Diversity, Culture, Theory, and Data: Science on Human Variety.
B. Ricardo Brown and Christopher X J. Jensen
SLAS Faculty Research Seminar
Monday, November 7, 2011
[CLICK to enlarge any image.]
UNTIL (AND A BIT AFTER)
DARWIN
B. Ricardo Brown, Ph.
D.
Associate
Professor of Cultural Studies
SLAS Faculty Seminar
Series
November 7, 2011
While I was
preparing for this talk, I ran across a January 1894 letter by
Engels. It is nice to come across an earlier text that speaks
directly to something you are actively thinking about. This letter
is one of many that he wrote attempting --- as he neared his end ---
to explain what he understood by the term “economic relations”
and their determinations. These determinations comprise, he wrote,
“the entire technique of production,” its geographical setting,
“and traditions and the remnants of earlier social orders that
survive “by force of inertia.”
“Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary,
artistic, etc. development is based on economic development. But all
these react upon each other and also upon the economic basis. It is
not that the economic situation is cause, [or] solely
active while everything else is
only passive effect. There is, rather interaction on the basis of
economic necessity which ultimately
always asserts itself... so it is not, as people here and there
conveniently imagine, that the economic situation produces an
automatic effect.” Engels to W. Borgius (London, January 25, 1894).
[SLIDE]
I
bring this up because Engels correspondent seems to have asserted
that the development of technique was dependent on the state of
scientific knowledge rather than social production. Engels
disagreed, of course, and presented an approach that resembles the
one I have taken in looking into the subject of human variety.
“If as you say, technique largely
depends on the state of science, science depends far more on the
state and the
requirements of technique. If a society has a technical need, that
helps science forward more than ten universities. The whole of
hydrostatics (Torricelli, etc.) was called forth by the necessity for
regulating the mountain streams of Italy in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries. We have known anything reasonable about
electricity only since its technical applicability was discovered.
But unfortunately it has become the custom in Germany to write the
history of the sciences as if they had fallen from the skies.”
Engels, ibid.
[SLIDE]
I think that this
statement, with a few tweaks here and there, resembles my own
approach to the critique of what might be called the Sciences of
Life, but I came across this letter only recently.
Instead, I came to
this work via my dissertation on the concept of community in
sociological theory. While looking into that topic, I noticed
intersecting topic: degeneracy and degeneration. Following back from
Eugenics to early Natural History, it became clear that degeneracy is
one moment in the history of an even more elaborate and complex set
of scientific ideologies. Moreover, the ubiquity of degeneracy meant
that there were multiple discourses on it as well. However, it did
seem that we can mark a divide between degeneracy in the works of
Naturalists such as Blumenbach and Buffon, and degeneracy as it later
appeared in the work of the Criminal Anthropologists and popular
followers of Max Nordau. In the earlier Natural History, degeneracy
served as an explanation for variety, including human variety. It
marked not so much decay or decline but instead deviation from the
norm of an original type. Later, degeneracy became the primary sign
of moral, physical, and social decay and disorganization.
It would be
convenient to be able to say that this break occurred because of
Darwin’s work. This is attractive and seemingly easy because much
of the work in Criminal Anthropology aligned with the many emerging
interpretations of Darwin. However, almost 15 years before Darwin’s
Origin, we find Marx writing in the Holy Family on the
increasingly popular view that crime and immorality are caused by
degeneracy. Marx is dismissive of this idea and expected that
nothing would come of it. In fact, despite Darwin degeneracy became
a powerful explanation for social disorder, while before his time,
degeneracy was a powerful explanation for variety in nature, i. e.,
for for the groupings we refer to as species and races.
And so to really
understand degeneracy, one needed to examine a closely related area
of inquiry usually referred to as “the species question.”
What accounts for
the variety of nature? Are species fixed or do they change? The
species question animated Natural History until Darwin produced the
definitive answer with his Origin of Species. Two aspects
were key for today, 1st, the debate over the nature of a
species and 2nd the debate on the fixity of species, i.
e., if species exist, then have they ever changed? This 2nd
concern was in particular prompted by the gradual recognition of the
importance and meaning of fossils.
