Wallace Family Papers in the Natural History Museum, London; and the Ethnological Society of London minutes and related material, Archives, Royal Anthropological Institute, London.

For their supply of and permission to use illustrative images, I am indebted to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, to the Tate Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, London, and to the Wellcome Library, London. My warmest thanks go to my daughter Morgan Richards, who, with her partner Ili Barré, organized and Photoshopped the illustrations.

My copyeditor, Johanna Rosenbohm, disentangled nightmares of bibliographical inconsistencies and errors with unflagging grace and expertise. Marta Steele compiled a thorough, intelligent, and user-friendly index. The University of Chicago Press has exhibited great patience in waiting for this book, and I wish to thank all involved—notably Karen Merikangas Darling for editorial support, and Jenni Fry, Evan White, and Yvonne Zipter, who saw it through production. My special thanks go to the late Susan Abrams for her belief in the project and inspirational guidance through its initial phase. I am especially pleased to acknowledge support from the fund established in her name: the Susan Elizabeth Abrams Fund in History of Science.

My greatest debt is to Warwick and the family, who know far more about the history of sexual selection than they ever thought necessary.

Finally, I should like to thank Charles Robert Darwin. It has been an absorbing experience and an education to get to know him a little. I shall miss the man who, with all the contingent constraints of his time and place—the social attitudes and cultural values that I have been so committed to uncovering and interrogating—gave us the theory of sexual selection. Without him, this book could never have been written.

Prologue

An Awful Stretcher

Charles Darwin’s concept of natural selection has been endlessly written about; his secondary principle of sexual selection has received far less historical attention. Its sources and the conceptual pathways to its formulation remain largely unknown or misunderstood. The extraordinarily wide range of Darwin’s investigations and the depth of his readings in this connection have never been explored.

Yet sexual selection (the struggle for mates) was of considerable strategic importance to Darwin’s theory of evolution. It explained what natural selection (the struggle for existence) could not; and it offered a naturalistic, as opposed to divine, account of beauty and its perception. It was thus vital to the defense of evolution against the established theory of special creation.

In sexually reproducing species, there are often striking differences in what are termed secondary sexual characteristics. These species are called sexually dimorphic, and their differences may be divided into two basic categories: (1) those that include structures (such as horns or spurs) with which males fight among themselves, and (2) those that include ornamental structures and behaviors (fanned tails, inflatable bladders, elaborate or colorful plumage, songs, dances and so on) exhibited (usually but not always by males) during courtship.

In the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin explained the evolution of such differences through the action of sexual selection. He recognized two aspects of the sexual struggle, corresponding to the above categories: male combat for possession of the females; and a more peaceful contest, female choice, whereby males compete with one another by means of charms (brilliance of plumage, song, etc.) in their wooing of the female during courtship. Sexual selection shored up natural selection in two ways: female choice accounted for the persistence of seemingly useless or disadvantageous ornamental characteristics (such as the bright plumage of many male birds that renders them more conspicuous to predators) that could not be explained in functional survival terms; and male combat not only explained the development of specialized weapons (spurs or horns), but also enhanced the action of natural selection by ensuring that the fittest males were reproduced.¹ However, in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), sexual selection took on a much wider role. There, Darwin’s exhaustive elaboration of sexual selection throughout the animal kingdom (fully two-thirds of the work) was directed to substantiating his view that human racial and sexual differences—not just physical differences, but certain mental and moral differences—had evolved primarily through the action of sexual selection.

It was the culmination of a lifetime of intellectual effort and commitment, a tremendous job, as Darwin described it, long and hard in the making.² Yet sexual selection never quite made it. Darwin constantly was forced to contest its validity with a great array of critics, and with his death in 1882, sexual selection went into abeyance, not to be revived until late in the twentieth century. Today it remains a controversial theory, subject to ongoing dispute and reinterpretation. However it may be read, though, sexual selection—for those who concern themselves with it—still means Darwin. And what Darwin meant still matters. He lives on in many contradictory (and some quite startling) guises in current narratives, justifications, or critiques of sexual selection.³

This book aims to resolve these contradictions. It examines the man, rather than the myth, and the social as well as the intellectual roots of his theory building. The history of sexual selection was never one of straightforward, unadulterated science, but from its beginnings was intertwined with cultural and social beliefs and shaped by professional and institutional power plays and the larger issues of the day. It is a history that reaches from the last decades of the eighteenth century to those of the nineteenth, from provincial England to the ends of the earth and back again, and through a period of extraordinary social and scientific transformation. It involved numerous narrative strands and characters, many of them little known in the history of evolutionary science, but its central actor was always Darwin. It was Darwin who worked to pull these strands together, to bind them into a tightly woven complex of theory, analogy, and practice, to make sexual selection "altogether [his] own subject."⁴

