history of man essay

There is no great and no small To the Soul that maketh all: And where it cometh, all things are; And it cometh everywhere. I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.

T here is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it.

The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, 'Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things. Human life as containing this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws, and wide and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of self-reliance . It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures — in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius — anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; — because their law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us , as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal allusions. A true aspirant, therefore, never needs to look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but sweeter, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea, further, in every fact and circumstance, — in the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows from mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use it in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

The world exists for the education of each man.

There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Everything tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have anything to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them forever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way. "What is History," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?" This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court, and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, — the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras in my own mind.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, — must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been known. The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be. So stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches, before a fanatic Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like; and we aim to master intellectually the steps, and reach the same height or the same degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, — all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, — is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now .

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the place and state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the value which is given to wood by carving led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone through this process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints' days and image-worship, we have, as it were, been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have the sufficient reason.

The difference between men is in their principle of association.

Some men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet , to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and, far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species; through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and, whilst I look at it, its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how changed, when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows!

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious.

There is at the surface infinite variety of things; at the centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man in which we recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius. We have the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were, and what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us again in their literature , in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their architecture , a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square, — a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in sculpture , the "tongue on the balance of expression," a multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action, and never transgressing the ideal serenity; like votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and, though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and decorum of their dance. Thus, of the genius of one remarkable people, we have a fourfold representation: and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works; and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest, which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the books of all ages. What is Guido's Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as the horses in it are only a morning cloud. If any one will but take pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the chain of affinity.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely, — but, by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature, and can then draw him at will in every attitude. So Roos "entered into the inmost nature of a sheep." I knew a draughtsman employed in a public survey, who found that he could not sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first explained to him. In a certain state of thought is the common origin of very diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of awakening other souls to a given activity.

It has been said, that "common souls pay with what they do; nobler souls with that which they are." And why? Because a profound nature awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture, or of pictures, addresses.

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must be explained from individual history, or must remain words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us, — kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, the roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St. Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old prediction to us, and converting into things the words and signs which we had heard and seen without heed. A lady, with whom I was riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her to wait , as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world. I remember one summer day, in the fields, my companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches, — a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the common architectural scroll to abut a tower.

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances, we invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. "The custom of making houses and tombs in the living rock," says Heeren, in his Researches on the Ethiopians, "determined very naturally the principal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns, already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that, when art came to the assistance of nature, it could not move on a small scale without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat porches and wings, have been, associated with those gigantic halls before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen, or lean on the pillars of the interior?"

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest trees with all their boughs to a festal or solemn arcade, as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when the bareness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals, without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw, and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir, and spruce.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish, as well as the aerial proportions and perspective, of vegetable beauty.

In like manner, all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its magnificent era never gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in summer, and to Babylon for the winter.

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil, or the advantages of a market, had induced to build towns. Agriculture, therefore, was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. And in these late and civil countries of England and America, these propensities still fight out the old battle in the nation and in the individual. The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season, and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from month to month. In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the cumulative values of long residence are the restraints on the itineracy of the present day. The antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in individuals, as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to predominate. A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon, and roams through all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and associates as happily, as beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his faculties of observation, which yield him points of interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind, through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence or content which finds all the elements of life in its own soil; and which has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his states of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as his onward thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or series belongs.

The primeval world, — the Fore-World, as the Germans say, — I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses, — of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Ph;oebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined, and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint, and take furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole head. The manners of that period are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal qualities, courage, address, self-command, justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are not known. A sparse population and want make every man his own valet, cook, butcher, and soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to wonderful performances. Such are the Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. "After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and, taking an axe, began to split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like." Throughout his army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any, and sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax discipline as great boys have?

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old literature, is, that the persons speak simply, — speak as persons who have great good sense without knowing it, before yet the reflective habit has become the predominant habit of the mind. Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health, with the finest physical organization in the world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses should,—— that is, in good taste. Such things have continued to be made in all ages, and are now, wherever a healthy physique exists; but, as a class, from their superior organization, they have surpassed all. They combine the energy of manhood with the engaging unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction of these manners is that they belong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his being once a child; besides that there are always individuals who retain these characteristics. A person of childlike genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains, and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had, it seems, the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, — when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do, as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the world, he has the same key. When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer. Hence, evidently, the tripod, the priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every fact, every word.

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.

I have seen the first monks and anchorets without crossing seas or centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me with such negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty beneficiary, begging in the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual's private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with the tyranny, — is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forms, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped, and how the Pyramids were built, better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds like them new perils to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation. How many times in the history of the world has the Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his own household! "Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, "how is it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?"

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in literature, — in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities.

What a range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus! Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts, and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history of religion with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friend of man; stands between the unjust "justice" of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their account. But where it departs from the Calvinistic Christianity, and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it represents a state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the self-defence of man against this untruth, namely, a discontent with the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would steal, if it could, the fire of the Creator, and live apart from him, and independent of him. The Prometheus Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to all time are the details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakespeare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched his mother earth, his strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and, in all his weakness, both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature. The power of music, the power of poetry to unfix, and, as it were, clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations of form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were; but men and women are only half human. Every animal of the barn-yard, the field, and the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul, — ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events! In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine the men of sense , in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race, remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every word should be a thing. These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Helen, and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as real to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving them, he writes out freely his humor, and gives them body tohis own imagination. And although that poem be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of customary images, — awakens the reader's invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand." All the fictions of the Middle Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit "to bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind."

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a garland and a rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle, even a mature reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle Genelas; and, indeed, all the postulates of elfin annals, — that the fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not speak; and the like, — I find true in Concord, however they might be in Cornwall or Bretagne.

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is always beautiful and always liable to calamity in this world. —————-

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another history goes daily forward, — that of the external world, — in which he is not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also the correlative of nature. His power consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air and appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense population, complex interests, and antagonist power, and you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded, that is, by such a profile and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbot's shadow;

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and Laplace need myriads of ages and thick-strewn celestial areas.

One may say a gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the nature of Newton's mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring the affinities and repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws of organization. Does not the eye of the human embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood? Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the refinements and decorations of civil society? Here also we are reminded of the action of man on man. A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day. Who knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, any more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see to-morrow for the first time.

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures for each pupil. He, too, shall pass through the whole cycle of experience. He shall collect into a focus the rays of nature. History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described that goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and experiences; — his own form and features by their exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold; the Apples of Knowledge; the Argonautic Expedition; the calling of Abraham; the building of the Temple; the Advent of Christ; Dark Ages; the Revival of Letters; the Reformation; the discovery of new lands; the opening of new sciences, and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? As old as the Caucasian man, — perhaps older, — these creatures have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has passed from one to the other. What connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty chemical elements, and the historical eras? Nay, what does history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What light does it shed on those mysteries which we hide under the names Death and Immortality? Yet every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighbouring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succour have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, — from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, — if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

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Darwin: From the Origin of Species to the Descent of Man

This entry offers a broad historical review of the origin and development of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection through the initial Darwinian phase of the “Darwinian Revolution” up to the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871. The development of evolutionary ideas before Darwin’s work has been treated in the separate entry evolutionary thought before Darwin . Several additional aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution and his biographical development are dealt with in other entries in this encyclopedia (see the entries on Darwinism ; species ; natural selection ; creationism ). The remainder of this entry will focus on aspects of Darwin’s theory not developed in the other entries. It will also maintain a historical and textual approach. Other entries in this encyclopedia cited at the end of the article and the bibliography should be consulted for discussions beyond this point. The issues will be examined under the following headings:

1.1 Historiographical Issues

1.2 darwin’s early reflections, 2.1. the concept of natural selection.

• 2.2. The Argument of the Published Origin

3.1 The Popular Reception of Darwin’s Theory

3.2 the professional reception of darwin’s theory, 4.1 the genesis of darwin’s descent, 4.2 darwin on mental powers, 4.3 the ethical theory of the descent of man.

• 4.4 The Reception of the Descent

5. Summary and Conclusion

Other internet resources, related entries, acknowledgments, 1. the origins of darwin’s theory.

Charles Darwin’s version of transformism has been the subject of massive historical and philosophical scholarship almost unparalleled in any other area of the history of science. This includes the continued flow of monographic studies and collections of articles on particular aspects of Darwin’s theory (Prestes 2023; R. J. Richards and Ruse 2016; Ruse 2013a, 2009a,b,c; Ruse and Richards 2009; Hodge and Radick 2009; Hösle and Illies 2005; Gayon 1998; Bowler 1996; Depew and Weber 1995; Kohn 1985a). The continuous production of popular and professional biographical studies on Darwin provides ever new insights (Ruse et al. 2013a; Johnson 2012; Desmond and Moore 1991, 2009; Browne 1995, 2002; Bowlby 1990; Bowler 1990). In addition, major editing projects on Darwin’s manuscripts and the completion of the Correspondence , project through the entirety of Darwin’s life, continue to reveal details and new insights into the issues surrounding Darwin’s own thought (Keynes [ed.] 2000; Burkhardt et al. [eds] 1985–2023; Barrett et al. [eds.] 1987). The Cambridge Darwin Online website (see Other Internet Resources ) serves as an international clearinghouse for this worldwide Darwinian scholarship, functioning as a repository for electronic versions of all the original works of Darwin, including manuscripts and related secondary materials. It also supplies a continuously updated guide to current literature.

A long tradition of scholarship has interpreted Darwin’s theory to have originated from a framework defined by endemic British natural history, a British tradition of natural theology defined particularly by William Paley (1743–1805), the methodological precepts of John Herschel (1792–1871), developed in his A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830 [1987]), and the geological theories of Charles Lyell (1797–1875). His conversion to the uniformitarian geology of Charles Lyell and to Lyell’s advocacy of “deep” geological time during the voyage of the HMS Beagle (December 1831–October 1836), has been seen as fundamental in his formation (Norman 2013; Herbert 2005; Hodge 1983). Complementing this predominantly anglophone historiography has been the social-constructivist analyses emphasizing the origins of Darwin’s theories in British Political Economy (Young 1985: chps. 2, 4, 5). It has also been argued that a primary generating source of Darwin’s inquiries was his involvement with the British anti-slavery movement, a concern reaching back to his revulsion against slavery developed during the Beagle years (Desmond and Moore 2009).

A body of recent historiography, on the other hand, drawing on the wealth of manuscripts and correspondence that have become available since the 1960s (online at Darwin online “Papers and Manuscripts” section, see Other Internet Resources ) has de-emphasized some of the novelty of Darwin’s views and questions have been raised regarding the validity of the standard biographical picture of the early Darwin. These materials have drawn attention to previously ignored aspects of Darwin’s biography. In particular, the importance of his Edinburgh period from 1825–27, largely discounted in importance by Darwin himself in his late Autobiography , has been seen as critical for his subsequent development (Desmond and Moore 1991; Hodge 1985). As a young medical student at the University of Edinburgh (1825–27), Darwin developed a close relationship with the comparative anatomist Robert Edmond Grant (1793–1874) through the student Plinian Society, and in many respects Grant served as Darwin’s first mentor in science in the pre- Beagle years (Desmond and Moore 1991, chp. 1). Through Grant he was exposed to the transformist theories of Jean Baptiste Lamarck and the Cuvier-Geoffroy debate centered on the Paris Muséum nationale d’histoire naturelle (see entry on evolutionary thought before Darwin , Section 4).

These differing interpretive frameworks make investigations into the origins of Darwin’s theory an active area of historical research. The following section will explore these origins.

In its historical origins, Darwin’s theory was different in kind from its main predecessors in important ways (Ruse 2013b; Sloan 2009a; see also the entry on evolutionary thought before Darwin ). Viewed against a longer historical scenario, Darwin’s theory does not deal with cosmology or the origins of the world and life through naturalistic means, and therefore was more restricted in its theoretical scope than its main predecessors influenced by the reflections of Georges Louis LeClerc de Buffon (1707–1788), Johann Herder (1744–1803, and German Naturphilosophen inspired by Friederich Schelling (1775–1854) . This restriction also distinguished Darwin’s work from the grand evolutionary cosmology put forth anonymously in 1844 by the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers (1802–1871) in his immensely popular Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation , a work which in many respects prepared Victorian society in England, and pre-Civil War America for the acceptance of a general evolutionary theory in some form (Secord 2000; MacPherson 2015). It also distinguishes Darwin’s formulations from the theories of his contemporary Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).

