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Notes
Nor, as indicated above, would I collapse sexual selection into “intermarriage” as the outcome of the process. It suggests, as Hoquet seems to imply in his discussion, that the human practices/cultures of Victorian (and post-Victorian) courtship and mate choice were (and are) sufficient to provoke and sustain Darwin’s conception of sexual selection.
Roderick Buchanan has analysed the ways in which Darwin’s Victorian assumptions about gender and sex roles confused his interpretation of some critical barnacle observations, Buchanan (2017).
With reference to Milam’s apposite quotation of Wilde’s famous affirmation of “art for art’s sake” of the aesthetic movement: Huxley is supposed to have forbidden Wilde the house after one of his daughters introduced this notorious personification of late Victorian decadence into the Huxley home (Richards 2017, 597n136).
This included his careful presentation of his religious views, or lack of them, and his purported materialism, raised by Hamlin. Despite some early gestures towards materialism and its popular association with Darwinism, Darwin discouraged or dissociated himself from those of his followers, such as Haeckel, Vogt or Aveling, who adopted an aggressively anti-religious, materialist or atheistic stance. In private correspondence, Darwin declared that he had never been an atheist. The standard view is that he moved from an early orthodox Christianity to late life agnosticism. By the time of the Origin, Darwin was a deist whose position was that there was “space both for a naturalistic science of species production and for a Creator whose laws made this process possible” (Brooke 2009, 267). He left (possibly expedient) well-known references to a Creator in all six editions of the Origin. In writing the Descent, he was committed to a naturalistic account of human evolution and of beauty and its appreciation, along with mind and morality, and this seems to have been sufficient for his purposes without the need for overt materialism.
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Richards, E. Author’s response. Metascience 27, 411–420 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-018-0332-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-018-0332-0