The question that
animated Natural History would also be its undoing, relegating
Natural History to travel/literary excursions into the wild or to the
domain of amateurs such as birders. But even here Natural History’s
emphasis on the experienced amateur and the practice of observation
continues. If the species question animated Natural History, it is
good to remember that this was a time when science looked very
different and when the scientific disciplines that we take for
granted were either new or had not yet emerged. Science itself was
organized very differently, with amateurs and learned societies
serving a centers of learning and scientific exchange. In fact, the
term “scientist” was at this time a rather new one. Dating from
the early 1830s and finally codified as one who “cultivates science
in general” in 1840 by Whewell. [who Darwin quotes in the front
piece of the Origin]
So remember that
unlike Chris’s part of this talk, science as you know it did not
really exist during the era I am discussing, not only was a different
question animating scientific inquiry, but also there was a very
different formation of scientific knowledge and ideologies. Of
course, the necessities of social production and the contradictions
which followed from these social conflicts were rapidly creating the
need and desire for our science.
Looking at the
period from which Darwin emerged and from which he was largely cut
off during the five year voyage of the Beagle,
we find Natural History at its apex, with such luminaries as
Linne, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Buffon, Lyell, but also figures like
Thomas Jefferson and Samuel G. Morton, James Audubon and John
Bachman, and Louis Agassiz. We find that the species question had
been largely resolved by the naturalists on both sides of the
Atlantic, but that those in the United States, referred to as the
American School, dominated the discussion of the species question.
In the Natural History of Darwin’s time, humans were thought to
hold the key to understanding variety in nature and thus to resolving
the species question and disclosing the rational order that Natural
History had always sought. A decade before the publication of the
Origin of Species, Samuel Morton stated flatly that “the
question of the origin of species is [a question of the origin] of
the human species.” In the years between 1780 and 1859, the
scientific theory known as polygenesis --- which held that humans
were divided into races and each race had a separate origin and fixed
characteristics --- came to dominate the understanding of human
history. Advocated most vigorously by those in the American School,
but widely accepted, the Polygenic theory of human origins was
acknowledge by proponents and opponents alike as a rational,
scientific theory as well as a powerful justification for slavery.
It was used against the abolitionists who had of course turned to the
Biblical story of creation to stress a single origin, or the
monogenesis of humans, in support of their cause.
So let me turn to
mention how human variety was addressed within this debate over the
species question and how Darwin came to intervene in this debate. In
a sense, I am saying Darwin’s Origin should be approached
not only as a great work of science and materialism, but also as one
of the great abolitionist works. It
is in relation to the prevailing Polygenic theory that we see the far
reaching social effects of Darwin’s work and understand Darwin's
lasting achievement as more than simply a new theory of nature. It
is in the dispute over the scientific validity of the Polygenic
theory that Darwin places his own work ten years later in The
Descent of Man:
[SLIDE]
Whether primeval man, when he
possessed but a few arts, and those of the rudest kind, and when his
power of language was extremely imperfect, would have deserved to be
called man, must depend on the definition which we employ. In a
series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature to
man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite
point where the term ‘man’ ought to be used. But this is a matter
of very little importance. So again, it is almost a matter of
indifference whether the so-called races of man are thus designated,
or are ranked as species or subspecies; but the latter term appears
the more appropriate. Finally, we may conclude that when the
principle of evolution is generally accepted, as it surely will be
before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists
will die a silent and unobserved death.
Source: Darwin, Charles. The
Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to
Sex, first
edition. London: John Murray, volumes 1 and 2, 1871,
pp. 243–248; The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online,
Cambridge University <http://darwin-online.org.uk/>
(viewed April 9, 2008).
That the era of the
Polygenic theory was also the era of slavery was hardly coincidental,
as the polygenic theory cloaked slavery in the aegis of scientific
respectability. The apologists for Southern slavery did not have to
look only to Greek and Roman slavery for ideological justification.
Now for many the rationality of Natural History itself underwrote the
rationality of slavery.