Darwin’s theory first took written form in reflections in a series of notebooks begun during the latter part of the Beagle voyage and continued after the return of the Beagle to England in October of 1836 (Barrett et al., 1987). His reflections on the possibility of species change are first entered in March of 1837 (“Red Notebook”) and are developed in the other notebooks (B–E) through July of 1839 (Barrett et al. 1987; Hodge 2013a, 2009). Beginning with the reflections of the third or “D” “transmutation” Notebook, composed between July and October of 1838, Darwin first worked out the rudiments of what was to become his theory of natural selection. In the parallel “M” and “N” Notebooks, dating between July of 1838 and July of 1839, and in a loose collection called “Old and Useless Notes”, dating from approximately 1838–40, he also developed many of his main ideas on human evolution that would only be made public in the Descent of Man of 1871 (below, Section 4).

To summarize a complex issue, these Notebook reflections show Darwin proceeding through a series of stages in which he first formulated a general theory of the transformation of species by historical descent from common ancestors. He then attempted to work out a causal theory of life that would explain the tendency of life to complexify and diversify (Hodge 2013a, 2009, 1985; Sloan 1986). This causal inquiry into the underlying nature of life, and with it the search for an explanation of life’s innate tendency to develop and complexify, was then replaced by a dramatic shift in focus away from these inquiries. This concern with a causal theory of life was then replaced by a new emphasis on external forces controlling population, a thesis developed from his reading of Thomas Malthus’s (1766–1834) Essay on the Principle of Population (6th ed. 1826). For Malthus, human populaton was assumed to expand geometrically, while food supply expanded arithmetically, leading to an inevitable struggle of humans for existence. The impact of Darwin’s reading of this edition of the Essay in August of 1838, was dramatic. It enabled him to theorize the existence of a constantly-acting dynamic force behind the transformation of species.

Darwin’s innovation was to universalize the Malthusian “principle of population” to apply to all of nature. In so doing, Darwin effectively introduced what may be termed an “inertial” principle into his theory, although such language is never used in his text. Newton’s first law of motion, set forth in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1st ed. 1687), established his physical system upon the tendency of all material bodies to persist eternally either at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line, requiring a causal force explanation for any deviations from this initial state. But Newton did not seek a deeper metaphysical explanation of this inertial state. Law One is simply an “axiom” in Newton’s Principia. Similarly, the principle of population supplied Darwin with the assumption of an initial dynamic state of affairs that was not itself explained within the theory—there is no attempt to account causally for this tendency of living beings universally to reproduce geometrically. Similarly for Darwin, the principle of population functions axiomatically, defining a set of initial conditions from which any deviance from this ideal state demands explanation.

This theoretical shift enabled Darwin to bracket his earlier efforts to develop a causal theory of life, and focus instead on the means by which the dynamic force of population was controlled. This allowed him to emphasize how controls on population worked in company with the phenomenon of slight individual variation between members of the same species, in company with changing conditions of life, to produce a gradual change of form and function over time, leading to new varieties and eventually to new species. This opened up the framework for Darwin’s most important innovation, the concept of “natural” selection.

2. Darwinian Evolution

The primary distinguishing feature of Darwin’s theory that separates it from previous explanations of species change centers on the causal explanation he offered for how this process occurred. Prior theories, such as the theory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (see entry on evolutionary thought before Darwin ), relied on the inherent dynamic properties of matter. The change of species was not, in these pre-Darwinian efforts, explained through an adaptive process. Darwin’s emphasis after the composition of Notebook D on the factors controlling population increase, rather than on a dynamic theory of life grounded in vital forces, accounts for many of the differences between Darwin’s theory and those of his predecessors and contemporaries.

These differences can be summarized in the concept of natural selection as the central theoretical component of Darwinian theory. However, the exact meaning of this concept, and the varying ways he stated the principle in the Origin over its six editions (1859–1872), has given rise to multiple interpretations of the meaning of this principle in the history of Darwinism, and the different understandings of his meaning deeply affected different national and cultural receptions of his theory (see below, Section 3 .1).

One way to see the complexity of Darwin’s own thinking on these issues is to follow the textual development of this concept from the close of the Notebook period (1839) to the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859. This period of approximately twenty years involved Darwin in a series of reflections that form successive strata in the final version of his theory of the evolution of species. Understanding the historical sequence of these developments also has significance for subsequent controversies over this concept and the different readings of the Origin as it went through its successive revisions. This historical development of the concept also has some bearing on assessing Darwin’s relevance for more general philosophical questions, such as those surrounding the relevance of his theory for such issues as the concept of a more general teleology of nature.

The earliest set of themes in the manuscript elaboration of natural selection theory can be characterized as those developed through a particular form of the argument from analogy. This took the form of a strong “proportional” form of the analogical argument that equated the relation of human selection to the development of domestic breeds as an argument of the basic form: human selection is to domestic variety formation as natural selection is to natural species formation (White, Hodge and Radick 2021, chps. 4–5). This makes a direct analogy between the actions of nature with those of humans in the process of selection. The specific expressions, and changes, in this analogy are important to follow closely. As this was expressed in the first coherent draft of the theory, a 39-page pencil manuscript written in 1842, this discussion analogized the concept of selection of forms by human agency in the creation of the varieties of domestic animals and plants, to the active selection in the natural world by an almost conscious agency, a “being infinitely more sagacious than man (not an omniscient creator)” who acts over “thousands and thousands of years” on “all the variations which tended towards certain ends” (Darwin 1842 in Glick and Kohn 1996, 91). This agency selects out those features most beneficial to organisms in relation to conditions of life, analogous in its action to the selection by man on domestic forms in the production of different breeds. Interwoven with these references to an almost Platonic demiurge are appeals to the selecting power of an active “Nature”:

Nature’s variation far less, but such selection far more rigid and scrutinizing […] Nature lets <<an>> animal live, till on actual proof it is found less able to do the required work to serve the desired end, man judges solely by his eye, and knows not whether nerves, muscles, arteries, are developed in proportion to the change of external form. (Ibid., 93)

These themes were continued in the 230 page draft of his theory of 1844. Again he referred to the selective action of a wise “Being with penetration sufficient to perceive differences in the outer and innermost organization quite imperceptible to man, and with forethought extending over future centuries to watch with unerring care and select for any object the offspring of an organism produced” (Darwin 1844 in ibid., 101). This selection was made with greater foresight and wisdom than human selection. As he envisions the working of this causal agency,

In accordance with the plan by which this universe seems governed by the Creator, let us consider whether there exist any secondary means in the economy of nature by which the process of selection could go on adapting, nicely and wonderfully, organisms, if in ever so small a degree plastic, to diverse ends. I believe such secondary means do exist. (Ibid., 103).

Darwin returned to these issues in 1856, following a twelve-year period in which he published his Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands (1844), the second edition of his Journal of Researches (1845), Geological Observations on South America (1846), the four volumes on fossil and living barnacles ( Cirripedia ) (1851, 54, 55), and Geological Observations on Coral Reefs (1851). In addition, he published several smaller papers on invertebrate zoology and on geology, and reported on his experiments on the resistance of seeds to salt water, a topic that would be of importance in his explanation of the population of remote islands.

These intervening inquiries positioned Darwin to deal with the question of species permanence against an extensive empirical background. The initial major synthesis of these investigations takes place in his long manuscript, or “Big Species Book”, commenced in 1856, known in current scholarship as the “Natural Selection” manuscript. This formed the immediate background text behind the published Origin . Although incomplete, the “Natural Selection” manuscript provides insights into many critical issues in Darwin’s thinking. It was also prepared with an eye to the scholarly community. This distinguishes its content and presentation from that of the subsequent “abstract” which became the published Origin of Species . “Natural Selection” contained tables of data, references to scholarly literature, and other apparatus expected of a non-popular work, none of which appeared in the published Origin .

The “Natural Selection” manuscript also contained some new theoretical developments of relevance to the concept of natural selection that are not found in earlier manuscripts. Scholars have noted the introduction in this manuscript of the “principle of divergence”, the thesis that organisms under the action of natural selection will tend to radiate and diversify within their “conditions of life”—the contemporary name for the complex of environmental and species-interaction relationships (Kohn 1985b, 2009). Although the concept of group divergence under the action of natural selection might be seen as an implication of Darwin’s theory from his earliest formulations of the 1830s, nonetheless Darwin’s explicit definition of this as a “principle”, and its discussion in a long late insertion in the “Natural Selection” manuscript, suggests its importance for Darwin’s mature theory. The principle of divergence was now seen by Darwin to form an important link between natural variation and the conditions of existence under the action of the driving force of population increase.

Still evident in the “Natural Selection” manuscript is Darwin’s implicit appeal to some kind of teleological ordering of the process. The action of the masculine-gendered “wise being” of the earlier manuscripts, however, has now been given over entirely to the action of a selective “Nature”, now referred to in the traditional feminine gender. This Nature,

…cares not for mere external appearance; she may be said to scrutinise with a severe eye, every nerve, vessel & muscle; every habit, instinct, shade of constitution,—the whole machinery of the organisation. There will be here no caprice, no favouring: the good will be preserved & the bad rigidly destroyed.… Can we wonder then, that nature’s productions bear the stamp of a far higher perfection than man’s product by artificial selection. With nature the most gradual, steady, unerring, deep-sighted selection,—perfect adaption [sic] to the conditions of existence.… (Darwin 1856–58 [1974: 224–225])

The language of this passage, directly underlying statements about the action of “natural selection” in the first edition of the published Origin , indicates the complexity in the exegesis of Darwin’s meaning of “natural selection” when viewed in light of its historical genesis (Ospovat 1981). The parallels between art and nature, the intentionality implied in the term “selection”, the notion of “perfect” adaptation, and the substantive conception of “nature” as an agency working toward certain ends, all render Darwin’s views on teleological purpose more complex than they are typically interpreted from the standpoint of contemporary Neo-selectionist theory (Lennox 1993, 2013). As will be discussed below, the changes Darwin subsequently made in his formulations of this concept over the history of the Origin have led to different conceptions of what he meant by this principle.

The hurried preparation and publication of the Origin between the summer of 1858 and November of 1859 was prompted by the receipt on June 18 of 1858 of a letter and manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) that outlined his remarkably similar views on the possibility of continuous species change under the action of a selection upon natural variation (Wallace 1858 in Glick and Kohn 1996, 337–45). This event had important implications for the subsequent form of Darwin’s published argument. Rapidly condensing the detailed arguments of the unfinished “Natural Selection” manuscript into shorter chapters, Darwin also universalized several claims that he had only developed with reference to specific groups of organisms, or which he had applied only to more limited situations in the manuscript. This resulted in a presentation of his theory at the level of broad generalization. The absence of tables of data, detailed footnotes, and references to the secondary literature in the published version also resulted in predictable criticisms which will be discussed below in Section 3.2 .

2.2. The Central Argument of the Published Origin

The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservaton of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was issued in London by the publishing house of John Murray on November 24, 1859 (Darwin 1859 [1964]). The structure of the argument presented in the published Origin has been the topic of considerable literature and can only be summarized here. Although Darwin himself described his book as “one long argument”, the exact nature of this argument is not immediately transparent, and alternative interpretations have been made of his reasoning and rhetorical strategies in formulating his evolutionary theory. (Prestes 2023; White, Hodge and Radick 2021; Hodge 2013b, 1977; Hoquet 2013; Hull 2009; Waters 2009; Depew 2009; Ruse 2009; Lennox 2005; Hodge 1983b).

The scholarly reconstruction of Darwin’s methodology employed in the Origin has taken two primary forms. One approach has been to reconstruct it from the standpoint of currently accepted models of scientific explanation, sometimes presenting it as a formal deductive model (Sober 1984). Another, more historical, approach interprets his methodology in the context of accepted canons of scientific explanation found in Victorian discussions of the period (see the entry on Darwinism ; Prestes 2023; White, Hodge and Radick 2021; Hodge 2013b, 1983b, 1977; Hoquet 2013; Hull 2009; Waters 2009; Depew 2009; Lennox 2005). The degree to which Darwin did in fact draw from the available methodological discussions of his contemporaries—John Herschel, William Whewell, John Stuart Mill—is not fully clear from available documentary sources. The claim most readily documented, and defended particularly by White, Hodge and Radick (2021) and M. J. S. Hodge (1977, 1983a), has emphasized the importance of John Herschel’s A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830 [1987]), which Darwin read as a young student at Cambridge prior to his departure on the HMS Beagle in December of 1831.