This phrase, with its recognition of Darwin’s jealously guarded ownership of sexual selection, comes from Alfred Russel Wallace. It was Wallace, of course, who had in one week in 1858, as a struggling young naturalist and collector in the Malay Archipelago, put together the theory of evolution by natural selection and posted it off to a shattered Darwin, who had been obsessively honing the theory for some twenty years. In Wallace’s absence, Darwin’s leading allies, the geologist Sir Charles Lyell and botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, famously settled the vital issue of priority by arranging the joint reading of extracts from Darwin’s earlier writings on natural selection and Wallace’s manuscript to the Linnean Society. While Darwin rushed into print and lasting fame with the Origin, Wallace modestly disclaimed ownership, deferring to Mr. Darwin’s celebrated theory of natural selection. But in the 1870s, to Darwin’s great chagrin, the coauthor of natural selection emerged as the most insistent and damaging critic of sexual selection, determined to rid natural selection of this abnormal excrescence.⁵

It all began in late May 1864, when Darwin sat down in the comfort of his study in Down House to pen a letter to Wallace, now returned to England from Borneo. It was Darwin’s benign intention to assure the younger naturalist that natural selection was just as much your theory as mine, and to praise his recently published Man paper.⁶ Darwin’s letter, however, was not so much about their joint progeny, natural selection, as about Darwin’s own theory of sexual selection. It marked the beginnings of their increasing theoretical estrangement. And it was Wallace’s paper on man that first set the cat among the pigeons—more or less literally, as matters unfolded.

As early as 1857, Wallace had written to ask Darwin whether he would discuss ‘man’ in his forthcoming book on species. Darwin (who at one time had intended to do just that, but had stepped back from the abyss) replied that he would avoid [the] whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices. The dangerous subject was accordingly excised from the Origin, save for the one well-known sentence: Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. Still, Darwin could not resist hinting in the Origin that he had the solution to another highly contentious and related problem, the differences between the races of man, which are so strongly marked. These had evolved through sexual selection of a particular kind, but, he cautioned, without here entering on copious details my reasoning would appear frivolous.⁷

Now, five years down the track, Darwin, having kept even his closest confidants, Lyell and Hooker, in the dark, divulged his frivolous reasoning to the junior coauthor of natural selection. Wallace seemed fearlessly inclined to go the whole orang in taking on the issue of human evolution, risking reputation and the respectability so valued by the circumspect and gentlemanly Darwin.⁸ As an added inducement, Darwin went so far as to offer Wallace his notes on the subject:

I suspect that a sort of sexual selection has been the most powerful means of changing the races of man. I can shew that the diff[erent] races have a widely diff[erent] standard of beauty. Among savages the most powerful men will have the pick of the women & they will generally leave the most descendants.

I have collected a few notes on man but I do not suppose I shall ever use them. Do you intend to follow out your views, & if so would you like at some future time to have my few references & notes? . . . 

[PS] Our aristocracy is handsomer (more hideous according to a Chinese or Negro) than middle classes from pick of women.⁹

Whatever Darwin’s hopes of Wallace were, they were dashed by return of post. Wallace had his own views on natural selection in human evolution, and it seemed on closer inspection that they were not entirely compatible with Darwin’s. As far as sexual selection went in the formation of the different races, Wallace (who, unlike Darwin, had actually lived among indigenous peoples in South America and the East Indies) was skeptical of its effects: In the very lowest tribes there is rarely much polygamy & women are more or less a matter of purchase—There is also little difference of social condition & I think it rarely happens that any healthy & un-deformed man remains without wife and children. As for Darwin’s foray into the class effects of sexual selection, Wallace, true to his egalitarian values, disputed the often repeated assertion of the greater beauty of the aristocracy. Mere physical beauty . . . is quite as frequent in one class of society as the other. In any case, the cash-strapped Wallace was engaged in writing up the Narrative of my travels for popular sale. He might possibly some day go a little more into this subject (of ‘Man’) & if I do will accept the kind offer of your notes.¹⁰

Darwin was seriously affronted by this casual dismissal of his much-prized theory of sexual selection and the high honor of his kind offer. He responded shortly that Wallace was probably . . . right,

except as I think about sexual selection which I will not give up. My belief in it, however, is contingent on my general belief in sexual selection. It is an awful stretcher to believe that a Peacock’s tail was thus formed, but believing it, I believe in the same principle somewhat modified applied to man. I doubt whether my notes w[ould] be of any use to you, & as far as I remember they are chiefly on sexual selection.¹¹

This exchange sets the scene for this book. It foregrounds the racial, class, and gender dimensions of Darwin’s conception of sexual selection, as well as its inextricability from Darwin’s views on human evolution. The difficulties Darwin faced in attributing an almost human aesthetic discrimination to a mere bird are acknowledged with his admission of its being an awful stretcher. At the same time, he affirmed his determination to not give up his belief that the peacock’s tail had indeed been formed in this way. We should note also that Darwin’s somewhat modified application of this same principle to human sexual selection entailed the overturning of the principle of female choice, which he claimed predominated among animals. Among humans, Darwin assumed that male choice was the norm in differentiating both the sexes and races. This role reversal was to cause problems and contradictions for Darwin and sow discord and confusion among his readers. What is more, as Darwin here frames his conceptual shift from animals to humans, it is historically incorrect. It is incorrect because Darwin came to sexual selection not from his study of the sexual differences and mating behaviors of birds and other animals, as this exchange suggests, but the other way round: from his very Victorian interpretation of the human practices of wife choice, courtship, and marriage, which he then extended to animals. Finally, there is Wallace’s positioning as chief critic and devil’s advocate, which was crucial to the making (and unmaking) of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection.

