scholarly journals Contextualizando The descent of man, de Charles Darwin: debates calorosos persistem após 150 anos de sua publicação

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Anderson Ricardo Carlos ◽  
Maria Elice de Brzezinski Prestes
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Descent Of Man

O presente artigo faz uma discussão do livro de Charles Darwin (1809-1882) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, de 1871, cuja primeira edição completa 150 anos de publicação em 2021. Embora tão famoso, e importante, quanto A origem das espécies, o Descent é, contudo, menos lido e o mais controvertido livro de Darwin, desde seu lançamento até os dias atuais. Os objetivos são o de recolher aspectos do contexto em que o livro foi escrito e problematizar algumas das questões polêmicas que o cercam. Para isso, inicialmente, por aproximações aos estudos de Darwin publicados a partir dos anos 1980, a abordagem historiográfica adotada é caracterizada como pós-positivista, contextualista e enriquecida por teorias multiculturais do conhecimento. O escopo e objetivos do Descent são apresentados, tendo em vista seu autor como representante da elite intelectual inglesa do século XIX. A seleção das polêmicas vivas hoje ocorreu em dois fóruns acadêmicos de 2021, uma disciplina sobre Darwin e um congresso internacional de estudos metacientíficos da biologia. As polêmicas foram reunidas em três grupos: 1) a escola craniométrica e a hierarquia das raças e civilizações; 2) a seleção sexual e os estereótipos culturais de gênero; 3) a seleção natural no âmbito humano e os movimentos eugênicos. As conclusões são desenhadas em convergência com os achados da historiografia recente, reconhecendo que a construção da teoria evolucionista de Darwin se deu na interação de mão dupla entre a ciência e a cultura, como é da natureza da construção de todo conhecimento científico. O seu trabalho teórico reflete elementos da sociedade vitoriana, com a qual o naturalista compartilhava as virtudes e os vícios.

Evolutionary Writings

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Darwin
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Global Impact ◽  
The World ◽  
Correspondence Project ◽  
Darwin Correspondence Project ◽  
Descent Of Man ◽  
Controversial Nature ◽  
Beagle Voyage

‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’ On topics ranging from intelligent design and climate change to the politics of gender and race, the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin occupy a pivotal position in contemporary public debate. This volume brings together the key chapters of his most important and accessible books, including the Journal of Researches on the Beagle voyage (1845), the Origin of Species (1871), and the Descent of Man, along with the full text of his delightful autobiography. They are accompanied by generous selections of responses from Darwin’s nineteenth-century readers from across the world. More than anything, they give a keen sense of the controversial nature of Darwin’s ideas, and his position within Victorian debates about man’s place in nature. The wide-ranging introduction by James A. Secord, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, explores the global impact and origins of Darwin’s work and the reasons for its unparalleled significance today.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

Fatal asymmetries

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Luis Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Artificial Selection ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In Descent of Man, Charles Darwin noted the impact of political institutions on natural selection. He thought that institutions such as asylums or hospitals may deter natural selection; however, he did not reach a decisive answer. Questions remain as to whether the selective impacts of political institutions, which in Darwin’s terms may be referred to as “artificial selection,” are compatible with natural selection, and if so, to what extent. This essay argues that currently there appears to be an essential mismatch between nature and political institutions. Unfitted institutions put exogenous and disproportionate pressures on living beings. This creates consequences for what is postulated as the condition of basic equivalence, which allows species and individuals to enjoy similar chances of survival under natural circumstances. Thus, contrary to Darwin’s expectations, it is sustained that assumed natural selection is not discouraged but becomes exacerbated by political institutions. In such conditions, selection becomes primarily artificial and perhaps mainly political, with consequences for species’ evolutionary future.