In Herschel’s text he would have encountered the claim that science seeks to determine “true causes”— vera causae— of phenomena through the satisfaction of explicit criteria of adequacy (Herschel, 1830 [1987], chp. 6). This concept Newton had specified in the Principia as the third of his “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy” (see the entry on Newton’s philosophy , Section 4). Elucidation of such causes was to be the goal of scientific explanation. Vera causae , in Herschel’s formulation, were those necessary to produce the given effects; they were truly active in producing the effects; and they adequately explained these effects.

The other plausible methodological source for Darwin’s mature reasoning was the work of his older contemporary and former Cambridge mentor, the Rev. William Whewell (1794–1866), whose three-volume History of the Inductive Sciences (Whewell 1837) Darwin read with care after his return from his round-the-world voyage (Ruse 2013c, 1975). On this reading, a plausible argument has been made that the actual structure of Darwin’s text is more closely similar to a “Whewellian” model of argument. In Whewell’s accounts of his philosophy of scientific methodology (Whewell 1840, 1858), the emphasis of scientific inquiry is, as Herschel had also argued, to be placed on the discovery of “true causes”. But evidence for the determination of a vera causa was to be demonstrated by the ability of disparate phenomena to be drawn together under a single unifying “Conception of the Mind”, exemplified for Whewell by Newton’s universal law of gravitation. This “Consilience of Inductions”, as Whewell termed this process of theoretical unification under a few simple concepts, was achieved only by true scientific theories employing true causes (Whewell 1840: xxxix). It has therefore been argued that Darwin’s theory fundamentally produces this kind of consilience argument, and that his methodology is more properly aligned with that of Whewell.

A third account, related to the Whewellian reading, is that of David Depew. Building on Darwin’s claim that he was addressing “the general naturalist public,” Darwin is seen as developing what Depew has designated as “situated argumentation”, similar to the views developed by contemporary Oxford logician and rhetorical theorist Richard Whately (1787–1863) (Depew 2009). This rhetorical strategy proceeds by drawing the reader into Darwin’s world by personal narration as it presents a series of limited issues for acceptance in the first three chapters, none of which required of the reader a considerable leap of theoretical assent, and most of which, such as natural variation and Malthusian population increase, had already been recognized in some form in the literature of the period.

As Darwin presented his arguments to the public, he opens with a pair of chapters that draw upon the strong analogy developed in the manuscripts between the action of human art in the production of domestic forms, and the actions of selection “by nature.” The resultant forms are presumed to have arisen through the action of human selection on the slight variations existing between individuals within the same species. The interpretation of this process as implying directional, and even intentional, selection by a providential “Nature” that we have seen in the manuscripts was, however, downplayed in the published work through the importance given by Darwin to the role of “unconscious” selection, a concept not encountered in the Natural Selection manuscript. Such selection denotes the practice even carried out by aboriginal peoples who simply seek to maintain the integrity and survival of a breed or species by preserving the “best” forms.

The domestic breeding analogy is, however, more than a decorative rhetorical strategy. It repeatedly functions for Darwin as the principal empirical example to which he could appeal at several places in the text as a means of visualizing the working of natural selection in nature, and this appeal remains intact through the six editions of the Origin.

From this model of human selection working on small individual natural variations to produce the domestic forms, Darwin then developed in the second chapter the implications of “natural” variation, delaying discussion of the concept of natural selection until Chapter IV. The focus of the second chapter introduces another important issue. Here he extends the discussion of variation developed in Chapter I into a critical analysis of the common understanding of classification as grounded on the definition of species and higher groups based on the possession of essential defining properties. It is in this chapter that Darwin most explicitly develops his own position on the nature of organic species in relation to his theory of descent. It is also in this chapter that he sets forth the ingredients for his attack on one meaning of species “essentialism”.

Darwin’s analysis of the “species question” involves a complex argument that has many implications for how his work was read by his contemporaries and successors, and its interpretation has generated a considerable literature (see the entries on species and Darwinism ; Mallet 2013; R. A. Richards 2010; Wilkins 2009; Stamos 2007; Sloan 2009b, 2013; Beatty 1985).

Prior tradition had been heavily affected by eighteenth-century French naturalist Buffon’s novel conception of organic species in which he made a sharp distinction between “natural” species, defined primarily by fertile interbreeding, and “artificial” species and varieties defined by morphological traits and measurements upon these (see the entry on evolutionary thought before Darwin , Section 3.3). This distinction was utilized selectively by Darwin in an unusual blending of two traditions of discussion that are conflated in creative ways in Darwin’s analysis.

Particularly as the conception of species had been discussed by German natural historians of the early nineteenth-century affected by distinctions introduced by philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), “Buffonian” species were defined by the material unity of common descent and reproductive continuity. This distinguished them by their historical and material character from the taxonomic species of the “Linnean” tradition of natural history. This distinction between “natural” and “logical” species had maintained a distinction between problems presented in the practical classification of preserved specimens, distinguished by external characters, and those relating to the unity of natural species, which was grounded upon reproductive unity and the sterility criterion (Sloan 2009b).

Remarkable in Darwin’s argument is the way in which he draws selectively in his readings from these two preexistent traditions to undermine the different grounds of species “realism” assumed within both of these traditions of discourse. One framework—what can be considered in his immediate context the “Linnean” tradition—regarded species in the sense of universals of logic or class concepts, whose “reality” was often grounded on the concept of divine creation. The alternative “Buffonian” tradition viewed species more naturalistically as material lineages of descent whose continuity was determined by some kind of immanent principle, such as the possession of a conserving “internal mold” or specifying vital force (see evolutionary thought before Darwin 3.3). The result in Darwin’s hands is a complex terminological interweaving of concepts of Variety, Race, Sub-species, Tribe, and Family that can be shown to be a fusion of different traditions of discussion in the literature of the period. This creative conflation also led to many confusions among his contemporaries about how Darwin actually did conceive of species and species change in time.

Darwin addresses the species question by raising the problems caused by natural variation in the practical discrimination of taxa at the species and varietal levels, an issue with which he had become closely familiar in his taxonomic revision of the Sub-class Cirripedia (barnacles) in his eight-year study on this group. Although the difficulty of taxonomic distinctions at this level was a well-recognized problem in the literature of the time, Darwin subtly transforms this practical problem into a metaphysical ambiguity—the fuzziness of formal taxonomic distinctions created by variation in preserved specimens is seen to imply a similar ambiguity of “natural” species boundaries.

We follow this in reading how natural variation is employed by Darwin in Chapter Two of the Origin to break down the distinction between species and varieties as these concepts were commonly employed in the practical taxonomic literature. The arbitrariness apparent in making distinctions, particularly in plants and invertebrates, meant that such species were only what “naturalists having sound judgment and wide experience” defined them to be ( Origin 1859 [1964], 47). These arguments form the basis for claims by his contemporaries that Darwin was a species “nominalist”, who defined species only as conventional and convenient divisions of a continuum of individuals.

But this feature of Darwin’s discussion of species captures only in part the complexity of his argument. Drawing also on the tradition of species realism developed within the “Buffonian” tradition, Darwin also affirmed that species and varieties are defined by common descent and material relations of interbreeding. Darwin then employed the ambiguity of the distinction between species and varieties created by individual variation in practical taxonomy to undermine the ontological fixity of “natural” species. Varieties are not simply the formal taxonomic subdivisions of a natural species as conceived in the Linnaean tradition. They are, as he terms them, “incipient” species (ibid., 52). This subtly transformed the issue of local variation and adaptation to circumstances into a primary ingredient for historical evolutionary change. The full implications to be drawn from this argument were, however, only to be revealed in Chapter Four of the text.

Before assembling the ingredients of these first two chapters, Darwin then introduced in Chapter Three the concept of a “struggle for existence”. This concept is introduced in a “large and metaphorical sense” that included different levels of organic interactions, from direct struggle for food and space to the struggle for life of a plant in a desert. Although described as an application of Thomas Malthus’s parameter of geometrical increase of population in relation to the arithmetical increase of food supply, Darwin’s use of this concept in fact reinterprets Malthus’s principle, which was formulated only with reference to human population in relation to food supply. It now becomes a general principle governing all of organic life. Thus all organisms, including those comprising food for others, would be governed by the tendency to geometrical increase.

Through this universalization, the controls on population become only in the extreme case grounded directly on the traditional Malthusian limitations of food and space. Normal controls are instead exerted through a complex network of relationships of species acting one on another in predator-prey, parasite-host, and food-web relations. This profound revision of Malthus’s arguments rendered Darwin’s theory deeply “ecological” as this term would later be employed. We can cite two thought experiments employed by Darwin himself as illustrations (ibid., 72–74). The first concerns the explanation of the abundance of red clover in England. This Darwin sees as dependent on the numbers of pollinating humble bees, which are controlled in turn by the number of mice, and these are controlled by the number of cats, making cats the remote determinants of clover abundance. The second instance concerns the explanation of the abundance of Scotch Fir. In this example, the number of fir trees is limited indirectly by the number of cattle.

With the ingredients of the first three chapters in place, Darwin was positioned to assemble these together in his grand synthesis of Chapter Four on “natural” selection. In this long discussion, Darwin develops the main exposition of his central theoretical concept. For his contemporaries and for the subsequent tradition, however, the meaning of Darwin’s concept of “natural” selection was not unambiguously evident for reasons we have outlined above, and these unclarities were to be the source of several persistent lines of disagreement and controversy.

The complexities in Darwin’s presentation of his central principle over the six editions of the published Origin served historically to generate several different readings of his text. In the initial introduction of the principle of natural selection in the first edition of Darwin’s text, it is characterized as “preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations” (ibid., 81). When Darwin elaborated on this concept in Chapter Four of the first edition, he continued to describe natural selection in language suggesting that it involved intentional selection, continuing the strong art-nature analogy found in the manuscripts. For example:

As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect? Man can act only on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by her; and the being is placed under well-suited conditions of life. (Ibid., 83)

The manuscript history behind such passages prevents the simple discounting of these statements as mere rhetorical imagery. As we have seen, the parallel between intentional human selectivity and that of “nature” formed the proportional analogical model upon which the concept of natural selection was originally constructed.

Criticisms that quickly developed over the overt intentionality embedded in such passages, however, led Darwin to revise the argument in editions beginning with the third edition of 1861. From this point onward he explicitly downplayed the intentional and teleological language of the first two editions, denying that his appeals to the selective role of “nature” were anything more than a literary figure. Darwin then moved decisively in the direction of defining natural selection as the description of the action of natural laws working upon organisms rather than as an efficient or final cause of life. He also regrets in his Correspondence his mistake in not utilizing the designation “natural preservation” rather than “natural selection” to characterize his principle (letter to Lyell 28 September 1860, Burkhardt Correspondence 8, 397; also see Darwin Correspondence Project in Other Internet Resources ). In response to criticisms of Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin then adopted in the fifth edition of 1869 his contemporary (1820–1903) Herbert Spencer’s designator, “survival of the fittest”, as a synonym for “natural selection” (Spencer 1864, 444–45; Darwin 1869, 72). This redefinition further shifted the meaning of natural selection away from the concept that can be extracted from the early texts and drafts. These final statements of the late 1860s and early 70s underlie the tradition of later “mechanistic” and non-teleological understandings of natural selection, a reading developed by his disciples who, in the words of David Depew, “had little use for either his natural theodicy or his image of a benignly scrutinizing selection” (Depew 2009, 253). The degree to which this change preserved the original strong analogy between art and nature can, however, be questioned. Critics of the use of this analogy had argued since the original formulations that the comparison of the two modes of selection actually worked against Darwin’s theory (Wallace 1858 in Glick and Kohn 1997, 343). This critique would also be leveled against Darwin in the critical review of 1867 by Henry Fleeming Jenkin discussed below.