The two men could not have been more different. Darwin was the last and greatest of the gentlemen naturalists, independently wealthy, readily able to command resources and negotiate social and scientific networks for the promotion of his unorthodox views. His science may have been unorthodox, but Darwin himself was in many ways entirely conventional, a man of his time and place, with an ingrained respect for the social conventions and a strong and saving sense of scientific caution. Wallace, by contrast, was a self-made man, a scientific and social maverick, intrepid in controversy, who struggled throughout his life to finance his science and support his family.

To complicate matters, Wallace was one of those paradoxical Victorians who confound modern minds with their seemingly gullible endorsement of table rapping, spirit manifestations, and all the paraphernalia of the séances that became so fashionable in the late nineteenth century. Again, unusual for a Darwinian, Wallace was also a defender of women’s rights and a socialist (the two did not necessarily go hand in hand). He made Darwin groan with his 1869 published declaration that natural selection alone could not explain crucial aspects of human evolution, asserting that an Overruling Intelligence had guided the development of human intelligence and morality. Yet in old age he emerged as the great defender of Darwinism when the Darwinians themselves were in disarray, championing natural selection against the proliferation of rival evolutionary theories. He spent twenty-five years relentlessly critiquing Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, only to turn round and expropriate it for his mature version of evolution, giving women the power to control social advance in a socialist society by their informed choice of only those males who possessed traits worthy of transmission to posterity.¹²

All this was to come. But the intimations of their future differences are there in their written exchange of 1864.

Reluctantly, the aging and chronically ill Darwin wrote the long-awaited work on Man and, as he had insisted to Wallace, the necessarily interconnected theory of sexual selection. The writing of The Descent of Man took place as the Darwinians, led by the master strategist Thomas Henry Huxley, fought for cultural authority and institutional dominance in the politically important field of anthropology, the new science of man, where conflicting theories of race were at stake. The Descent’s larger context was a capitalist and increasingly secular society. It was a society fully embarked on imperialist expansion, while staring down homegrown trade unionism and the socialist threat and dealing with growing demands for reform, suffrage, and better educational opportunities for women and the working class. It was during this critical period that Darwin polished and refined his theory of sexual selection, largely through his intensive and disputatious—but mutually respectful—correspondence with Wallace. Wallace, with his apostasy, was a thorn in the Darwinian side. But Darwin needed and esteemed the opinion of the coauthor of natural selection, even when directed against him, telling Wallace: I grieve to differ from you, & it actually terrifies me & makes me constantly distrust myself.¹³

Wallace was far from the only critic of sexual selection. Yet Darwin held to his theory to the very end, defiantly asserting its truth. His last defense of sexual selection was read at a meeting of the Zoological Society just hours before he died. With Darwin dead and Wallace ascendant as the greatest living champion of Darwinism, and with Darwinism itself under siege, by the turn of the century sexual selection was in crisis, deemed practically discredited by evolutionary theorists.¹⁴

To understand to the full Darwin’s commitment to sexual selection and its ensuing neglect, we must retrieve its history. This is essential if we are to know just how and when Darwin formulated his principle, how he distinguished it from natural selection, and more important, why Darwin was so convinced of its truth and of its necessity to his exposition of human evolution and racial divergence. Only then may we understand what exactly Darwin meant by sexual selection, how it was made compatible with other critical components of his evolutionary theorizing, and how his understanding and presentation of the principle shaped its history.

In his preface to the second edition of the Descent (1874), Darwin exasperatedly refuted the allegation that he invented sexual selection when he found that many details of structure in man could not be explained through natural selection. He pointed out that he had given a tolerably clear sketch of the principle in the first edition of the Origin, and that he had there stated that it was applicable to man.¹⁵ Indeed, the genesis of sexual selection goes back more than twenty years before the Origin, to Darwin’s secretive evolutionary jottings in London in the late 1830s in what are known as his transmutation notebooks and his related notebooks on Mind, Man and Materialism.¹⁶ It had its origins in the repertoire of culturally freighted biological, aesthetic, and ethnological writings, as well as breeding literature and practices, that Darwin drew on in his early notebook constructions. The history of sexual selection stretches yet further back, to the erotic evolutionary writings of Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, doctor, poet, radical, and womanizer—writings that had a much greater impact on the younger Darwin than is generally admitted.