So for the rest of
my talk I want to give you a sketch of the scientific study of human
variety in the period before Darwin’s intervention into the species
question.. I will have to leave off consideration of a couple of
things that I wish I had the time to go over. It would be helpful to
be able to say more about ideas of human variety in classical and
medieval times. Pliny the Elder is particularly important in this
regard, as he had no concept of race and an expansive view of what
constituted a human, as befits one in a vast Empire. It is also
difficult to find Roman texts wherein any mention is made of the
color of a person’s skin. It would be well to note in passing that
according to Herodotus and Homer, the Persians and Trojans both
drew on allies from as far away as India and Ethiopia. The last
great defenders of Troy’s walls were after all an Ethiopian king
and his troops. It would also be nice to delve into the contrasts
between Aristotle on slavery and the body (a good soul displays a
good body, a slave soul displays a slave body) and writers such as
Xenophon and Seneca, who found no essential difference between humans
or between freemen and slaves, and the radical egalitarianism of the
Epicureans.
Also, I can only
briefly mention that Darwin’s supposed debt to Spencer and to
Malthus is greatly exaggerated. Although the nickname the Beagle’s
crew gave him was “Philosopher,” Darwin’s had little interest
in such matters. As he noted to Marx in thanking him for a gift of a
copy of Capital, he really knew nothing about political
economy his copy of Capital ultimately went unread. With
Malthus, Darwin takes a idea, the continual increase in population
and with it increasing scarcity, and makes it an agent for change in
nature, whereas the decidedly anti-Enlightenment Malthus used it to
argue that nothing actually changes. Darwin stood Malthus on his
head just as he does Herbert Spencer, who wrote to Darwin that he did
not recognize his “survival of the fittest” or “evolution” as
it appeared in Darwin. Darwin insisted that the phrase was a
metaphor and used because of the popularity of Spencer’s work.***
He does not even use the phrase until the 5th edition of
the Origin of Species and even then at the insistence of
Wallace that
he substitute the phrase “survival of the fittest” for “natural
selection” in any later editions of the Origin
of Species.
Darwin wrote to Wallace of his belief that the term natural
selection “was of great advantage to bring into connection natural
and artificial selection.” Although Darwin agreed to use the
phrase “survival of the fittest,” he would consistently couple it
with Natural Selection. He will also consistently refer to survival
of the fittest not as “a plain expression of fact,” but as “a
metaphor for effect
and change.”
And so, despite his promise to use “survival of the fittest” in
the future, he wrote back to Wallace with characteristic irony:
“Natural Selection has now been so largely used abroad and at home,
that I doubt whether it could be given up, and with all its faults I
should be sorry to see the attempt made. Whether it will be rejected
must now depend on the survival of the fittest.”
Now,
we can move own to the period just before the publication of the
Origin, a
period that is dominated by polygenic theories of human origins
championed by American naturalists and physicians. The crowning work
of the American School, Types of Mankind, by Josiah Nott and
George Gliddon, with a chapter by Darwin's nemesis, Louis Agassiz,
epitomized the thinking regarding human origins in the time. Now for
many Natural History itself underwrote the rationality of slavery,
but the debate between mongenic and polygenic theories had been a
long one, beginning with Linne’s classification of Nature.
[SLIDE]
The
first place to begin in Natural History is with Linne’s System
of Nature. As most of you know,
Linne is often credited as being the first to classify humans
as part of the natural world. Linne's first classification was
replaced in his later editions by a far more detailed description of
the varieties of human beings.
[SLIDE]
But
the descriptions rely on Medieval ideas of the different
“complextions” of Humans. Linne also retained remnants of the
earlier prodigious humans described by Pliny the Elder in the 7th
book of his Natural History..... and which persisted through the
Middle Ages and down to the modern era in our representations of the
Monstrous Races.” The Wild Man (Homo ferus) the Conehead’s of
China, etc. But the characteristics of each race are elaborately
detailed anthropological notes and not only a matter of anatomical
comparisons.
[SLIDE]
Linne
might have placed humans in nature, but Blumenbach gave us what we
recognize as our conventional classification of human variety: Five
Races, distinguished by continent, color and temperament.
Blumenbach, I should note was a monogenist He believed in a common
origin of all human varieties, and was quite progressive for his day.
He owned what was perhaps the largest collection of African and
Black literature in Europe, which he used to rebut contemporaries
such as a fellow named Hegel, who believed that Africans were not
truly human and possessed no sense of self or culture. So it is
somewhat ironic that his legacy is most profound in our continuation
of his scheme of racial classification, rather than his opposition to
the belief in the intellectual inferiority of Africans. Notice two
that Blumenbach’s description of Caucasians is quite brief:
Beautiful in form.