The conceptual synthesis of Chapter Four also introduced discussions of such matters as the conditions under which natural selection most optimally worked, the role of isolation, the causes of the extinction of species, and the principle of divergence. Many of these points were made through the imaginative use of “thought experiments” in which Darwin constructed possible scenarios through which natural selection could bring about substantial change.

One prominent way Darwin captured for the reader the complexity of this process is reflected in the single diagram to appear in all the editions of the Origin . In this illustration, originally located as an Appendix to the first edition, but thereafter moved into Chapter Four, Darwin summarized his conception of how species were formed and diverged from common ancestral points. This image also served to depict the frequent extinction of most lineages, an issue developed in detail in Chapter Ten. It displayed pictorially the principle of divergence, illustrating the general tendency of populations to diverge and fragment under the pressure of population increase. It supplied a way of envisioning relations of taxonomic affinity to time, and illstrated the persistence of some forms unchanged over long geological periods in which stable conditions prevail.

Figure: Tree of life diagram from Origin of Species ( Origin 1859:“Appendix”.

Remarkable about Darwin’s diagram of the tree of life is the relativity of its coordinates. It is first presented as applying only to the divergences taking place in taxa at the species level, with varieties represented by the small lower-case letters within species A–L of a “wide ranging genus”, with the horizontal lines representing time segments measured in terms of a limited number of generations. However, the attentive reader could quickly see that Darwin’s destructive analysis of the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” species in Chapter Two, implied the relativity of the species-variety distinction, this diagram could represent eventually all organic relationships, from those at the non-controversial level of diverging varieties within fixed species, to those of the relations of Species within different genera. Letters A–L could also represent taxa at the level of genera, families or orders. The diagram can thus be applied to relationships between all levels of the Linnaean hierarchy with the time segments representing potentially vast expanses of time, and the horizontal spread of branches the degree of taxonomic divergence over time. In a very few pages of argument, the diagram was generalized to represent the most extensive group relations, encompassing the whole of geological time. Extension of the dotted lines at the bottom could even suggest, as Darwin argues in the last paragraph of the Origin , that all life was a result of “several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one” (Darwin 1859 [1964], 490). This could suggest a single naturalistic origin of all original forms either by material emergence, or through the action of a vitalistic power of life. Darwin’s use of Biblical language could also be read as allowing for the action of a supernatural cause.

In response to criticisms concerning this latter point, Darwin quickly added to the final paragraph in the second edition of 1860 the phrase “by the Creator” (1860: 484), which remained in all subsequent editions. as did the quotations on the frontispiece from familiar discussions in British natural theology concerning creation by secondary causation. Conceptual space was thereby created for the reading of the Origin by some contemporaries, notably by the Harvard botanist Asa Gray (1810–88), as compatible with traditional natural theology (Gray 1860).

The sweep of the theoretical generalization that closed the natural selection chapter, one restated even more generally in the final paragraph of the book, required Darwin to deal with several obvious objections to the theory that constitute the main “defensive” chapters of the Origin (Five–Nine), and occupy him through the numerous revisions of the text between 1859 and 1872. As suggested by David Depew, the rhetorical structure of the original text developed in an almost “objections and response” structure that resulted in a constant stream of revisions to various editions of the original text as Darwin engaged his opponents (Depew 2009; Peckham 2006). Anticipating at first publication several obvious lines of objection, Darwin devoted much of the text of the original Origin to offering a solution in advance to predictable difficulties. As Darwin outlined these main lines of objection, he discussed, first, the apparent absence of numerous slight gradations between species, both in the present and in the fossil record, of the kind that would seem to be predictable from the gradualist workings of the theory (Chps. Six, Nine). Second, the gradual development of organs and structures of extreme complexity, such as the vertebrate eye, an organ which had since Antiquity served as a mainstay of the argument for external teleological design (Chp. Six). Third, the evolution of the elaborate instincts of animals and the puzzling problem of the evolution of social insects that developed sterile neuter castes, proved to be a particularly difficult issue for Darwin in the manuscript phase of his work and needed some account (Chp. Seven). As a fourth major issue needing attention, the traditional distinction between natural species defined by interfertility, and artificial species defined by morphological differences, required an additional chapter of analysis in which he sought to undermine the absolute character of the interbreeding criterion as a sign of fixed natural species (Chp. Eight).

In Chapter Ten, Darwin developed his interpretation of the fossil record. At issue was the claim by Lamarckian and other transformists, as well as Cuvierian catastrophists such as William Buckland (1784–1856) (see the entry on evolutionary thought before Darwin , Section 4.1), that the fossil record displayed a historical sequence beginning with simpler plants and animals, arriving either by transformism or replacement, at the appearance of more complex forms in geological history. Opposition to this thesis of “geological progressionism” had been made by none other than Darwin’s great mentor in geology, Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (Lyell 1832 [1990], vol. 2, chp. xi; Desmond 1984; Bowler 1976). Darwin defended the progressionist view against Lyell’s arguments in this chapter.

To each of the lines of objection to his theory, Darwin offered his contemporaries plausible replies. Additional arguments were worked out through the insertion of numerous textual insertions over the five revisions of the Origin between 1860 and 1872, including the addition of a new chapter to the sixth edition dealing with “miscellaneous” objections, responding primarily to the criticisms of St. George Jackson Mivart (1827–1900) developed in his Genesis of Species (Mivart 1871).

For reasons related both to the condensed and summary form of public presentation, and also as a reflection of the bold conceptual sweep of the theory, the primary argument of the Origin could not gain its force from the data presented by the book itself. Instead, it presented an argument from unifying simplicity, gaining its force and achieving assent from the ability of Darwin’s theory to draw together in its final synthesizing chapters (Ten–Thirteen) a wide variety of issues in taxonomy, comparative anatomy, paleontology, biogeography, and embryology under the simple principles worked out in the first four chapters. This “consilience” argument might be seen as the best reflection of the impact of William Whewell’s methodology (see above).

As Darwin envisioned the issue, with the acceptance of his theory, “a grand untrodden field of inquiry will be opened” in natural history. The long-standing issues of species origins, if not the explanation of the ultimate origins of life, as well as the causes of their extinction, had been brought within the domain of naturalistic explanation. It is in this context that he makes the sole reference in the text to the claim that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history”. And in a statement that will foreshadow the important issues of the Descent of Man of 1871, he speaks of how “Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation” (ibid., 488)

3. The Reception of the Origin

The broad sweep of Darwin’s claims, the brevity of the empirical evidence actually supplied in the Origin , and the implications of his theory for several more general philosophical and theological issues, opened up a controversy over Darwinian evolution that has waxed and waned over more than 160 years. The theory was inserted into a complex set of different national and cultural receptions the study of which currently forms a scholarly industry in its own right. European, Latin American and Anglophone receptions have been most deeply studied (Bowler 2013a; Gayon 2013; Largent 2013; Glick 1988, 2013; Glick and Shaffer 2014; Engels and Glick 2008; Gliboff 2008; Numbers 1998; Pancaldi, 1991; Todes 1989; Kelly 1981; Hull 1973; Mullen 1964). To these have been added analyses of non-Western recptions (Jin 2020, 2019 a,b; Yang 2013; Shen 2016; Elshakry 2013; Pusey 1983). These analyses display common patterns in both Western and non-Western readings of Darwin’s theory, in which these receptions were conditioned, if not determined, by the pre-existing intellectual, scientific, religious, social, and political contexts into which his works were inserted.

In the anglophone world, Darwin’s theory fell into a complex social environment that in the United States meant into the pre-Civil War slavery debates (Largent 2013; Numbers 1998). In the United Kingdom it was issued against the massive industrial expansion of mid-Victorian society, and the development of professionalized science. To restrict focus to aspects of the British reading public context, the pre-existing popularity of the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation of 1844, which had reached 11 editions and sold 23,350 copies by December of 1860 (Secord “Introduction” to Chambers 1844 [1994], xxvii]), with more editions to appear by the end of the century, certainly prepared the groundwork for the general notion of the evolutionary origins of species by the working of secondary natural laws. The Vestiges ’s grand schema of a teleological development of life, from the earliest beginnings of the solar system in a gaseous nebula to the emergence of humanity under the action of a great “law of development”, had also been popularized for Victorian readers by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s epic poem In Memoriam (1850). This Vestiges backdrop provided a context in which some could read Darwin as supplying additional support for the belief in an optimistic historical development of life under teleological guidance of secondary laws with the promise of ultimate historical redemption. Such readings also rendered the Origin seemingly compatible with the progressive evolutionism of Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer (see the entry on Herbert Spencer ). Because of these similarities, Spencer’s writings served as an important vehicle by which Darwin’s views, modified to fit the progressivist views expounded by Spencer, were first introduced in non-Western contexts (Jin 2020, 2019 a,b; Lightman [ed.] 2015; Pusey 1983). Such popular receptions ignored or revised Darwin’s concept of evolution by natural selection to fit these progressivist alternatives.

Outside the United Kingdom, the receptions of Darwin’s work display the importance of local context and pre-existent intellectual and social conditions. Three examples—France, Germany, and China—can be elaborated upon. In France, Darwin’s theory was received against the background of the prior debates over transformism of the 1830s that pitted the theories of Lamarck and Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire against Cuvier (Gayon 2013; entry on evolutionary thought before Darwin , 4.1). At least within official French Academic science, these debates had been resolved generally in favor of Cuvier’s anti-transformism. The intellectual framework provided by the “positive philosophy” of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) also worked both for and against Darwin. On one hand, Comte’s emphasis on the historical progress of science over superstition and metaphysics allowed Darwin to be summoned in support of a theory of the progress of science. The Origin was so interpreted in the preface to the first French translation of the Origin made by Clémence Royer (Harvey 2008). On the other hand, the Comtean three stages view of history, with its claim of the historical transcendence of speculative and metaphysical periods of science by a final period of experimental science governed by determinate laws, placed Darwinism in a metaphysical phase of speculative nature philosophy. This view is captured by the assessment of the leading physiologist and methodologist of French Science, Claude Bernard (1813–78). As he stated this in his 1865 treatise on scientific methodology, Darwin’s theory was to be regarded with those of “a Goethe, an Oken, a Carus, a Geoffroy Saint Hilaire”, locating it within speculative philosophy of nature rather than granting it the status of “positive” science (Bernard 1865 [1957], 91–92]).

In the Germanies, Darwin’s work entered a complex social, intellectual and political situation in the wake of the failed efforts to establish a liberal democracy in 1848. It also entered an intellectual culture strongly influenced by the pre-existent philosophical traditions of Kant, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie , German Romanticism, and the Idealism of Fichte and Hegel (R. J. Richards 2002, 2008, 2013; Gliboff 2007, 2008; Mullen 1964). These factors formed a complex political and philosophical environment into which Darwin’s developmental view of nature and theory of the transformation of species was quickly assimilated, if also altered. Many readings of Darwin consequently interpreted his arguments against the background of Schelling’s philosophy of nature. The marshalling of Darwin’s authority in debates over scientific materialism were also brought to the fore by the enthusiastic advocacy of Darwinism in Germany by University of Jena professor of zoology Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834–1919). More than any other individual, Haeckel made Darwinismus a major player in the polarized political and religious disputes of Bismarckian Germany (R. J. Richards 2008). Through his polemical writings, such as the Natural History of Creation (1868), Anthropogeny (1874), and Riddle of the Universe (1895–99), Haeckel advocated a materialist monism in the name of Darwin, and used this as a stick with which to beat traditional religion. Much of the historical conflict between religious communities and evolutionary biology can be traced back to Haeckel’s polemical writings, which went through numerous editions and translations, including several English and American editions that appeared into the early decades of the twentieth century.

To turn to a very different context, that of China, Darwin’s works entered Chinese discussions by a curious route. The initial discussions of Darwinian theory were generated by the translation of Thomas Henry Huxley’s 1893 Romanes Lecture “Evolution and Ethics” by the naval science scholar Yan Fu (1854–1921), who had encountered Darwinism while being educated at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich from 1877 to 1879. This translation of Huxley’s lecture, published in 1898 under the name of Tianyan Lun , was accompanied with an extensive commentary by Yan Fu that drew heavily upon the writings of Herbert Spencer which Yan Fu placed in opposition to the arguments of Huxley. This work has been shown to have been the main vehicle by which the Chinese learned indirectly of Darwin’s theory (Jin 2020, 2019 a, b; Yang 2013; Pusey 1983). In the interpretation of Yan Fu and his allies, such as Kan Yuwei (1858–1927), Darwinism was given a progressivist interpretation in line with aspects of Confucianism.

