Abstract
The Descent of Man is a strange book. About three-fifths is not on human beings at all, but an extended discussion of Charles Darwin’s secondary mechanism of sexual selection. I argue that although the book is surely a little unbalanced, overall the discussion fits into Darwin’s strategy of explaining and extending his thinking on evolution, and that truly it marks no significant theoretical shift from his earliest thinking about the nature and causes of evolution. Darwin saw the evolution of human beings at one with the evolution of all organisms.
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Notes
- 1.
The argument of this paper strikes me as so obvious that I worry that truly no discussion is needed. I can only say that a recent, good book on the history of sexual selection—Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology by Erika Lorraine Milam—neither promotes nor disputes the argument I am about to make (Milam 2010).
- 2.
These are not terms that Darwin uses himself, but as we shall see he grasped clearly the ideas behind the terms so I do not think I am unduly anachronistic in introducing them here.
- 3.
I confess that this is one topic in Darwin scholarship that for many decades I thought was absolutely and completely without question or doubt. I introduced this connection in my overview of the Darwinian Revolution (Ruse 1979), and by the nature of that discussion I am sure I picked it up from others. In the next decade, Joel Schwartz (1984), in painfully greater detail than I, confirmed my belief that it was Wallace’s apostasy that led Darwin to greater reliance on sexual selection. Fairly recently however those entertaining revisionists Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Desmond and Moore 2009) have argued that all of Darwin’s thinking on our species starts and basically remains with his detestation of slavery. I confess that although I applaud the extent to which Desmond and Moore have shown the Darwin-Wedgwood family, including Charles, as being fervently anti-slavery, with Robert J. Richards (2009) I see absolutely no merit whatsoever in this claim. It simply isn’t so.
- 4.
Philosopher Elliott Sober, well known for his fervent devotion to group selection (see for example Sober and Wilson 1997), an enthusiasm presumably not unconnected to his Marxism (Wright et al. 1992), argues that when Darwin turns to sex ratios in the Descent, he shows his commitment to group selection (Sober 2011). I counter this in Richards and Ruse 2014.
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Ruse, M. (2015). Sexual Selection: Why Does it Play Such a Large Role in The Descent of Man?. In: Hoquet, T. (eds) Current Perspectives on Sexual Selection. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9585-2_1
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