[SLIDE]
There
is always a aesthetic dimension in these discussions, and
Blumenbach’s classification was in opposition to those who would
classify humans based purely on aesthetic judgment, especially
employing the “facial angle,” and not anatomical and
anthropological data.
[SLIDE]
Blumenbach
also coined the term Caucasian based upon his examination of a skull
in is collection from the Caucuses Mountain region.
[SLIDE]
We
can mention Lamarck, who had much influence on Darwin, but Lamarck’s
ideas on the transformation of species had at this time been eclipsed
by the doctrine of the fixity of species supported by Cuvier and many
others.
[SLIDE]
And
Cuvier, gave us much, from his Animal Kingdom and work on
fossils to his theory of cataclysmic revolutions of the Earth and the
theory of extinction. We also owe to him the strongest arguments for
the fixity of species in relation to human variety. Comparing a
specimen of the Sacred Ibis with mummified remains found in tombs and
depictions of the animal in temple drawings, Cuvier concluded that
the species had not changed over the entire period of the present
era. Now the implications of Cuvier's research was profound, for it
was quickly pointed out that there were recognizable depictions of
Negroes in some of the same ancient drawings.
[SLIDE]
It
seemed that the Sacred Ibis had not changed and neither had the
Negro. The estimated 6000 years since the Creation or the last
revolution of the earth, was not long enough to account for the
differences in species or for the general variety of nature. Cuvier
argued that whenever one has no physical data, one must turn to the
Biblical accounts and to archeology, especially Egyptian archeology.
It was not lost on Cuvier and others that the polygenic theory also
contradicted the biblical account of creation. The free scientific
inquiry that the American School demanded had already set the
polygenic theory and religion on a collision course long before
Darwin’s Origin.
Egypt
was a very popular subject during this time in America. George
Gliddon, who had served as an American Consul in Egypt, undertook a
series of popular and well attended lectures on Egyptian history and
culture, during which an 800 foot long tapestry of scenes from
Egyptian life would scroll by behind him. He also unwrapped a mummy
at the end of each nights lecture, which cause him some embarrassment
when one that he billed as a male prince turned out to be female.
But more than just a showman, Gliddon was fascinated by the species
question and human origins. While in Egypt he had read Samuel
Morton’s the work on craniology and set to robbing Egyptian graves
and tombs for Morton's collection of crania, helping Morton amassed
the worlds largest collection of human crania, with over 700 skulls.
Many of the skull depicted in Morton’s Crania Egyptia were
plundered by Gliddon.
[SLIDE]
Gliddon
was a character in real life and in fiction, appearing in Edgar Allen
Poe’s “Conversation with a Mummy,” but Morton was perhaps
America’s first internationally recognized scientist. When Louis
Agassiz came to the U.S., he first went to visit Morton, who he held
equal to Cuvier as a naturalist and scientist. With Morton’s
stature came also the authority of the polygenic theory and the
formation of “The American School.”
[SLIDE]
In
1842 a reviewer of recent polygenic works asked: “In surveying the
globe in reference to the different appearances of mankind, the most
extraordinary diversities are apparent to the most superficial
observer. . . . Hence arises the question—Have
all these diverse races descended from a single stock?”
[SLIDE]
Josiah
Nott, who did pioneering work on Yellow Fever, lectured on the
species question and wrote on the contradictions inherent in the
Biblical account of creation. Either the world is quite a bit older
than 6,000 years, giving time for the variation in humans to work
itself out into its present races, or one would have to admit that
each race was created as it now is. In his estimation, only the
polygenic theory could reconcile the history of the Earth with the
obvious and fixed differences in the races. Neither God nor Nature
had created men equal. Even Mulattoes were not proof that we were
the same species, for Mulattos became hybrids doomed to die off from
illness, increased sterility, and because mulatto women did not make
good mothers.
It
is often uncritically accepted that the ideas and concepts Darwin
brought together in The Origin of Species were in the
air and merely part of the spirit of the age.
Well,
yes and no. Was Darwin’s work the mere assembling and making
intelligible insights already available? What is certain is that
Natural History had reached a crisis amidst the disputes over fixity,
variation, and classification.
[SLIDE]
In
the midst of this crisis, the debate between the monogenists and
polygenists was a choice between two powerful explanations for human
variety. Although certainly related to the debate over slavery, it
would be simplistic to think that the polygenic/monogenic debate was
between pro- and antislavery advocates who wanted to wrap themselves
in the veneer of scientific respectability.
