Excerpt of Banquet at Delmonico's by Barry Werth
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Darwin had long avoided publishing his ideas on human evolution,
letting Huxley and others speculate before him on the effects of natural
selection and the universal linkages between people and animals. But
by 1867, eight years after Origin and following two years of crushing
illness - vomiting, nausea, eczema, and an "accursed stomach" that for
months on end left him sleepless and all but unable to work - he decided
he could wait no longer. His "man-essay," as he had described it to Gray,
had grown into two parts. The first, due to be published at the end of the
month, addressed the conjoined questions of whether man, like any other
species, descended from earlier forms; the manner of human development;
and, most explosively, for this had been his urgent agenda since he
first recorded his thoughts on evolution in secret notebooks thirty-five
years earlier, "the value of the differences between the so-called races of
man" - the race question. A follow-up book - a rare sudden respite from
his health problems was now letting him surge ahead, writing four hundred
pages in three months, and adding, for the first time, photographs -
would address the similarities in feelings and expression between humans
and animals. Hence his interest in Laura Bridgman.
Darwin informed Gray that he had finished work on the first
volume - The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, now at the
printer’s - and would soon send him a copy. "Parts, as to the moral sense,
will I daresay aggravate you," he wrote, "and if I hear from you I shall
probably receive a few stabs from your polished stiletto of a pen."
Polite jests aside, Darwin and Gray had long since argued themselves
into a stalemate on many fronts. Darwin had confessed to Gray a year
earlier that he was having great difficulty explaining the animal underpinnings
of civilized behavior - the "moral sense" - and he dreaded another
onslaught of scalding criticism, public and private, from Gray and
others. Many people might be prepared for Darwin to claim that man
physically descended from apes, as Huxley and several other widely
respected naturalists had already done, through the process of natural
selection - "survival of the fittest," to use Spencer’s phrase. But how did
one explain a mechanism for discerning right from wrong? Good from
evil? Righteousness from sin? What animal ancestry, he knew he’d be
asked, could possibly account for such virtues as a love of justice, or of
Jesus?
All these added up to the "highest and most interesting problem for
the naturalist," which Darwin now sought to answer. He had come to attribute
morality to a combination of three evolutionary forces: instinctive
sympathy born (as in many other species, notably dogs and monkeys) of
family and tribal ties in the struggle for survival; habit ingrained by social
behavior; and education. At the same time, natural science contained for
Darwin, who grew up in a world of deep-seated antiroyalist and anti-
Anglican leanings, a political thrust. Nothing so appalled him as blind
Christian acceptance of the immorality and sufferings of genocide and
slavery - nothing except the use of science to justify that indifference.
Loath to offend a pious wife and friends like Gray, he withheld from
making direct attacks on religion in his new work, seeking instead to
show only how such creeds might have evolved. "How so many absurd
rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated,
we do not know," he wrote in Descent,
but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during
the early years of life, whilst the brain is impressible, appears to
acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very nature of an
Darwin had made up his mind about racial origins during his voyage,
where he first encountered the "shocking barbarity" of slavery in Brazil,
then primitive "savages" in Tierra del Fuego, but only now felt confident
enough in his research to publish his theory. Two views of racial descent
recently competed in Western thought, neither egalitarian. People either
believed all humans descended from a single stock (monogenism), and
that while the entire species had degraded since Creation, some races,
usually those in hot climates, degraded more than others; or else that the
races were created separately and hierarchically, with distinct and unequal
endowments (polygenism). Either way, whites had no difficulty deeming
themselves intellectually and morally superior. Darwin, though he shared
in the general self-congratulation, held the radical notion that racial distinctions
were fundamentally cosmetic: that features such as skin color
and hair texture were simply caused by sexual selection - different beauty
standards and mating preferences among different groups. However disturbing
the notion to contemporary Western sensibilities, he believed
that all mankind was one species. As he now predicted confidently in
Descent, "when the principles of evolution are generally accepted, as they
surely will be before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the
polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death."
Excerpted from Banquet at Delmonico's
by Barry Werth. Copyright © 2009 by Barry Werth. Excerpted by
permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
