Abstract

In The Origin of Species, Darwin took care to avoid treating the question of the place of human beings in his theory and in the animal world: but he could scarcely avoid this question that was one of the major preoccupations of most of those who first commented on his work. In The Descent of Man (1871), he chose to tackle it head on. In that work, Darwin proposed that the sensory, and more broadly the intellectual and moral prerogatives found in man, including the aesthetic appreciation of “beauty”, were shared by many animal species. He maintained that sexual selection, or the struggle for reproduction was responsible for the differences between males and females. For him, sexual selection was also the cause of complex forms of behaviour which, in humans, were probably the origin of the formation of human groups, known as races, and the development of cultures. Darwin the scientist and Darwin the Victorian male were thus engaged in a discussion in which gender prejudice and imperial pride were fully implicated.