Islands of Discovery: Scientific Curiosity in the Works of Darwin, Huxley and Wells

Dark Paradise ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Thomas Henry Huxley ◽  
Scientific Curiosity ◽  
Unknown Species ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Theories Of Evolution ◽  
Descent Of Man

Intrigued by the descriptions of hitherto unknown species, Victorian naturalists embarked on Pacific journeys to study new flora and fauna. The third chapter follows a young Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley as they develop theories that would challenge the assumed boundaries between “civilized” and “savage” man. Their often overlooked travel narratives, The Voyage of the Beagleand The Voyage of the Rattlesnake respectively, displayed not only emerging theories of evolution and natural selection, but also early biological and anthropological observations that questioned whether Pacific islanders were truly so different from British ones. These radical new ideas, spurred on by later works such as Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man, influenced novelists to use the Pacific islands as a testing ground for new theories of regressive evolution. Capitalizing on the emerging genre of “science fiction,” H.G. Wells imagined the Pacific in The Island of Doctor Moreau not as an idyllic paradise but as a horrific nightmare that reduced all islanders, British and native, to their most bestial forms displaying distinctly Pacific resonances and the changing British perspectives on the islands.

Chapter VI: Darwin

1980 ◽  
Vol 25 (S1) ◽  
pp. 34-48
Author(s):  
Richard Albert Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Mental Development ◽  
Fiftieth Anniversary ◽  
Unique Characteristic ◽  
Main Trend ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Descent Of Man ◽  
Animal World

In this year falls the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Charles Darwin—one of those rare individuals who have altered the main trend of thought and inaugurated a new attitude and a new outlook in human affairs.—JULIAN HUXLEY, Contemporary Review, October 1932.Language has justly been considered as one of the chief distinctions between man and the lower animals. But man, as a highly competent judge, Archbishop Whately, remarks, ‘is not the only animal that can make use of language to express what is passing in his mind, and can understand, more or less, what is so expressed by another.’—DARWIN, Descent of Man, Chap. III.The investigation of language, as pointed out in the last chapter, had been carried on for a hundred years in the belief that language was a unique characteristic of man, and did not extend to the animal world beneath him. But with the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871 the whole problem of language was suddenly expanded into a much wider region. Darwin, in that book, distinctly challenged the human boundaries that had been set to language as being artificial and arbitrary, and extended the problem over into the animal world, maintaining that the difference between the language of man and the cries of animals was not a difference in kind, as had been formerly thought, but a difference in degree only, a difference in definiteness of connotation and distinctness of articulation. This difference in language followed naturally, he maintained, upon the difference in degree of their mental development.

Natural Histories of Form

2020 ◽  
Vol 151 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Basis ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Aesthetic Sense ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
Descent Of Man

Arguing that aesthetic preference generates the historical forms of human racial and gender difference in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin offers an alternative account of aesthetic autonomy to the Kantian or idealist account. Darwin understands the aesthetic sense to be constitutive of scientific knowledge insofar as scientific knowledge entails the natural historian’s fine discrimination of formal differences and their dynamic interrelations within a unified system. Natural selection itself works this way, Darwin argues in The Origin of Species; in The Descent of Man he makes the case for the natural basis of the aesthetic while relativizing particular aesthetic judgments. Libidinally charged—in Kantian phrase, “interested”—the aesthetic sense nevertheless comes historically adrift from its functional origin in rites of courtship.

scholarly journals Henrique Vaz, Darwin and Cassirer: Being Human and Transcendence

Open Theology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 258-267
Author(s):  
Agnaldo Portugal
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Ernst Cassirer ◽  
Biological Approach ◽  
Culture Centered ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract This article compares the approach of the Brazilian philosopher Henrique Vaz to the ones of Charles Darwin and Ernst Cassirer about human nature. Firstly, the text expounds Darwin’s ideas about human species in his The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), showing how the strictly biological approach is insightful in many respects, but becomes insufficient to understand humans in some other important points. Secondly, the article argues that those insufficiencies of Darwin’s theory may be overcome by the culture centered understanding of the human phenomenon held by Ernst Cassirer. Some other inadequacies are shown in Cassirer’s account, however, which can be resolved - preserving the virtues of both his and Darwin’s theories - by Henrique Vaz’s dialectic conception of humans as beings towards transcendence.

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