[SLIDE]
The debate of one versus
many species went to the very core of the ethics of scientific
inquiry. Supporters of slavery could be found on each side, as could
abolitionists. Those opposed to slavery included the polygenist
George Squire, who founded the short lived but significant New York
Anthropological Society.
Supporters
included John Bachman of Charleston, Audubon’s co-author
[( Audubon, John James, and John,Bachman. The
Quadrupeds of North America,
3 vols. New York: V. G. Audubon, 1851-54..)]
[SLIDE]
Bachman
was the principle scientific opponent of the polygenic theory in
America and he and Morton carried on a long public debate. Bachman
was an interesting fellow, too. He founded a liberal arts college
Newberry College, had a church and school which welcomed both Blacks
and Whites, ordained the first three Black Lutheran ministers in
America. Bachman's wife Maria painted many of the backgrounds,
insects, and plants in Audubon's works. Their daughters married
Audubon's sons and Audubon named several species for his friend, such
as the now extinct Bachman’s Warbler.
[SLIDE]
He
also owned 5 slaves, gave the prayer for the opening of the
Secessionist S. C. legislature, and during the war wrote in the
popular press about the need to apply the knowledge of Natural
History to support the Southern cause.
By
1850 the American School had succeeded in challenging the biblical
chronology of the history of the earth and its inhabitants. Freed
from doctrine, the American School hailed a new era of “free
scientific inquiry” into Nature in general, and human origins and
racial variation in particular. It is precisely at this moment that
Darwin intervenes.
[SLIDE]
Now
if we turn to Darwin, we first note that
The
Origin
of Species
is structured as one continuous argument.
It begins with an exposition on variation as it exists under
domestication, followed by an examination of variation without the
intervention of humans. Instead of focusing on fixity, Darwin took
variation and chance to be the norm. They are the central causes and
essential products of the struggle for life. Natural selection is
one basis of this of variability. In the struggle for existence, life
maintains itself through variation.
Darwin
argued instead that Nature permanently produces variety. He
proposed a new science arising from genealogy, morphology (the
comparative study of function, behavior, and environment),
embryology, and the study of rudimentary organs. This is the
structure of The
Origin
of Species that
reveals Darwin transvaluation of Natural History into the Science of
Life. Contrary
to other naturalists of his time, he sees all living things not
only as
being
connected
by descent, but also as being transformed over time.
Classification,
then,
is not about finding the order of the creator but about tracing the
lines of descent:
“All
true classification is genealogical, that community of descent is the
hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and
not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general
propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects
more or less alike.”
[SLIDE]
Darwin
did not engage in the active defense of his theory, leaving it to
friends like Thomas Huxley and Asa Gray to respond to the more heated
attacks. There were many reasons for his reticence, including his
health, which had been severely compromised during the five-year
circumnavigation of the Beagle.
It was not known what caused his chronic illness and bouts of intense
pain. Still, much of Darwin’s work was shaped by his Beagle
voyage.
As we all know, he had begun the voyage something of a a believer in
fixity and creation, and by the end, he had already begun to sketch
the outlines of the theory. But he was always an opponent of slavery.
[SLIDE]
Darwin
was not the Beagle’s
naturalist, but more the social companion for Captain Fitz-Roy.
British naval commanders were drawn from the upper class, and it was
forbidden for them to socialize even with their own junior officers.
It was a lonely life for a ship’s captain, made all the more
apparent by the suicide of the Beagle’s
first captain while sheltering in a harbor near the Straits of
Magellan. Fitz-Roy took Darwin, even though the captain was concerned
(given his interest in craniology) that the shape of Darwin’s nose
suggested that he was not up to the hardships of the voyage.
Together they shared the cramped quarters of the ship for five
years—the limited size of which became even more pronounced when
the two discovered their opposing views on slavery. Fitz-Roy held the
common view that slavery was a necessary evil because of the inherent
inferiority of the enslaved races. Slavery would ultimately civilize
the Negro, he argued, and introduce global trade that would make
colonialism and slavery unnecessary.
[SLIDE]
He
later founded the Met Office in the U.K and everyday we repeat a
phrase he coined: the weather forecast.
In
Brazil in
1832,
Darwin
observed slavery for himself, and his experiences never left him.
