Product Description

No book made a greater impact on the intellectual world of its first Victorian readers nor has had such an enduring influence on our thinking on science, literature, theology and philosophy. In The Descent of Man, Darwin addresses the crucial question of the origins, evolution and racial divergence of mankind, that he had deliberately left out of On the Origin of Species. And the evidence he presents forces us to question what it is that makes us uniquely human.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80577 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 864 pages

From the Author
'I find an addictive fascination in his Victorian prose style, quite apart from the feeling one gets of having been ushered into the presence of one of the great minds of all time.' Richard Dawkins

About the Author
CHARLES DARWIN (1809-82) was an evolutionary biologist, best known for his controversial and ground-breaking On the Origin of Species (1856). JAMES MOORE is Reader in History of Science & Technology at the Open University. He is currently working on a biography of Alfred Russel Wallace. ADRIAN DESMOND is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Biology Department at UCL. He is the author of a 2-volume biography of Huxley and is editing Huxley's family correspondence.

Excerpted from The Descent of Man (New Editions) by Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
'Humanity is the missing guest at the feast of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859. The famous "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is a calculated understatement matched, in the annals of science, only by Watson and Crick's "it has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material".
By the time Darwin finally got around to throwing that light with the publication of The Descent of Man in 1871, it might have seemed a good idea to separate it into two books: Sexual Selection followed by the Descent of Man. But Darwin knew what he was doing.

The distinguished American philosopher Daniel Dennett has credited Darwin with the greatest idea ever to occur to a human mind. This was natural selection, the survival of the fittest, of course, and I would include sexual selection as part of the same idea. But Darwin was not only a deep thinker, he was a naturalist of encyclopaedic knowledge and (which by no means necessarily follows) the ability to hold it in his head and deploy it in constructive directions.

He was a master encyclopaedist, who collated huge quantities of information and observations solicited from naturalists all around the world, each gentleman meticulously acknowledged for having "attended to" the subject and sometimes complimented as a "reliable observer". I find an addictive fascination in his Victorian prose style, quite apart from the feeling one gets of having been ushered into the presence of one of the great minds of all time.'

Customer Reviews

Well ahead of its time
Aside from the fascinating (and mostly accurate) accounts of natural and sexual selection, confirmed decades later by new discoveries in the fossil record and the advent of DNA, this volume presents a fascinating letter from Darwin to Wallace confirming what a superficial examination of species makes apparent: that Darwin was well aware that 'blending' inheritance couldn't be right, and that hereditary traits must be passed on by some particulate process. This is obvious when we realise that our parents are male and female, but we are not born intermediate hermaphrodites. In this sense, and in so many others, Darwin was well ahead of his time.

It is naive, as Dawkins points out in his introduction, to consider the views of this Victorian gentleman (politically conservative, scientifically radical) through post-Nazi hindsight. Contrary to popular belief, Darwinism does not excuse mass extermination in pursuit of 'perfection'; indeed, lengthy passages of this book are given over to emphasising that 'savage' races (an uncontroversial label at the time, whose meaning has since drifted) are not separate species or sub-human. Darwin's limited recommendations for improving ourselves must be considered with this qualification; let us not forget that at the time such views were entirely acceptable.

Darwin accounts for racial differences through sexual selection: superficial but diverse surface differences masking underlyingly highly similar organisms. Skip forward 130 years, and Dawkins's introduction also reminds us that DNA has re-affirmed this and led many scientists to advocate the abandonment of 'race' as a biological concept; through humanity passing through what Dawkins calls an "evolutionary bottleneck" in the last few thousand years, there is more genetic difference between any two groups of chimpanzees than there is between any of the human 'races'.

A great book, which can be dipped into through the highly-entertaining index. Darwin's knowledge of natural history was phenomenal; here we can read at length and leisure the amazing range of creatures' adaptive behaviours, with a plausible explanation of how they share a common ancestry.

Wonderful, in each sense of the word.

Please read and judge for yourself.
A seminal work, such as this, deserves to be read as it represents original, source material for ideas that rocked the world. Unfortunately Darwin is often criticised by people who may never have accessed his original work but take a political and chronologically privileged dislike to how this important source material may, or may not, have been subsequently interpreted. I refer of course to the above review.
Such works as this need to be read with an appreciation of the context in which they were written i.e. a long time ago and within an entirely different world view. Cheap, agenda-ridden, pseudo-intellectual critisism made with the benefit of hindsight and taking a twenty-first century perspective will hopefully not dissuade people from accessing fantastic source material such as this and making their own minds up. Read it, and make your own mind up (before somebody else does it for you).

Brilliant
This book is brilliant. However, you must read it in it's own time. Darwin wrote this at a time when people saw humans as being at the top of the ladder that was evolution. This was also a time when Europeans thought themselves to be superior to the rest of the world. This seemed a natural conclusions since they were more advanced, richer and had conquered almost the whole world.

This book is beutifull. Darwin had obviously found mass condemnation from The Origin Of Species,. but also mass acceptance by many, especially from the scientific community. This book is written by a true scientist, who backs up his arguments with as much evidence as possible, but without going overboard. His target audience is not the ignorant who refuse to accept evolution regardless of the available evidence. When read in context, and freed from the fear of mass condemnation which haunted Darwin throughout The Origin Of Species we are given a chance to really see Darwin's genius. When reading this I got the impression that Darwin, freed from the narrow minded ideas of his own time, and given a slight push, could have taken the theory of evolution and advanced it to it's modern state.

It is true that Darwin's theory has been twisted as a justification of the holocaust, and other racial crimes. However, it must be pointed out that Evolution is not alone, many theories can be twisted to justify evil. Also, there is another way of looking at the ladder theory of evolution, which is the way in which the British empire took it. The British helped out other peoples throughout the world, and the plan at least was to stand them up on their own two feet.

There is a very interesting point in thie edition. Karl Marx loved the idea of survival of the fittest. He interpreted man as a being which always advanced to the next level. He therefore concluded that since Capitalism would collapse, something he spent his life writing about, that man would implement the better system, ie Communism. However, Darwin comments that man does not instinctivly advance to the next level, commenting that many "savages" don't advance. Also, neither did the Romans, who were quite content to continue as they were, disproving Marx's supposition.

This is an excellant book, which must be read in it's time, not with a modern mind, or with retrospective knowledge of the holocaust.