Sexual selection thus has a very long history. It was not simply dependent on Darwin’s observations of and readings into the literature on the sexual dimorphism and courtship behaviors of a huge range of sexually reproducing species, but was drawn from a great complexity of sources. And Darwin justified it with a mix of culturally laden constructions of sexuality, gender, and race, together with his interpretations of heredity and development (themselves culturally inflected). To date, those few historians who have examined sexual selection in any detail have largely ignored these dimensions of Darwin’s conception.¹⁷ The notable exceptions to this have been those literary critics who have centered their interpretations on Darwin’s fictive encounters with pretty women in the courtship plots of the sentimental Victorian novels he enjoyed so much, and more recently, the historians Adrian Desmond and James Moore, who have represented sexual selection as the pro-abolitionist Darwin’s evolutionary solution to the racially motivated claims of those contemporary apologists for slavery who argued that the human races were separate species with separate origins.¹⁸ While these reinterpretations have brought valuable new insights—and Desmond and Moore have put Darwin’s moral commitment to the abolition of slavery definitively on the historiographical agenda—the history of sexual selection is far more complex than these partial accounts suggest. Most significantly, a vital visual dimension is missing.

It cannot be overemphasized that Darwin’s sexual selection predominantly relies on the visual perception of beauty. Bird and human alike must be able to perceive and discriminate among differences in external appearance—even down to the minute differences that Darwin insisted on—in making the essential choice of mate. For Darwin, it was absolutely fundamental that animals share an aesthetic sense with humans. This was primarily because of his need to demonstrate continuity from animals to humans and, therefore, the evolutionary development of this highest human faculty—the appreciation of beauty—against the rival theory of special creation, which held that the great diversity and beauty of nature had been designed by the Creator for his own or for human appreciation. Likewise, Darwin had a compelling need for a noncreationist explanation of nonfunctional, nonadaptive male ornamentation and conspicuous coloring, especially in birds, that could not be accounted for by natural selection or by his alternative theory of use-inheritance (contrary to popular belief, Darwin never abandoned some aspects of the inheritance of acquired characters).

Darwin’s disclaimers of appreciation for or cultivation in the higher arts have been made much of, but they are misleading.¹⁹ Like other well-to-do young gentlemen of his class and time, he was early schooled in the visual arts while at the University of Cambridge. His five-year stint as gentleman companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy (and unofficial ship’s naturalist) on board the Beagle (1831–36) exposed the still youthful Darwin to an explosion of vivid visual experiences that resonated with him to the end of his days and was critical to the formation of his evolutionary views. Of all these novel experiences, the most remarkable—one that Darwin returned to again and again in his writings—was his first sighting, at the uttermost ends of the earth, of the naked painted . . . hideous savage of Tierra del Fuego.²⁰ The sensory shock of the savage—who seemed to him destitute of all the accustomed attributes of humanity, almost a member of another species—was an assault on his eyes that thoroughly challenged Darwin’s family values of racial unity and the brotherhood of man, and all Christian notions of the unbridgeable gulf between human and beast.

On his return to London, Darwin read extensively in contemporary aesthetics (or theories of the beautiful) in the early stages of theory building. He underwent a further program of visual re-education through studying the selective practices of pigeon breeders, who examined each tincture of feather and minute difference of beak, to an understanding of the great accuracy of eye and judgement necessary to become a skillful breeder.²¹ Many pigeon fanciers were silk weavers who bred pigeons on rooftops for pleasure, and for food and income through the downturns in their highly skilled trade. They brought their exacting, artistic weaver’s eye from the handlooming of the delicate fabrics of their craft to the scrutiny and selective reshaping of the living bodies of their birds.²² Their practices epitomize the connections that Darwin was to draw among fashion, aesthetics, and breeding.

Above all, Darwin lived in a culture that was profoundly visual. New developments in media and printing technologies, in the mass marketing of cheap prints, greeting cards, illustrated books and magazines, promoted Victorian visual acuity and acquisition. These were augmented by a staggering upsurge in the commercial display and advertisement of household goods and fashions, as decorative goods and ready-made clothing and accessories flooded the marketplace. Victorian fashions—feminine fashions, to be specific—were, to say the least, eye catching. The introduction of aniline dyes in the mid-1850s led to a startling intensity and novelty of color in fabrics. The innovation of the crinoline around the same time, a by-product of the new steel technology that brought high fashion within the reach of servants and factory workers, also made women (including women of the streets) much more noticeable and visible. Victorian visual culture was far from the drab and dreary we have come to expect, but colorful, flashy, often as trashy and titillating as it was obedient to the middle-class canons of taste and propriety.

Historians have only recently begun to look at the ways in which Darwin drew on the available visual and aesthetic resources of this culture.²³ A good deal, for instance, has been made of Darwin’s response to the romantic and the sublime in literature and art, particularly through the influence of Alexander von Humboldt’s perceptions of tropical nature.²⁴ Yet little attention, if any, has been paid to the role in Darwin’s evolutionary thinking of the very British empiricist aesthetic tradition—exemplified by the views of his grandfather Erasmus—that was closely allied with a wider range of social, political and ethical debates that relate to the middle-class rise to political power.²⁵ Darwin’s views on sexual selection owe more to this homegrown aesthetics than to Humboldt’s romanticism. Similarly, the centrality of aesthetic rankings in early writings on race and the significance of this to Darwin’s views on racial differences and origins have been consistently overlooked or underplayed. Historians have yet to acknowledge the extent to which Darwin’s interpretations were colored by contemporary Eurocentric notions of the ugly and the beautiful and by the racial hierarchy they endorsed—a visual ideology that promoted a politics of race, colonialism, and extinction, that was in place well before the scientific racism of the later part of the nineteenth century, and that permeates Darwin’s Beagle-based observations and ranking of indigenous peoples.²⁶