Beginning in 1902, a second phase of Darwinian reception began with a partial translation of the first five chapters of the sixth edition of the Origin by the Chinese scientist, trained in chemistry and metallurgy in Japan and Germany, Ma Junwu (1881–1940). This partial translation, published between 1902 and 1906, again modified the text itself to agree with the progressive evolutionism of Spencer and with the progressivism already encountered in Yan Fu’s popular Tianyan Lun. Only in September of 1920 did the Chinese have Ma Junwu’s full translation of Darwin’s sixth edition. This late translation presented a more faithful rendering of Darwin’s text, including an accurate translation of Darwin’s final views on natural selection (Jin 2019 a, b). As a political reformer and close associate of democratic reformer Sun Yat-Sen (1866–1925), Ma Junwu’s interest in translating Darwin was also was involved with his interest in revolutionary Chinese politics (Jin 2019a, 2022).

The reception of the Origin by those who held positions of professional research and teaching positions in universities, leadership positions in scientific societies, and employment in museums, was complex. These individuals were typically familiar with the empirical evidence and the technical scientific issues under debate in the 1860s in geology, comparative anatomy, embryology, biogeography, and classification theory. This group can usually be distinguished from lay interpreters who may not have made distinctions between the views of Lamarck, Chambers, Schelling, Spencer, and Darwin on the historical development of life.

If we concentrate attention on the reception by these professionals, Darwin’s work received varied endorsement (Hull 1973). Many prominent members of Darwin’s immediate intellectual circle—Adam Sedgwick, William Whewell, Charles Lyell, Richard Owen, and Thomas Huxley—had previously been highly critical of Chambers’s Vestiges in the 1840s for its speculative character and its scientific incompetence (Secord 2000). Darwin himself feared a similar reception, and he recognized the substantial challenge facing him in convincing this group and the larger community of scientific specialists with which he interacted and corresponded widely. With this group he was only partially successful.

Historical studies have revealed that only rarely did members of the scientific elites accept and develop Darwin’s theories exactly as they were presented in his texts. Statistical studies on the reception by the scientific community in England in the first decade after the publication of the Origin have shown a complicated picture in which there was neither wide-spread conversion of the scientific community to Darwin’s views, nor a clear generational stratification between younger converts and older resisters, counter to Darwin’s own predictions in the final chapter of the Origin (Hull et al. 1978). These studies also reveal a distinct willingness within the scientific community to separate acceptance of Darwin’s more general claim of species descent with modification from common ancestors from the endorsement of his explanation of this descent through the action of natural selection on slight morphological variations.

Of central importance in analyzing this complex professional reception was the role assigned by Darwin to the importance of normal individual variation as the source of evolutionary novelty. As we have seen, Darwin had relied on the novel claim that small individual variations—the kind of differences considered by an earlier tradition as merely “accidental”—formed the raw material upon which, by cumulative directional change under the action of natural selection, major changes could be produced sufficient to explain the origin and subsequent differences in all the various forms of life over time. Darwin, however, left the specific causes of this variation unspecified beyond some effect of the environment on the sexual organs. Variation was presented in the Origin with the statement that “the laws governing inheritance are quite unknown” (Darwin 1859 [1964], 13). In keeping with his commitment to the gradualism of Lyellian geology, Darwin also rejected the role of major “sports” or other sources of discontinuous change in this process.

As critics focused their attacks on the claim that such micro-differences between individuals could be accumulated over time without natural limits, Darwin began a series of modifications and revisions of the theory through a back and forth dialogue with his critics that can be followed in his revisions to the text of the Origin . In the fourth edition of 1866, for example, Darwin inserted the claim that the continuous gradualism depicted by his branching diagram was misleading, and that transformative change does not necessarily go on continuously. “It is far more probable that each form remains for long periods unaltered, and then again undergoes modification” (Darwin 1866, 132; Peckham 2006, 213). This change-stasis-change model allowed variation to stabilize for a period of time around a mean value from which additional change could then resume. Such a model would, however, presumably require even more time for its working than the multi-millions of years assumed in the original presentation of the theory.

The difficulties in Darwin’s arguments that had emerged by 1866 were highlighted in a lengthy and telling critique in 1867 by the Scottish engineer Henry Fleeming Jenkin (1833–1885) (typically Fleeming Jenkin). Using an argument previously raised in the 1830s by Charles Lyell against Lamarck, Fleeming Jenkin cited empirical evidence from domestic breeding that suggested a distinct limitation on the degree to which normal variation could be added upon by selection (Fleeming Jenkin 1867 in Hull 1973). Using a loosely mathematical argument, Fleeming Jenkin argued that the effects of intercrossing would continuously swamp deviations from the mean values of characters and result in a tendency of the variation in a population to return to mean values over time. It is also argued that domestic evidence does not warrant an argument for species change. For Fleeming Jenkin, Darwin’s reliance on continuous additive deviation was presumed to be undermined by these arguments, and only more dramatic and discontinuous change—something Darwin explicitly rejected—could account for the origin of new species.

Fleeming Jenkin also argued that the time needed by Darwin’s theory to account for the history of life under the gradual working of natural selection was simply unavailable from scientific evidence, supporting this claim by an appeal to the physical calculations of the probable age of the solar system presented in publications by his mentor, the Glasgow physicist William Thompson (Lord Kelvin, 1824–1907) (Burchfield 1975). On the basis of Thompson’s quantitative physical arguments concerning the age of the sun and solar system, Fleeming Jenkin judged the time since the presumed first beginnings of life to be insufficient for the Darwinian gradualist theory of species transformation to have taken place.

Jenkin’s multi-pronged argument gave Darwin considerable difficulties and set the stage for more detailed empirical inquiries into variation and its causes by Darwin’s successors. The time difficulties were only resolved in the twentieth-century with the discovery of radioactivity that could explain why the sun did not lose heat in accord with Newtonian principles.

As a solution to the variation question, Darwin developed his “provisional hypothesis” of pangenesis, which he presented the year after the appearance of the Fleeming Jenkin review in his two-volume Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication (Darwin 1868; Olby 2013). Although this theory had been formulated independently of the Jenkin review (Olby 1963), in effect it functioned as Darwin’s reply to Jenkin’s critique. The pangenesis theory offered a causal theory of variation and inheritance through a return to a theory resembling Buffon’s theory of the organic molecules proposed in the previous century (see entry on evolutionary thought before Darwin section 3.2). Invisible material “gemmules” were presumed to exist within the cells. According to theory, these were subject to external alteration by the environment and other external causes. The gemmules were then shed continually into the blood stream (the “transport” hypothesis) and assembled by “mutual affinity for each other, leading to their aggregation either into buds or into the sexual elements” (Darwin 1868, vol. 2, 375). In this form they were then transmitted—the details were not explained—by sexual generation to the next generation to form the new organism out of “the modified physiological units of which the organism is built” (ibid., 377). In Darwin’s view, this hypothesis united together numerous issues into a coherent and causal theory of inheritance and explained the basis of variation. It also explained how use-disuse inheritance, a theory which Darwin never abandoned, could work.

The pangenesis theory, although not specifically referred to, seems to be behind an important distinction Darwin inserted into the fifth edition of the Origin of 1869 in his direct reply to the criticisms of Jenkin. In this textual revision, Darwin distinguished “certain variations, which no one would rank as mere individual differences”, from ordinary variations (Darwin1869, 105; Peckham 2006, 178–179). This revision shifted Darwin’s emphasis away from his early reliance on normal slight individual variation, and gave new status to what he now termed “strongly marked” variations. The latter were now the forms of variation to be given primary evolutionary significance. Presumably this strong variation was more likely to be transmitted to the offspring, although details are left unclear, and in this form major variation could presumably be maintained in a population against the tendency to swamping by intercrossing as Fleeming Jenkin had argued.

Darwin’s struggles over this issue defined a set of problems that British life scientists in particular were to deal with into the 1930s. These debates over the role of somatic variation in the evolutionary process placed Darwinism in a defensive posture that forced its supporters into major revisions in the Darwinian research program (Gayon 1998; Vorzimmer 1970). The consequence was a complex period of Darwinian history in which natural selection theory was rejected by many research, or defended in modified form by others (Bowler 1983, 2013a; Largent 2009).

4. Human Evolution and the Descent of Man

Darwin had retained his own conclusions on human evolution quietly in the background through the 1860’s while the defense of his general theory was conducted by advocates as diverse as Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) in England, Asa Gray (1810–88) in the United States, and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) in the emerging new Germany. Darwin’s own position on the “human question” remained unclear to the reading public, and his rhetorical situating of the Origin within a tradition of divine creation by secondary law, captured in the frontispiece quotations from William Whewell and Francis Bacon, allowed many before 1871 to see Darwin as more open to religious interpretations of human origins than those of some of his popularizers.

Darwin’s interest in developing his insights into the origins of human beings and the explanation of human properties through descent with modification was, however, evident in his correspondence as early as January of 1860 when he began collecting evidence on the expressions of the emotions in human beings (Browne 2002, chp. 9). He then developed a questionnaire specifically intended to gain such information from contacts in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego (Radick 2018). Further engagement with these issues was then generated by the discussions of Lyell (1863) and A. R. Wallace (1864), both of whom suggested that natural selection could not account for the development of the “higher” rational faculties, language, and ethical motivation (R. J. Richards 1987, chp. 4). It was then in February of 1867 that Darwin decided to remove material from his massive manuscript of the Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication to create a “very small volume, ‘an essay on the origin of mankind’” (Darwin to Hooker, 8 February 1867 and CD to Turner, 11 February 1867, Burkhardt, Correspondence 15: 74, 80). At this time he also sent to several international correspondents a more detailed questionnaire asking for information on human emotional expression. Further impetus to develop his views was created by the arguments of William R. Greg (1809–1881) in an essay in Fraser’s Magazine (1868), with further support by arguments of A. R. Wallace in 1869, both of whom drew a sharp distinction between human properties and those of animals (R. J. Richards 1987, 172–184). These arguments denied that natural selection could explain the origins of these “higher powers”.

Darwin’s drafting of his views on human issues, begun in early 1868, expanded into a major enterprise in which he became deeply engaged with the issue of the implications of his theory for ethics. The result of this effort devoted to anthropological topics was two separate works: the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex , delivered to the publisher in June of 1870 with publication in 1871, and its companion, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , which he commenced in early 1871 with publication in early 1872.

As commentators have noted, these two works differ markedly in their arguments, and reflect different relationships to Darwin’s causal theories of natural and sexual selection, with sexual selection predominting over natural selection for the major portion of the Descent , and both of these causal theories generally missing from the descriptive approach of the Expression (Radick 2018).

Sexual selection—the choosing of females by males or vice versa for breeding purposes—had received a general statement by Darwin in Chapter IV of the Origin , but this played only a minor role in the original argument, and its importance was denied by co-evolutionist A. R. Wallace. In the Descent this was now developed in extensive detail as a major factor in evolution that could even work against ordinary natural selection. Sexual selection could be marshaled to explain sexual dimorphism, and also the presence of unusual characters and properties of organisms—elaborate feeding organs, bright colors, and other seemingly maladaptive structures such as the antlers on the Irish Elk or the great horn on the Rhinoceros beetle—that would appear anomalous outcomes of ordinary natural selection working for the optimal survival of organisms in nature. In a dramatic extension of the principle to human beings, the combination of natural and sexual selection is used to explain the origins of human beings from simian ancestors. It also accounts for the sexual dimorphism in humans, and is a major factor accounting for the origin of human races (E. Richards 2017; R. A. Richards 2013).

Although the secondary causal role of sexual selection in the development of species generally was to be the main topic of the bulk of the Descent , this plays an ambiguous role initially in the “treatise on man” that occupies the initial chapters, and functions differently in his treatment of the origins of mental powers, the moral sense, and the origin of races in this opening discussion.

In constructing this presentation, Darwin reaches back to the early Notebooks that he had separated out from the “transformist” discussions to deal with his inquiries into ethics, psychology, and emotions (see Section 1.2 above). Of particular importance for the opening discussions of the Descent was the “M” notebook, commenced in July of 1838, and “N”, begun in October of that year. On occasion he also samples the collection of entries now entitled “Old and Useless Notes”, generally written between 1838 and 1840.