His son Francis remembered that his father was often awakened by
nightmares of his Brazilian experiences, and that his father would
become enraged at the mere suggestion of an apology for slavery.
Those who thought so, Darwin wrote, had never put themselves in the
position of the slave. He had begun the voyage as an ardent opponent
of slavery and related how he was often told by others that
experience in the slave countries would prove to him the inferiority
of the Negro. From Brazil he wrote to his sister that his experiences
in Brazil in particular only hardened his opposition to slavery.
[SLIDE]
In
the years between Darwin’s return from the Beagle
voyage and the publication of his major works, a transformation was
occurring in scientific knowledge. Physics and chemistry were already
becoming the provinces of specialists. The laboratory as well as the
field was becoming the locale for organizing the production of
scientific knowledge. The rapid foundation of new learned
associations and societies reflected both the move toward
specialization and the speedier dissemination of results and
theories. Science had finally turned to the
study life.
Just one governing principle remained to be overthrown: the view of
humanity as the apex of creation. In this regard, The
Origin
of Species
is a profound argument for human humility.
“As
all the organic beings, extinct and recent, which have ever lived on
this earth have to be classed together, and as all have been
connected by the finest gradations, the best, or indeed, if our
collections were nearly perfect, the only possible arrangement, would
be genealogical. Descent being on my view the hidden bond of
connection which naturalists have been seeking under the term of the
natural system.”
[SLIDE]
The
Great Chain of Being was transformed into the tree of genealogical
affinities: “I believe this simile
largely speaks the truth,” Darwin stated. The concluding paragraph
describes a “tangled bank” teeming with life and the remains of
past lives, all representing a dynamic and indeterminate Nature.
Darwin
executed more than just a rhetorical maneuver with the naming of The
Origin
of Species or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for
Life.
Darwin chose to avoid the question of human origins because to
mention it would have made his work a part of the monogenic-polygenic
debate. To make a break with that controversy, Darwin answered the
species question by demanding that we consider humans to be just one
of an infinite variety of living animals, all of which were created
by the same processes that could still be seen at work. There
was no reason to privilege humans as the special key to knowledge for
any species could
answer some or all of the questions of origins.
With
Darwin’s intervention into the monogenic/polygenic controversy, the
fixed, closed systems of classification of natural history could no
longer adequately describe the world. The Earth had to
be seen as a planet where life “from so simple a beginning endless
forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being
evolved.” This, the last sentence of the book, is the only instance
in The
Origin
of
Species
where Darwin mentions evolution. [It
is significant that “evolved” is used in a passage where
Darwin juxtaposes the fixity of the law of gravity with the in
indeterminate variation of descent with modification. Most
simply put, Linnaeus may have placed humans in the fixed chart of
classifications, but Darwin placed humans in the genealogical tree of
life; that is, directly in nature itself, and allowed that other
species could explain the origin of man.]
Darwin’s work makes us just one of many species joined in life’s
great but indeterminate struggle for existence “whilst this planet
has gone cycling according to the fixed law of gravity.”
[SLIDE]
We
should not think of Darwin’s intervention as the triumph of reason
over false science, for with the new theory came also new scientific
ideologies such as degeneracy as a hereditary taint and eugenics as a
means to free us from those taints. New forms of social control
which relied on new systems of classification appear but also never
quite left behind those of the past. These were not forms of
irrationality, and polygenesis was not a mere perversion of reason.
In fact, polygenism constituted scientific reason in its era. Our
present everyday understanding of race and identity owe much to it in
the form of “traditions and remnants” and “by the force of
inertia.” And so too do the sciences of life such as biology and
sociology insofar as they came in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to buttress eugenics.
[SLIDE]
To
conclude, the end of Natural History came with the end of the dispute
between the monogenists and polygenists—and the polygenic theory
was turned on its head by Darwin’s account of a single common line
of descent shaped by natural selection and the conditions of life.
Variation and chance became essential aspects of Nature.
That
the monogenic/polygenic debate has largely faded from history is what
Darwin hoped would be one of his notable achievements. That it has
not completely disappeared but is instead constantly invoked not only
in the sciences whenever they forget their own history, but also by
those who cling to notions of essential differences and unchanging
identities --- this sad fact of everyday life would no doubt
disappoint him.
_____________