Again, Victorian fashion and its representation in the popular press is the subject of a large literature that has yet to be linked with Darwin’s theorizing.²⁷ Yet the extremes of fashion recurs as an explanatory motif in Darwin’s expositions of the relation of breeding practices to sexual selection, and he explicitly compared women’s decorative practices with those of savages and birds. New feminine colors, shapes, and decorations impinged on Darwin’s everyday field of vision, as much as those of the varieties of pigeons he bred and studied (he was, after all, a husband and a father with daughters who took a keen interest in dress). Unlikely as it may seem, Darwin drew inspiration from the pronounced sexual dimorphism of nineteenth-century dress, in particular from the vagaries and extremes of the fashion choices of Victorian women, the visual expression of their identity, which was trivialized and satirized in the popular press.

Of still greater import for Darwin’s theory building—as well as for his personal comfort and posterity—was the choice of a wife. This was a serious business for the men of the emergent middle classes who looked to a good woman, the iconic angel in the house, the personification of Victorian womanliness, modesty, self-denial and purity, who would safeguard their property, their propriety, and their posterity. Or as Darwin put it, as the well-fledged bachelor newly returned from the voyage of the Beagle and on the sharp lookout for a wife, one who was better than an angel & had money.²⁸

This leads me to my next point: sex. A history of sexual selection can hardly be written without confronting the history of sex.²⁹ Darwin’s Descent of Man, as was then conventional in works directed to a wider reading audience of both sexes, is devoid of any overt discussion of human sexuality or erotic desire. Darwin had to negotiate with his publisher, John Murray, even to include what Murray termed the objectionable adjective in the subtitle of a work devoted to sexual selection.³⁰ Yet Darwin’s evolutionary writings are saturated with sex: from his explication of the sex life of barnacles and the sexual contrivances of orchids, to his principles of natural and sexual selection where sex and superfecundity are the driving forces of organic change.³¹

Since the foundational work of Michel Foucault, we can no longer think of sex as ahistorical. Foucault showed that sexuality was a historically inflected activity that required study as much as any other social or cultural activity.³² Understandings of and attitudes toward sexuality, as well as its practices, are mediated (among other things) by religion, class, politics, gender, and race. Gender and race are themselves similarly and even more obviously inflected, and well before Foucault, work had begun to retrieve their historical meanings and functions. Like sex, these terms are problematic; they change and shift around and are constantly reconstructed. They are not easy to pin down, and they underwent some significant changes during the course of Darwin’s long life. Fortunately, we now have a wealth of studies of nineteenth-century sex, race, and gender that may be brought to bear on Darwin’s theory building. For one thing, we know that Victorian sexuality was more diverse than the repressive stereotype we have inherited from its late-Victorian and Edwardian critics. At the same time, we must take account of those points where stereotype and its variations intersect in the making of sexual selection.

In all this, the historian must not neglect the close study of the observational and intellectual components of Darwin’s theory building as he worked to pull the elements of sexual selection together, to differentiate it from natural selection, and to make it compatible with his observations and with his theories of inheritance, embryology, and divergence. Of particular significance was Darwin’s interpretation of embryology (the study of animal development). Its centrality to his construction of sexual selection has been ignored by historians, who have focused on the relation of Darwin’s embryology to natural selection and to contemporary evolutionary theory and become mired in ongoing controversy.³³ Its reconstruction here, as a critical element of his theorizing on sexual selection, clarifies much that has been misunderstood in Darwin’s embryological argument for evolution. It also highlights the necessity of moving beyond the close textual analysis of the technical core of sexual selection in Darwin’s published and unpublished writings. Complex as it is, this is not sufficient. Embryology had resonances beyond the museum or laboratory, well beyond Darwin’s experimental researches on his prized pigeons, and it is these that largely make comprehensible its role in his evolutionary theorizing.

The traditional image of Darwin as the objective observer and theoretician of Down House—remote from the social and political concerns of his fellow Victorians—has been exploded. Today, few historians would dispute the connection of Darwin’s theoretical constructions with Victorian politics and ideology. All else aside, some fifteen thousand letters have been retrieved and the publication of a projected thirty-two volumes of meticulously edited and annotated correspondence is well under way. His letters show overwhelmingly that Darwin was a consummate networker, building a far-flung web of informants from all walks of life—breeders, gardeners, keepers, doctors, missionaries, travelers, naturalists, and collectors—who did their best to answer questions, send specimens, and carry out experiments for him. It was a network of power with Darwin at its center, collating, managing, and deploying the information he received. Darwin also maintained close touch with a select coterie of scientific peers who carried out the necessary social functions of a scientist for him while he remained ensconced at Down, pursuing his researches. He persuaded them, pumped them for information and tested his views on them, urging them on to the defense of Darwinism in the professional and public arenas that he was too diffident (or famously ill) to enter. He was never a professional scientist, but he kept abreast of institutional and professional politics. He read the reviews, the lampoons, even collected cartoons of himself as a hairy ape. He also kept up to date with the greater political issues of his day, and it has become clear that they impinged more on his science and his published writings than was conventionally acknowledged.³⁴