The initial topic of focus in the Descent deals with the far-reaching issues concerning the status and origin of human mental properties, faculties presumed traditionally to be possessed uniquely by human beings. These properties Darwin now places on an evolutionary continuum with those features of animal behavior long regarded as instinctual. In this he placed himself in opposition to the long tradition of discourse that had distinguished humans from animals due to the possession of a “rational principle” related to their possession of a rational soul. This tradition had been given a more radical foundation in the revolutionary reflections on the relation of mind and body initiated by René Descartes (1596–1650) in the middle of the seventeenth century. Descartes deepened this distinction with the separation of the two substances—thinking substance, or res cogitans , possessed only by humans, and extended material substance, res extensa that constituted the rest of the natural world, including animals and plants, rendering animals only lifeless machines without rational faculties.

Darwin’s collapse of this Cartesian barrier with his theory of human origins outlined in the Descent continued a discussion that had been a concern of his transformist predecessors, especially Jean Baptiste Lamarck (Sloan 1999). But Darwin took this issue to a new level as he interpreted the human-animal relationship in the context of his novel theory of divergent evolution from common ancestors. Darwin also broke with the view of humans as the summit of a natural teleological process. Darwin instead denies such teleological ordering, and effectively reduces human properties to those of animals—mental as well as physical—by tracing them to their origin in properties of lower organisms.

The warrant for the identification of human and animal mental properties, however, is not supported by substantial argumentation in the Descent. The opening discussions of the treatise summarize the anatomical evidence for “homologies” —true identities—between humans and animals due to descent from common ancestors, claims already set out in Chapter Thirteen of the Origin. But the transferal of this identity of structure to inner non-anatomical “mental” properties rested on premises that are not made explicit in this text, and were not identities drawn by Huxley, Wallace and Lyell, for example, in their treatments of humans in relation to evolutionary theory, although they acknowledged the anatomical continuities.

To understand Darwin’s arguments, it is useful to return to his Notebook discussions on which he was drawing for his reasoning (see above, Section 1.2). In his “C” Notebook, opened in February of 1838, Darwin has a remarkable entry that displays very early on his commitment to a metaphysical “monism”—the thesis that there is only one substance underlying both mind and body. With this goes the thesis of a parallelism of the complexity of mental properties with those of material structure. In this entry in “C” following on Darwin’s reflections on the issue of instinct, and also recording some of his observations on animals at the Regents Park zoological gardens, Darwin comments:

There is one living spirit, prevalent over this wor[l]d, (subject to certain contingencies of organic matter & chiefly heat), which assumes a multitude of forms <<each having acting principle>> according to subordinate laws.—There is one thinking […] principle (intimately allied to one kind of organic matter—brain. & which <prin> thinking principle. seems to be given or assumed according to a more extended relations [ sic ] of the individuals, whereby choice with memory, or reason ? is necessary.—) which is modified into endless forms, bearing a close relation in degree & kind to the endless forms of the living beings.— We see thus Unity in thinking and acting principle in the various shades of <dif> separation between those individuals thus endowed, & the community of mind, even in the tendency to delicate emotions between races, & recurrent habits in animals.— (Barrett 1987, 305)

As we follow these issues into the “M” Notebook, the assumption of a single “thinking principle,” allied to one kind of organic matter, seems then to underlie Darwin’s subsequent reflections on mind and matter. The “M” Notebook cites numerous “mental”properties common to humans and animals that generally parallel levels of material organization, similar to the identities expressed in the later Descent. The range of this universal extension of mental properties is far-reaching in these early discussions: consciousness and “free will” extends to all animals, including invertebrates:

With respect to free will, seeing a puppy playing cannot doubt that they have free will, if so all animals., then an oyster has & a polype (& a plant in some senses […]; now free will of oyster, one can fancy to be direct effect of organization, by the capacities its senses give it of pain or pleasure, if so free will is to mind, what chance is to matter […] (Barrett 1987, 536).

When these themes reappear in Chapter Two of the first edition of the Descent , Darwin seems to draw implicitly upon this matter-mind identity theory as an obvious consequence of his theory of descent from common ancestry. There he enumerates a long list of traditional human mental and emotional properties to claim that each of them are identities with the properties of simpler forms of life. The list is expansive: courage, deceit, play, kindness, maternal affection, self-complacency, pride, shame, sense of honor, wonder, dread, imitation, imagination, and dreaming. All are considered to be represented in a wide range of animals, with “play”and “recognition” found even in the ants.

When he addresses the more complex mental properties that specifically had been considered by a long tradition of discussion to be the distinctive human properties—possession of language, reason, abstract conceptual thinking, self-reflection—these again are treated as having their manifestations in other forms of life, with none of them unique to human beings. Language, the property that Descartes, for example, had considered to be the primary distinguishing character denoting the human possession of mind as distinct from matter, Darwin treats a developing in a gradual process from animal sounds that parallel the differentiation of species, illustrated by the fact that languages “like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups” (Darwin 1871 [1981], 60). He closes his discussion of mental powers with an analysis of religious belief that derives it from imagination and belief in spirits found in aboriginal peoples. It can even be homologized with the “deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submissions, some fear, and perhaps other feelings” (ibid., 68). Darwin’s discussions of the relation of human and animal mental and emotional properties would set the agenda for a complex discussion that would carry into contemporary debates over animal cognition and the relations of human and animal properties (see the entries on animal cognition ; methods in comparative cognition ; and animal consciousness ).

The subsequent treatment of ethical issues in the third chapter of the Descent was for Darwin a topic to be approached “exclusively from the side of natural history” (ibid., 71). This issue also presented him with some of his most difficult conceptual problems (CD to Gray, 15 March 1870, Burkhardt, Correspondence 18, 68). In this discussion he also employs natural selection theory as an explanatory cause.

Under the heading of “Moral Sense”, Darwin offered some innovations in ethics that do not easily map on to standard ethical positions classified around the familiar categories of Rule or Act Utilitarianism, Kantian Deontology, Hedonism, and Emotivism. Darwin’s closest historical affinities are with the Scottish “Moral Sense” tradition of Frances Hutcheson (1694–1746), Adam Smith (1723?–1790), and David Hume (1711–1776). More immediately Darwin drew from the expositions of the moral sense theory by his distant relative, Sir James Macintosh (1765–1832) (R. J. Richards 1987, 114–122, 206–219).

Traditional moral sense theory linked ethical behavior to an innate property that was considered to be universal in human beings, although it required education and cultivation to reach its full expression (see the entry on moral sentimentalism ). This inherent property, or “moral” sense, presumably explained such phenomena as ethical conscience, the sense of moral duty, and it accounted for altruistic actions that could not be reduced to hedonic seeking of pleasure and avoiding pain. It also did not involve the rational calculation of advantage, or the maximization of greatest happiness by an individual prior to action, as implied by Utilitarianism. For this reason Darwin criticized John Stuart Mill’s version of Utilitarian theory because it relied on acquired habits and the calculation of advantage (Darwin 1871 [1981], 71n5).

Darwin’s reinterpretation of the moral sense tradition within his evolutionary framework also implied important transfomations of this theory of ethics. The moral sense was not to be distinguished from animal instinct but was instead derived historically from the social instincts and developed by natural selection. From this perspective, Darwin could claim a genuine identity of ethical foundations holding between humans and animals, with the precursors of human ethical behavior found in the behavior of other animals, particularly those with social organization. Natural selection then shaped these ethical instincts in ways that favored group survival over immediate individual benefit (ibid., 98). Human ethical behavior is therefore grounded in a natural property developed by natural selection, with the consequence that ethical actions can occur without moral calculus or rational deliberation.

When moral conflict occurs, this is generally attributed to a conflict of instincts, with the stronger of two conflicting instincts favored by natural selection insofar as it favors group benefit (ibid. 84). In human beings the “more enduring Social Instincts” thus come to override the less persistent “individual” instincts.

The adequacy of evolutionary ethical naturalism as a foundation for ethical realism proved to be a point of contention for Darwin’s contemporaries and successors following the publication of the Descent . For some moral philosophers, Darwin had simply reduced ethics to a property subject to the relativizing tendencies of natural selection (Farber 1994: chp. 5). It was, in the view of Darwin’s philosophical critics, to reduce ethics to biology and in doing so, to offer no way to distinguish ethical goods from survival advantages. Not even for some strong supporters of Darwinism, such as Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace, was Darwin’s account adequate (ibid., chp. 4). Much of subsequent development of moral philosophy after Darwin would be grounded upon the canonical acceptance of the “is-ought” distinction, which emerged with new force from the critique of “evolutionary” ethical theory. This critique began with Thomas Huxley’s own break with Darwinian ethical theory in his Romanes Lecture, “Evolution and Ethics”of 1893 (Huxley 1893). This lecture, reflecting Huxley’s views eleven years after Darwin’s death, would play an important role in the Chinese reception of Darwinism (Huxley 1895; see above, section 3.1). This line of critique also received an influential academic expression in G. E. Moore’s (1873–1958) Principia Ethica —itself an attack on Spencer’s version of evolutionary ethics (Moore 1903). Debates over the adequacy of evolutionary ethics continue into the present (see the entries on biological altruism and morality and evolutionary biology ; see also, R. J. Richards 2015, 2009, 1999, 1987, Appendix 2; Charmetant 2013; Boniolo and DeAnna (eds.) 2006; Hauser 2006; Katz (ed.) 2000; Maienschein and Ruse (eds.) 1999).

4.4 Reception of the Descent

The international reception of the Descent of Man and Expression of the Emotions is a topic in need of the kind of detailed studies that surround the historical impact of the Origin. These works presented the reading public after 1871 with a more radical and controversial Darwin than had been associated with the author of the popular Journal of Researches or even the Origin itself, and his anthropological works created a watershed in the public reception of Darwin’s views (Radick 2013). The Descent finally made public Darwin’s more radical conclusions about human origins, and seemed to many of his readers, even those previously sympathetic to the Origin , to throw Darwin’s authority behind materialist and anti-religious forces. Public knowledge of Darwin’s own conclusions on human evolution before 1871 had rested on the one vague sentence on the issue in the Origin itself. The Descent made public his more radical conclusions. Even though the question of human evolution had already been dealt with in part by Thomas Huxley in his Man’s Place in Nature of 1863 (Huxley 1863), and by Charles Lyell in the same year in his Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (Lyell 1863), followed by Alfred Russel Wallace’s articles in 1864 and 1870 (Wallace 1864 and online), these authors had either not dealt with the full range of questions presented by the inclusion of human beings in the evolutionary process, or they had emphasized the moral and mental discontinuity between humans and animals. Only Ernst Heinrich Haeckel had drawn out a more general reductive conception of humanity from evolutionary theory and he had not ventured into the specific issues of ethics, social organization, the origins of human races, and the relation of human mental properties to those of animals, all of which are dealt with in the Descent . Darwin’s treatise presented, as one commentator has put it, “a closer resemblance to Darwin’s early naturalistic vision than anything else he ever published” (Durant 1985, 294).

Darwin’s extension of his theory to a range of questions traditionally discussed within philosophy, theology, and social and political theory, has shaped the more general history of Darwinism since the 1870s. It set the agenda for much of the development of psychology of the late nineteenth century (R. J. Richards 1987). It also hardened the opposition of many religiously-based communities against evolutionary theory, although here again, distinctions must be made between different communities (Ellegård 1990, chp. 14). Such opposition was not simply based upon the denial of the literal scriptural account of the origins of humankind, an issue that played out differently within the main religious denominations (Haught 2013; Finnegan 2013; Swetlitz 2013; Artigas, Glick, & Martinez 2006; Moore 1979). The more fundamental opposition was due to the denial of distinctions, other than those of degree, between fundamental human properties and those of animals.

Furthermore, the apparent denial of some kind of divine guidance in the processes behind human evolution and the non-teleological character of Darwin’s final formulations of the natural selection theory in the fifth and sixth editions of the Origin , hardened this opposition. His adoption from Herbert Spencer of designator “survival of the fittest” as a synonym for “natural selection” in the fifth edition of 1869 added to this growing opposition. As a consequence, the favorable readings that many influential religious thinkers—John Henry Newman (1801–1890) is a good example—had given to the original Origin , disappeared. The rhetoric of the Descent , with its conclusion that “man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears” (Darwin 1871 [1981], 389), presented to the public a different Darwin than many had associated with the popular seagoing naturalist.

