A crucial question for Darwin

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What it means to be human is a crucial question for Darwin. You get an interesting impression of this from his writings. If you read On the Origin of Species, for example, there’s hardly anything in it about human beings. There is one sentence where he says light will be thrown on the origin of man and its history. And there are a few other examples that involve people.

What needs to be emphasized is that the core idea of On the Origin of Species, evolution by natural selection, comes from thinking about humans and what it means to be human. It comes from the work of political economy by Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. When Darwin was thinking about why some individuals survive in the struggle for existence and others don’t make it, he was thinking about people; he was thinking about you and me.

I think it’s really important to realise that throughout Darwin’s theoretical thought, this question about humanity and the idea of what it means to have a mind and be part of the natural world at the same time – this is the core of the question he’s trying to answer. We can see this in his later writings when he publishes The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relationship to Sex in 1871. This is a two-volume work, which argues in the first part that humans come from lower animals. In making this argument, Darwin shows how a whole range of different characteristics – our morals, our belief in God, our love of music – are in various ways present within lower animals.

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Race and ethnicity

The second half of The Descent of Man considers why different races exist. The answer for Darwin has to do with sexual selection. In most of the animal kingdom, females do the choosing. That’s why you have very brightly coloured male birds and often rather dull-coloured female birds. In humans, it’s the other way around: men choose, and women are selected. Now, The Descent of Man, in this way, intervenes in a whole range of debates that continue to the present day about race, gender and identity.

And in many ways, frankly, Darwin’s thoughts here are quite complicated. Darwin was absolutely opposed to slavery. For him, the worst experience of his life occurred while he was in Brazil. There, he heard and saw enslaved people whipped and tortured. To Darwin, this represented the lowest possible aspect of human nature.

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On the other hand, another shocking experience happened when he went to Tierra del Fuego. There, he saw people who he thought were on the bottom rung of humanity. The people he saw were daubed with paint and spoke what he viewed as a crude, simple language. They were even potentially cannibals. For Darwin, this event showed something about potentially who we are and from where we come. Overall, Darwin was shocked by his experience with these supposedly primitive people.

He was also particularly shocked because three of these people had been on the Beagle voyage with him. Having been captured on an earlier voyage, they were brought back to their homes where they were supposed to help sow the seeds of civilisation. Nevertheless, they had re-adapted to their local environment and the people around them.

Darwin’s view of women

Darwin also had a similar view of women. Indeed, Darwin believed women were at a lower evolutionary stage in certain ways. For example, they had the distinct characteristics typical of women of their time; they were caring and more domestic-oriented than men. On the other hand, men were more aggressive, but they were also more mentally capable, inventive and creative.

Yet if you look at Darwin’s correspondence, he’s very open to contributions from a vast range of women. About 5% of his correspondence is with women, and many of them contribute significant findings to his research. Darwin welcomes them in terms of what they can provide. He also treats his daughter as someone essential to engage with intellectually.

So, again, his views are complicated. Simply put, Darwin’s view is mostly characteristic of his time. That said, he opposes John Stuart Mill’s views on the subjugation of women very strongly in The Descent of Man. He doesn’t think that Mill is right.

Overall, we need to think of Darwin as a relevant figure and as a figure, even today, who’s part of an ongoing debate on how to look back at the past. These ambiguities, I think, are characteristic of many other figures who are publicly debated. In that sense, Darwin is no more a scientific saint than, say, Abraham Lincoln is a saintly politician. They both have different dimensions, and we need to learn and think about how to understand them.

Part of the natural world

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When thinking about what it means to be human, Darwin often drew upon things that connect us directly to the natural world. Take our bodies, for example. They are part of what we can see in the world around us. We can also see something quintessentially human in them, such as a smile. We can study these human attributes in relation to the way we evolved. These are things that, in a certain sort of sense, we may share with other creatures.

Darwin was also very much someone who believed that small things could add up into very large things. Although this aspect of change was debated in his time, Darwin understood it, and I think he would understand how it applies to the ongoing climate catastrophe. The climate change happening in our daily life is occurring through small changes. Although it can be quite spectacular at times, it’s easy to suggest these kinds of changes come and go.

Nevertheless, Darwin certainly would have understood that these small environmental changes added up over a long time will lead to a huge change. He would recognise that we really need to come to grips with this.

Was there a Darwinian revolution?

It’s crucial to use Darwin to think through these issues we’ve mentioned. Yet was there really a Darwinian revolution in his own time?

Well, that’s a term that wasn’t really used much in the 19th century. In many ways, this term was invented by evolutionary biologists in the 1950s and 1960s. It tells us something about current thought, but it gives too much importance to Darwin as a single figure.

When I think about Darwin, I like to think about who he was and what he represented, and how this can lead us to understand other aspects of his time. Darwin was very good at identifying critical issues, but he wasn’t the only one. And it isn’t as though there was some sudden Darwinian revolution which transformed in a moment the way we considered the natural world. Instead, our thinking has evolved across long periods of history while involving many different figures and many different kinds of people.

Darwin’s scientific approach

Darwin was somebody who was always coming up with ideas whenever he approached something. I looked at some of Darwin’s earliest geological notebooks on the Beagle. I was very interested in considering if you went on a trip like the Beagle, what are you going to do the first time you land? You know, this is your big chance. Your dad thinks you’re going to become a wastrel. He’s really worried about you. You’re there on this desert island. And what are you going to do?

Well, Darwin immediately starts doing very detailed work on volcanoes, but at the same time, he’s comparing them with ones that are in the Mediterranean, thousands of miles away. In other words, from the beginning, he’s thinking globally. He’s making these speculations. The unusual thing about Darwin is he pulls these two different things together.

I think that was a great virtue of his, but it was also a problem for him. When speaking about species, many people during Darwin’s time considered this issue of species outside the realm of science. In the 1830s, this issue potentially belongs to French radicals, working-class individuals demanding that the lower classes have more rights.

Indeed, whole groups of people are arguing for these things, but Darwin doesn’t want to be associated with them. When he first tells a scientific friend of his, Joseph Hooker, that he’s coming up with this theory, he half-jokingly says it’s like confessing a murder. In other words, people will think they are dealing with somebody who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, a mere speculator.

But Darwin wasn’t a mere speculator. He was somebody who combined broad speculation with detailed scientific work and observations. It’s that combination that I think makes him quite unusual and quite a significant model for thinking about what science could be in the 19th century and what a scientist could be today.

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Darwin’s thoughts on human nature

Secord, J. (2008), ‘Introduction’, in Charles Darwin, Evolutionary Writings (Oxford University Press), vii-xxxvii.

Darwin Correspondence Project. (n.d.). Correspondence with women.

Darwin Correspondence Project. (n.d.). Darwin’s queries on expression.

Darwin's thoughts on human nature