In addition to the correspondence, we now have a treasure trove of archived notes and manuscript material—even the marginalia in Darwin’s library of books, journals, and pamphlets—much of it transcribed and published (much now available on the Internet), along with a great mass of raw untranscribed notes in Darwin’s characteristic scrawl. He read omnivorously, not just works deemed scientific, but a slew of pamphlets, catalogs, and handbooks on breeding, horticulture, and beekeeping, as well as works of popular fiction, travelogues, history, and biography (which were mostly read aloud to him by Emma, his devoted wife). He used his books as working tools, ruthlessly tearing large volumes in half if they were too cumbersome to read while reclining on his study sofa, marking passages and making notes as he went, indexing pertinent pages and subjects. He kept from 30 to 40 large portfolios on different subjects into which he filed relevant notes, abstracts, and letter pages from his correspondents: Before beginning on any subject I look to all the short indexes & make a general & classified index, & by taking the one or more proper portfolios I have all the information collected during my life ready for use.³⁵

Lest this convey a picture of easy access and reassembly for the historian, it should be noted that Darwin’s thrifty practice of cannibalizing notes and recycling bits of paper for other projects and uses has kept archivists and historians on their toes as they try to piece together what goes where (and there are still exciting discoveries to be made, as I shall tell). Darwin’s paper trail is far from complete, has gaps just as the historian seems on the verge of significant discovery, and is at times indecipherable or so cryptic as to challenge comprehension. Yet, together with the support of the correspondence and Darwin’s published works, these surviving notes and annotations do make possible, if difficult, the tracking of Darwin’s path to sexual selection and the shifts it underwent as he worked to pull its elements together and present it to his Victorian readers, both lay and scientific.

This book, then, explores the intellectual and social roots of Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, analyzes its stages of theory building in his unpublished and published writings and its elaboration in The Descent of Man, and reviews its contemporary reception, reinterpretations and applications. I am not concerned with present-day theory, except insofar as it will become clear that there are significant differences between sexual selection as Darwin conceived it and as it is currently understood in evolutionary biology, and that these differences help to explain its long hiatus as well as to illuminate the social and cultural contingencies of the history of a significant, if controversial, biological concept.

I have chosen to explore the major sources or strands of sexual selection thematically in part 1 of this book. These having been established, my account then reverts to a more conventional chronological history of sexual selection in part 2. It reviews the major stages of theory building from the London notebooks on, but is primarily concerned with the period from the writing of Darwin’s big species book, which became the Origin, up to the publication of the Descent and readers’ responses to it.

This is an ambitious project, and must cover a lot of ground from the late Enlightenment period of Erasmus Darwin’s writings to the eclipse of sexual selection in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a period of great social, scientific, and institutional change. My thematic approach permits the exploration of Darwin’s major ideas and their contextualizations in a way that does justice to these significant shifts and their interconnections with Darwin’s formulation of sexual selection. Many, if not all, of these ideas (even where Darwin seems at his most original) were borrowed from other thinkers or practitioners, and were either adopted outright or adapted to his theorizing by Darwin—that is, they have earlier histories and practices that we must look for and analyze in order to understand them and their roles in the formation of sexual selection.³⁶ When this plurality of (sometimes contradictory) historical sources, themes, and practices is integrated with the fine-grained analysis of Darwin’s notes, correspondence, and publications, it makes possible a multilayered, richly detailed history of the genesis of what was, for its time, a radical theoretical concept that is back in play in current evolutionary thinking.

I should add a note on terminology: Darwin and those on whose writings he drew, or those with whom he corresponded, at times used a vocabulary that offends us now. In a historical study of this kind, it is important to bear in mind that terms such as savage, mankind, man, race, negro, and so on, had a range of available meanings and that their general usage did not necessarily connote the meaning the enlightened now would attach to them. Their usage requires careful attention to context if their historical understanding is to be achieved. Also, although I have done my best to defer to modern sensibilities, it is not always possible to supply gender-free or nonracial alternatives.

The Outline of This Book

Part 1, Beauty, Brotherhood, and Breeding: The Origins of Sexual Selection, consists of nine chapters, each of which examines a major source or theme in the making of sexual selection.

Chapter 1, The Ugly Brother, analyzes the defining moment of Darwin’s conception of sexual selection: his lived experience of savage encounter with the indigenes of Tierra del Fuego. It is argued that his early adoption of the view that the different human races had different inborn, heritable standards of beauty or aesthetic taste—a view that underpinned his notion of aesthetic choice in animals—was founded in Darwin’s reconciliation of his liberal abolitionist background with a pervasive contemporary visual ideology that had some commonalities with later biological racism.