The new opposition to Darwin is reflected in the many hostile reviews of the Descent to appear in the periodical press (R. J. Richards 1987, 219–230). Particularly at issue were Darwin’s accounts of the origin of ethical principles and intelletual powers, including language, self-reflection, abstract thinking and religious belief as derivations from animal properties (Anon. 1871)

The profound revolution in thought that Darwin created, however, was eventually recognized even by his one-time harsh critics. The once leading British comparative anatomist Richard Owen (1804–1892), who had long been estranged from Darwin since his harsh review of the Origin in 1860, nonetheless could comment on the occasion of Darwin’s burial in Westminster Abbey in a letter to Horace Walpole:

The great value of Darwin’s series of works, summarizing all the evidence of Embryology, Paleontology, & Physiology experimentally applied in producing Varieties of Species, is exemplified in the general acceptance by Biologists of the Secondary Law, by Evolution, of the ‘Origin of Species’ […] In this respect Charles Darwin stands to Biology in the relation which Copernicus stood to Astronomy. […] [Copernicus] knew not how the planets revolved around the sun. To know that required the successive labours of a Galileo, a Kepler and finally a Newton […] Meanwhile our British Copernicus of Biology merits the honour and the gratitude of the Empire, which is manifest by a Statue in Westminster Abbey. (Richard Owen to Horace Walpole, 5 November, 1882, Royal College of Surgeons of England Archives, MS0025/1/5/4).

The subsequent history of the debates surrounding Darwin’s achievement forms a complex story that involves much of the history of life science, as well as ethical theory, psychology, philosophy, theology and social theory since 1870. For a general summary of recent scholarship see Ruse 2013a and articles from this encyclopedia listed below.

This article has intended to give a historical overview of the specific nature of Darwinian theory, and outline the ways in which it differed from the theories of predecessors in the nineteenth century (see the entry evolution before Darwin ). The eventual general consensus achieved by the middle of the twentieth century around the so-named “Synthetic” theory of evolution that would combine population genetics with a mathematical analysis of evolutionary change, has formed a successful research program for more than half a century (Smocovitis 1996; Mayr and Provine 1980; Provine 1971). This “synthesis” has been challenged in recent decades by the current movement known as evolutionary developmental theory, or “evo-devo”. This development represents in some important respects a return to presumably discarded traditions and lines of exploration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which sought to link evolution with embryological development, and to a complex understanding of genetics, with re-examination of the effects of external conditions on inheritance (Gilbert 2015; Newman 2015; Laubichler and Maienschein 2007; Gissis and Jablonka 2011; Pigliucci and Müller 2010; Amundson 2005; Gilbert, Opitz and Raff 1996). Where these debates and revisions in evolutionary theory may lead in another fifty years is a matter of speculation (Gayon 2015 in Sloan, McKenny and Eggleson 2015).

More general philosophical issues associated with evolutionary theory—those surrounding natural teleology, ethics, the relation of evolutionary naturalism to the claims of religious traditions, the implications for the relation of human beings to the rest of the organic world—continue as issues of scholarly inquiry. The status of Darwin’s accounts of human mental powers and moral properties continue to be issues of philosophical debate. The adequacy of his reliance on sexual selection to explain sex and gender roles in human society form heated topics in some feminist scholarship. Such developments suggest that there are still substantial theoretical issues at stake that may alter the future understanding of evolutionary theory in important ways (Sloan, McKenny, & Eggleson [eds] 2015).

• Amundson, Ron, 2005, The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Roots of Evo-Devo , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139164856
• Anon., “Review of the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex” , Edinburgh Review 134 (July 1871), 195–235.
• Artigas, Mariano, Thomas F. Glick, and Rafael A. Martínez, 2006, Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877–1902 , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Barrett, Paul H., Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sydney Smith (eds.), 1987, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks: 1836–1844 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [online manuscripts at Darwin’s notebooks and reading lists.]
• Beatty, John 1985, “Speaking of Species: Darwin’s Strategy”, in Kohn 1985a: 265–281. doi:10.1515/9781400854714.265
• Bernard, Claude, 1865 [1957], Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine , translated Henry Copley Greene, New York: Dover. Originally published in 1927, New York:Macmillan. [ Bernard 1865 available online ]
• Boniolo, Giovanni and Gabriele De Anna (eds.) 2006, Evolutionary Ethics an Contemporary Biology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bowlby, John, 1990, Charles Darwin: A New Life , New York: Norton.
• Bowler, Peter J., 1976, Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century , New York: Science History.
• –––, 1983, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• –––, 1990, Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence , Oxford: Blackwell.
• –––, 1996, Life’s Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life’s Ancestry, 1860–1940 , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2013a, “Darwinism in Britain”, in Ruse 2013a: 218–225. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139026895.028
• Browne, Janet, 1995, Charles Darwin: Voyaging , New York: Knopf.
• –––, 2002, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Burchfield, Joe D., 1975, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Burkhardt, Frederick et al., (eds.), 1985–2023, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin , 30 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Chambers, Robert, 1844 [1994], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation , facsimile reprint of first edition, J. Secord (ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [ Chambers 1844 available online ]
• Charmetant, Erin. 2013,“Darwin and Ethics”, in Ruse 2013a, 188–194.
• Darwin, Charles Robert, 1836–1844 [1987], Charles Darwin’s Notebooks: 1836–1844 , Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sydney Smith (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also the Darwin Online section on Darwin’s notebooks and reading lists .
• –––, 1856–1858 [1974], Charles Darwin’s “Natural Selection”, Being the Second Part of his Big Species Book Written from 1856 to 1858 , R.C. Stauffer (ed.), 1974, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ Natural Selection 1974 available online ]
• –––, 1842 [1996], “1842 Sketch On Selection Under Domestication, Natural Selection, and Organic Beings in the Wild State”, selection in Glick and Kohn 1996, 89–99.
• –––, 1844a [1996], “1844 Essay: Variation of Organic Beings in the Wild State”, in Glick and Kohn 1996, 99–115.
• –––, 1859 [1964], On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection , London: Murray. Facsimile reprint, ed. E. Mayr Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [ Origin first edition available online ]
• –––, 1860, second edition [ Origin second edition available online ]
• –––, 1861, third edition, [ Origin third edition available online ]
• –––, 1862, first French edition, De l’origine des espèces , Clémence Royer (trans.), Paris: Guillaumin. [ Origin French first edition available online ]
• –––, 1866, fourth edition, [ Origin fourth edition available online ]
• –––, 1869, fifth edition, [ Origin fifth edition available online ]
• –––, 1872, sixth edition, [ Origin sixth edition available online
• –––, 1868, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication , two volumes, London: John Murray. First edition available online
• –––, 1871 [1981], The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex , two volumes, London: John Murray. Reprinted, ed John T. Bonner and Robert May, Princeton: Princeton University Press [ Descent 1871 available online ]
• –––, 1872, Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals , London: John Murray. [ Expression available online ]
• Depew, David J., 2009, “The Rhetoric of the Origin of Species”, in Ruse and Richards 2009: 237–255. doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521870795.015
• Depew, David J. and Bruce H. Weber, 1995, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Desmond, Adrian J., 1984, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875 , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, and James R. Moore, 1991, Darwin , London: Michael Joseph.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online , maintained by John van Wyhe, Cambridge University Library. In particular note the Darwin Papers & Manuscripts section
• Darwin Manuscripts Project , maintained by David Kohn in cooperation with the American Museum of Natural History Research Library.
• Letter to Charles Lyell, 28 September 1860, DCP-LETT-2931
• Letter from J.D. Hooker, 8 February 1867, DCP-LETT-5395
• Letter to William Turner, 11 February 1867, DCP-LETT-5398
• Letter to Asa Gray, 15 March 1870, DCP-LETT-7132
• Ghiselin, Michael T., 2009, Darwin: A Reader’s Guide [PDF], Occasional Papers of the California Academy of Sciences 155.
• The Huxley File , maintained by Charles Blinderman and David Joyce (Clark University).
• Works by Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Project Gutenberg.
• Wallace Online , maintained by John van Wyhe, Cambridge University Library.

adaptationism | altruism | altruism: biological | animal: cognition | animal: consciousness | biology: philosophy of | comparative cognition, methods in | creationism | Darwinism | evolution: concept before Darwin | evolution: cultural | fitness | genetics: ecological | life | morality: and evolutionary biology | moral sentimentalism | natural selection | natural selection: units and levels of | Newton, Isaac: philosophy | species | Spencer, Herbert | teleology: teleological notions in biology | Whewell, William

The author wishes to acknowledge the valuable comments on this version of the article by David Depew, Gregory Radick, M. J. S. Hodge, Alan Love, and Xiaoxing Jin. Additional comments were made on an earlier version by Michael Ruse, Robert J. Richards, Edward Zalta, M. Katherine Tillman, and the anonymous reviewers for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Xiaoxing Jin for information contained in his substantial doctoral work and subsequent research on the reception of Darwinism into China. Responsibility for all interpretations is my own.

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12 Theories of How We Became Human, and Why They’re All Wrong

Killers? Hippies? Toolmakers? Chefs? Scientists have trouble agreeing on the essence of humanity—and when and how we acquired it.

What a piece of work is man! Everyone agrees on that much. But what exactly is it about Homo sapiens that makes us unique among animals, let alone apes, and when and how did our ancestors acquire that certain something? The past century has seen a profusion of theories. Some reveal as much about the time their proponents lived in as they do about human evolution.

1. We Make Tools: “It is in making tools that man is unique,” anthropologist Kenneth Oakley wrote in a 1944 article . Apes use found objects as tools, he explained, “but the shaping of sticks and stones to particular uses was the first recognizably human activity.” In the early 1960s, Louis Leakey attributed the dawn of toolmaking, and thus of humanity, to a species named Homo habilis (“Handy Man”), which lived in East Africa around 2.8 million years ago. But as Jane Goodall and other researchers have since shown, chimps also shape sticks for particular uses—stripping them of their leaves, for instance, to “fish” for underground insects. Even crows, which lack hands, are pretty handy.

This primitive hand ax, found at a site in Israel, dates from 790,000 years ago and was probably made by Homo erectus. The oldest stone tools are 3.3 million years old.

2. We’re Killers : According to anthropologist Raymond Dart, our predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers—carnivorous creatures that "seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.” It may read like pulp fiction now, but after the horrific carnage of the Second World War, Dart’s 1953 article outlining his “killer ape” theory struck a chord.

Raymond Dart, originator of the “killer ape” theory of human evolution, holds the skull of the Taung Child, the first australopithecine ever discovered.

3. We Share Food : In the 1960s, the killer ape gave way to the hippie ape. Anthropologist Glynn Isaac unearthed evidence of animal carcasses that had been purposefully moved from the sites of their deaths to locations where, presumably, the meat could be shared with the whole commune. As Isaac saw it, food sharing led to the need to share information about where food could be found—and thus to the development of language and other distinctively human social behaviors.

4. We Swim in the Nude : A little later in the age of Aquarius, Elaine Morgan , a TV documentary writer, claimed that humans are so different from other primates because our ancestors evolved in a different environment—near and in the water. Shedding body hair made them faster swimmers, while standing upright enabled them to wade. The “aquatic ape” hypothesis is widely dismissed by the scientific community. But, in 2013, David Attenborough endorsed it.

5. We Throw Stuff : Archaeologist Reid Ferring believes our ancestors began to man up when they developed the ability to hurl stones at high velocities . At Dmanisi , a 1.8- million-year-old hominin site in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Ferring found evidence that Homo erectus invented public stonings to drive predators away from their kills. “The Dmanisi people were small,” says Ferring.“This place was filled with big cats. So how did hominins survive? How did they make it all the way from Africa? Rock throwing offers part of the answer.” Stoning animals also socialized us, he argues, because it required a group effort to be successful.

This painting inspired by archaeological finds at Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia, shows a female Homo erectus preparing to throw a stone to drive hyenas away from a deer carcass.