Chapter 2, Good Wives, discusses the ways in which Darwin’s family background and his experiences as Victorian husband and father entered into the making of sexual selection. Emma Darwin’s role as nurturing wife and mother and Darwin’s dependence on her support and his domestic comforts are viewed against the gender relations implicit in Victorian expectations of a good wife, as well as in the code of manliness and the construction of masculinity.

Chapter 3, ‘Bliss Botanic’ and ‘Cocks Heroic’ examines the erotic evolutionary writings of Erasmus Darwin and how his grandson took the notion of sexual combat as a means of species benefit and as an explanation for the development of specialized male weapons from this source. The younger Darwin’s early notebook theorizing on the sexual struggle is discussed in relation to his earliest formulation of natural selection and the ways in which he distinguished the struggle for mates from the struggle for existence. It is argued that his grandparent’s naturalistic, sexualized aesthetics also influenced Charles Darwin’s understanding of beauty and aesthetic choice.

Chapter 4, Beauty Cuts the Knot, extends this analysis through an examination of Darwin’s early readings in British empiricist aesthetics—notably the writings of Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke—and Darwin’s adoption of a naturalistic notion of beauty as strongly gendered, as race and class specific, and weighted with moral and political meaning.

Chapter 5, Reading the Face of Race, looks at Darwin’s readings in early ethnological literature, which had tight associations with aesthetics and physiognomy. William Lawrence’s blasphemous Lectures—which offered a uniquely materialist, monogenetic theory of racial origins, developed by analogy with domestication, and which located mental and moral differences in anatomy—was a particularly important source for Darwin’s thesis of the role of aesthetic selection in the formation and stabilization of the human races. The vital role of the naturalist Edward Blyth in integrating the two forms of sexual selection and bringing Lawrence’s views to Darwin’s attention at two critical stages of theory formation is emphasized.

Chapter 6, Good Breeding, deals with Darwin’s immersion in the practices of animal breeders and the reconstitution of the notion of aesthetic preference by artificial selection.

Chapter 7, Better Than a Dog Anyhow, deepens this analysis with a discussion of Darwin’s close reading in early 1839 of a key text, Alexander Walker’s Intermarriage. Walker placed explicitly before Darwin the reiterated comparison of wife choice with the selective procedures of animal improvers and made the masculine judgment of woman’s beauty—a visually based, aesthetically informed process of choice—the agency of human progress or racial improvement.

Chapter 8, Flirting with Fashion, examines the critical role of Victorian fashion in Darwin’s thinking. It looks at how Darwin’s exposure to the perceived vagaries and excesses of the dress choices of Victorian women and his consistent recourse to the metaphor of fashion enabled his transfer of the masculine, manipulative art of breeding to the sexual preferences of female animals. It analyzes his formulation of his fundamental threefold analogue of the selective practices of pigeon fanciers, the frivolous dress choices of fashion-conscious women, and the aesthetic choices of female birds, all of whom capriciously pushed their selections to nonfunctional extremes.

Chapter 9, Development Matters, introduces the crucial embryological understandings underpinning Darwin’s threefold analogue, sketches their political and social implications, and shows their functioning in Darwin’s integration of the critical theoretical components of sexual selection: development, inheritance, and divergence. It indicates how this developmentally centered understanding confirmed the agency of female choice in animals, powered Darwin’s dispute with Wallace, and gave him the confidence and self-belief to write The Descent of Man.

Part 2, ‘For Beauty’s Sake’: The Making of Sexual Selection, consists of five chapters covering the major stages of theory building from the period of Darwin’s big species book, through the writing of the Origin, up to the publication of the Descent and its reception.

Chapter 10, Critical Years: From Pigeons to People, discusses Darwin’s evolving views on sexual selection in a period of mounting racial and sexual tension in which a heightened sense of national identity reinforced the racial and gender superiority of the white middle-class male. It examines how Darwin drew on the writings of the new racial determinists—notably the race theorist Robert Knox and the polygenists Josiah Nott and George Gliddon—in reaffirming his earlier Lawrence-derived thesis of an aesthetic factor in the differentiation of gender, class, and race, and discusses the relation of Darwin’s pigeon-keeping to this.

Chapter 11, Putting Female Choice in (Proper) Place, takes the analysis from the big species book up to the publication of the Origin, focusing on female choice and the arguments and evidence Darwin adduced in its support. Two rediscovered pages of his big species book (thought lost) show that Darwin had put female choice in theoretical place by, at the latest, mid-1858. This chapter stresses the importance of embryology in Darwin’s decision to publish his views on the determining role of sexual selection in human racial differentiation in the Origin. His naturalization of female choice in birds and normalization of male aesthetic choice in human racial divergence is discussed in relation to the good woman of Victorian domestic ideology and the beginnings of first wave feminism.

Chapter 12, The Battle for Beauty, picks up the history of sexual selection in the late 1860s as Darwin set about researching and writing The Descent of Man. It analyzes Darwin’s prolonged dispute with Wallace over the issues of female choice, protective coloration, and human evolution in the contexts of the Huxley-led drive for Darwinian cognitive and cultural authority; institutional conflict between the Darwinian ethnologicals and the racialist anthropologicals; the American Civil War; the Eyre affair; the social and professional implications of the irrepressible woman question; and John Stuart Mill’s championing of women’s rights.

Chapter 13, "Writing the Descent," deals with Darwin’s final assembly of the components of sexual selection and human sexual and racial divergence into The Descent of Man. It is argued that the Descent was structured by Darwin’s differences with Wallace, by his conflicts with Mill and the new evolutionary anthropologists, and the enduring resonances of savage encounter. This chapter also assesses the problems posed by Darwin’s detailed reconstructions of plumage and attribution of high aesthetic appreciation to female birds, and the contradictions engendered by his key thesis of the primacy of beauty-based male choice as the determinant of human racial divergence.

Chapter 14, "The Post-Descent Years," explores the response to the Descent through Darwin’s late Victorian readership—not simply his scientific readers, but the wider reading public who variously adopted, adapted, or rejected his theory of sexual selection. As sexual selection (along with natural selection) went into eclipse, female choice was seized on by an array of social purists, eugenicists, sexual reformers, birth controllers, feminists, and socialists, notably Wallace, who in a volte-face in 1890 advocated a post-socialist world in which free and informed female choice would guide the future direction of humanity. Huxley’s reaction to all this is analyzed through the content and context of his famous Romanes Lecture.

The subsequent history of sexual selection is briefly reviewed in an epilogue, and Darwin is given the last word.

The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick! Darwin told Asa Gray in 1860. By 1864 he was convinced of the solution to the problems it posed. Peacock feather from Descent 1871, 2:137. University of Sydney Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.

Part One

Beauty, Brotherhood, and Breeding: The Origins of Sexual Selection

One

The Ugly Brother

I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found. . . .

Their appearance was so strange, that it was scarcely like that of earthly inhabitants. . . .

I never saw such miserable creatures; stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint & quite naked.—One full aged woman absolutely so, the rain & spray were dripping from her body; their red skins filthy & greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gesticulation violent & without any dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same world. I can scarcely imagine that there is any spectacle more interesting & worthy of reflection, tha[n] one of these unbroken savages.

—Darwin on the Fuegians, 1832, 1834

So Darwin recorded his encounters with the savages of Tierra del Fuego in the diary he kept on board the Beagle. His immediate account registers both fascination and revulsion. At the same time, his shock at the profound difference of the Fuegians, the enormity of their distance from civilized man, was tempered by his assumption that these unbroken people may yet be improved by the taming hand of civilization.

At that point in time, he had reason to think so. Three of his fellow travelers on the Beagle were Fuegians, dubbed with the objectifying, Anglicized pseudonyms of Jemmy Button (whose name Darwin claimed, expresses his purchase-money¹), York Minster, and Fuegia Basket. Their real names were, respectively, O’run-del’lico, El’leparu, and Yok’cushly. They had been taken from a tribal state in Tierra del Fuego to England by Captain FitzRoy on a previous voyage and given the rudiments of a Christian education. They were now being returned to their native land along with a naive young missionary and assorted impedimenta of British civilization—described by FitzRoy as serviceable articles, but including, according to Darwin, "wine glasses, butter-bolts, tea trays, soup turins, mahogany dressing case, fine white linen [and] beavor [sic] hats."² It was FitzRoy’s personal project of improvement that they would form the nucleus of a Christian civilization on these inhospitable shores.

In the Descent, Darwin harked back to his continual surprise at how closely these domesticated Beagle Fuegians who could speak a little English resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental faculties.³ Yet their barbarian relatives, brutish, to his eyes devoid of all the expected attributes of humankind, pushed the boundaries of humanity to its very limits.

Figure 1.1. Fuegian by Conrad Martin, symbol of the ugly brother, displacing the earlier, idealized image of the noble savage. Frontispiece to FitzRoy 1939. University of Sydney Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.

During his travels on the Beagle, Darwin met with a number of other races and saw many awe-inspiring sights. But at the conclusion to his diary, which became the basis of his best-selling Journal of Researches (rewritten in 1837, first published in 1839), Darwin returned to what had most struck him on his five-year voyage: the primal spectacle of man in his lowest and most savage state:

One’s mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these?—men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savages and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal.⁴

Words failed Darwin in attempting to describe the unbridgeable gulf between the Fuegian and his civilized observer; nor could this difference even be represented in paint, so far removed from iconography, from all aesthetic conventions, was the alien appearance of the Fuegian (whose own rudimentary aesthetic was limited to the appreciation of gaudy baubles such as blue beads and scarlet cloth). This unforgettable, unpaintable, indescribable difference (which Darwin did in fact describe over and over again in terms of the difference between wild and domesticated animals) was still with him at the end of his life.⁵ But his best-known reprise of his Fuegian encounter was in the conclusion to the Descent. There, Darwin, in an attempt to counter the Victorian horror of bestial descent, asserted his personal preference for a brave monkey or a plucky baboon as ancestor, rather than a bestial Fuegian progenitor. It repays close reading:

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be