6. We Hunt : Hunting did much more than inspire cooperation, anthropologists Sherwood Washburn and C. S. Lancaster argued in a 1968 paper : “In a very real sense our intellect, interests, emotions and basic social life—all are evolutionary products of the success of the hunting adaptation.” Our larger brains, for instance, developed out of the need to store more information about where and when to find game. Hunting also allegedly led to a division of labor between the sexes, with women doing the foraging. Which raises the question: Why do women have big brains too?

7. We Trade Food for Sex : More specifically, monogamous sex. The crucial turning point in human evolution, according to a theory published in 1981 by C. Owen Lovejoy, was the emergence of monogamy six million years ago. Until then, brutish alpha males who drove off rival suitors had the most sex. Monogamous females, however, favored males who were most adept at providing food and sticking around to help raise junior. Our ancestors began walking upright, according to Lovejoy, because it freed up their hands and allowed them to carry home more groceries.

On an elephant that died of natural causes, archaeologists tested how fast they could butcher meat with primitive stone tools. Each man cut a hundred pounds an hour.

8. We Eat (Cooked) Meat : Big brains are hungry—gray matter requires 20 times more energy than muscle does. They could never have evolved on a vegetarian diet, some researchers claim ; instead, our brains grew only once we started eating meat, a food source rich in protein and fat, around two to three million years ago. And according to anthropologist Richard Wrangham , once our ancestors invented cooking—a uniquely human behavior that makes food easier to digest—they wasted less energy chewing or pounding meat and so had even more energy available for their brains. Eventually those brains grew large enough to make the conscious decision to become vegan.

9. We Eat (Cooked) Carbs : Or maybe our bigger brains were made possible by carb-loading, according to a recent paper . Once our ancestors had invented cooking, tubers and other starchy plants became an excellent source of brain food, more readily available than meat. An enzyme in our saliva called amylase helps break down carbohydrates into the glucose the brain needs. Evolutionary geneticist Mark G. Thomas of University College London notes that our DNA contains multiple copies of the gene for amylase, suggesting that it—and tubers—helped fuel the explosive growth of the human brain.

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10. We Walk on Two Feet : Did the crucial turning point in human evolution occur when our ancestors descended from the trees and started walking upright? Proponents of the “savanna hypothesis” say climate change drove that adaptation. As Africa became drier around three million years ago, the forests shrank and savannas came to dominate the landscape. That favored primates who could stand up and see above the tall grasses to watch for predators, and who could travel more efficiently across the open landscape, where food and water sources were far apart. One problem for this hypothesis is the 2009 discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid that lived 4.4 million years ago in what’s now Ethiopia. That region was damp and wooded then—yet “Ardi” could walk on two legs.

As the Africa climate became more arid, after about three million years ago, forests gave way to grasslands—and our ancestors had to adapt.

11. We Adapt : Richard Potts , director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program, suggests that human evolution was influenced by multiple changes in climate rather than a single trend. The emergence of the Homo lineage nearly three million years ago, he says, coincided with drastic fluctuations between wet and dry climates. Natural selection favored primates that could cope with constant, unpredictable change, Potts argues: Adaptability itself is the defining characteristic of humans.

Projectile weapons made by early Homo sapiens, found at Pinnacle Point in South Africa, reflect the human ability to cooperate, according to anthropologist Curtis Marean.

12. We Unite and Conquer : Anthropologist Curtis Marean offers a vision of human origins well suited to our globalized age: We are the ultimate invasive species . After tens of thousands of years confined to a single continent, our ancestors colonized the globe. How did they accomplish this feat? The key, Marean says, was a genetic predisposition to cooperate—born not from altruism but from conflict. Primate groups that cooperated gained a competitive edge over rival groups, and their genes survived. “The joining of this unique proclivity to our ancestors’ advanced cognitive abilities enabled them to nimbly adapt to new environments,” Marean writes. “It also fostered innovation, giving rise to a game-changing technology: advanced projectile weapons.”

So what’s wrong with all these theories?

Many of them have merit, but they share a bias: the idea that humanity can be defined by a single well-defined trait or group of traits and that a single stage in evolution was a crucial turning point on the inevitable road to Homo sapiens.

But our ancestors weren’t beta tests. They weren’t evolving toward something, they were just surviving as Australopithecus or Homo erectus. And no single trait they acquired was a turning point, because there was never anything inevitable about the outcome: the toolmaking, stone-throwing, meat-and-potato-eating, highly cooperative, adaptable—and oh-so-big-brained—killer ape that is us. And is still evolving now.

Related: 13 Pictures That Capture the Wonder and Thrill of Archaeology

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Where the world comes to study the Bible

You are here, recent articles, from the series: what we believe previous page | next page, 5. the human race: its creation, history, and destiny the creation of man.

Article contributed by www.walvoord.com

How did the human race begin? The Scriptures introduce man as a created being. In Genesis 1:27 this truth is stated, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The origin of man has long been the subject of human speculation. But in spite of all that has been done scientifically and otherwise, no one has ever come up with a better explanation than creation for the origin of man.

In recent centuries the theory of evolution has arisen, which attempts to explain all species of life, whether plant or animal, as a product of a gradual improvement that develops over many millions of years. The problem with evolution, however, is that it is a theory that has yet to be proved. With all the advantages of modern science, it has never been possible to change one species into another; a dog never becomes a cat; a plant never becomes a fish; and a tree never becomes a cow. In other words, a tree remains a tree though it may vary in its structure and leaf design and new kinds of trees can be formed, but the fact is that we have never been able by any scientific process to change one species into another.

Evolution has no solution for the origin of life. Science never has been able to produce life out of that which was not life. The Bible remains the simple and effective and clear explanation of how man was created. Further, in the creation of man he was made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27). No development in evolution could ever take an animal and produce in it that which corresponds to the image of God.

The revelation that man is the object of God’s creation is not simply taught in one passage but in many. In the first chapter of Genesis alone the fact of man’s creation is stated repeatedly. In the sweeping statement of John 1:2-3, Jesus Christ as the Word was “with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” Colossians 1:16 is even more explicit, “For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.”

According to Hebrews 11:3, all things, not simply human beings, were made by God: “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” If one accepts the Bible as the Word of God in other matters, one must necessarily accept the Bible when it indicates that God is the Creator and originator of all that has been created. It is significant that even unbelievers who scoff at the second coming of Christ have to conclude, “Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3:4), in other words, they must begin with creation. There is no alternative explanation to the doctrine of creation that satisfies the questions that are raised by the nature of our universe and the nature of man.

The Nature of Man

In the original creation as stated in Genesis 1:27, man was made in the image and likeness of God. This means that he has the essential qualities of personality, which are intellect or mind, sensibility or feeling, and will, that is, the ability to make moral choices. These qualities do not exist in any creature other than man, but they make it possible for him to have communion with God and also to be morally responsible for his actions.

The Scriptures further define man as composed of that which is material or immaterial. Accordingly, man has a body and he has life. In considering the matter of the life of man, the Scriptures record, “The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7). As man is discussed in Scripture, it becomes evident that in addition to material and immaterial, the immaterial part of man is considered under two major aspects-that of spirit and soul. When man was created, according to Genesis 2:7, he “became a living being,” literally, man became “a living soul” (KJV). Several hundred times in both the Old and New Testaments man is declared to possess a soul.

The Bible also claims that human beings possess a spirit. In Hebrews 4:12 the Word of God is said to penetrate human consciousness to the point that “it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit.” In general, the word “soul” seems to refer to the psychological aspect of man or his natural experience of life. The word “spirit” seems rather to refer to his God-consciousness and his ability to function in moral and spiritual realms. However, in the Bible these terms are sometimes used to refer to the whole man, such as the words “body” or “soul” or “spirit.” For instance, in Romans 12:1 believers are exhorted to offer their bodies as living sacrifices to God. In referring to a believer’s body, Paul is referring to the whole person. Likewise, “soul” sometimes refers to the whole person, and sometimes “spirit” refers to the whole person.

Other immaterial aspects of man are also mentioned in the Bible, such as mind, will, conscience, and other references to aspects of human personality. While the body of a Christian is considered sinful, it, nevertheless, is referred to in Scripture as the “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19). The bodies of Christians should be kept under control and made to submit to the human mind (1 Cor. 9:27). The bodies of Christians, which now are corrupt and sinful, are going to be transformed, cleansed from sin, and made new like the resurrection body of Christ, at the time of resurrection or rapture (Rom. 8:11, 17-18, 23; 1 Cor. 6:13-20; Phil. 3:20-21). Though man in his present humanity is sinful and comes short of what God would have him to be and do, Christians can look forward to the time when their bodies will be made perfect in the presence of God.

The Problem of Sin

The problem of sin in the world has been faced by theologians as well as by philosophers of all kinds, and some explanations have been attempted. People who ignore the Bible fall into two classifications-those who explain sin as that which occurs because God is not omnipotent and could not prevent it, and those who postulate that God Himself is sinful and that, therefore, sin is in the universe. Adherents to polytheism, the belief that there are many gods, assume that the gods have limitations, that they are not omnipotent, that they sin. Therefore, they can offer no solution for the sin problem.

Christianity explains the problem in terms of divine revelation and what took place after Adam and Eve were created. The answer to the sin problem is that man freely chose evil and this brought sin into the human race. God had commanded Adam and Eve, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17). The biblical narrative in Genesis, however, continues with the account of how Eve partook of the fruit of the tree and Adam joined with her in partaking of it (Gen. 3:2-6). The result was that the entire human race was plunged into sin.

The biblical narrative also supplies the fact that Satan, who appeared to Eve in the form of a serpent, was evil. This implies that there was an original creation of the angelic world and that some of the angels sinned against God and became the demon world, led by Satan, that exists today. Scripture assumes that God would not create evil but created a world in which there was moral choice possible, and both angels and men chose evil instead of that which was right.

Unlike the philosophic world, which has no solution for the problem of evil, the Bible not only accounts for its origin but also provides a divine remedy in the promise of Genesis 3:15 that the woman would have offspring who would crush the head of the serpent, fulfilled in the death of Christ on the cross and His resurrection. Satan was defeated and his ultimate judgment was assured.

A biblical doctrine of sin is absolutely essential to understanding the Scriptures as an account of God’s revelation of salvation that is available through Christ and a record of victory over sin that is promised to those who will put their trust in God. The doctrine of sin is at the root of explaining history with its record of wickedness, suffering, sin, and death. The proper doctrine of sin is also necessary to understand humankind and his reaction to God and to God’s revelation.

Before Adam sinned he was innocent in thought, word, and deed. He had been created without sin but with moral choice. The challenge of obedience to God was very simple. The only command God gave that could be disobeyed was the command not to partake of the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17).

After Adam sinned a radical change took place. He died spiritually. Physical aging began the process that led ultimately to his death, and his conscience was aware of the fact that he had sinned against God. The immediate result of sin was that God cursed the serpent for tempting Eve (Gen. 3:14-15). The woman was promised that she would be subject to her husband and that her pain in childbearing would increase (Gen. 3:16). Adam was promised that the ground would be cursed because of him and he would find it difficult to produce food. He was also informed that eventually he would die and return to the dust from which he was made. Because of the changed situation, Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden where they had been placed, which prevented them from eating of the Tree of Life, which would have given them physical life forever (Gen. 3:22-24).

The Effect of the Fall on the Human Race

The devastating effect upon Adam’s personal situation was extended to the entire human race because Adam was the head, or beginner, of humanity.

In the discussion of sin and its effect upon the human race, the Bible teaches that what Adam did was imputed, or reckoned, to all his descendants. Accordingly, it is revealed in Romans 5:12-14 :

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned—for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

The whole human race was considered as if they themselves had done what Adam did, and the judgment was affirmed that if they had the same opportunity in the same situation that they would have sinned against God also.

In providing a solution for human sin as intimated in Genesis 3:15, God provided in Christ crucified the One who would make it possible for people to be saved. This required an imputation, or a reckoning, of people’s sin as if Christ Himself had performed it. As stated in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “God made him [Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” When Christ died on the cross, He died in our place as a Lamb of sacrifice because He was bearing the sins of the whole world (John 1:29).

The fact that Christ has died and paid the price of man’s sin makes it possible now for God to reckon, or impute, righteousness to those who believe in Christ. An earlier example of this is the statement that when Abram believed in the Lord concerning his future posterity, “it was credited to him as righteousness” (Rom. 4:3). Accordingly, though Abram was a sinner like all other members of the human race, when he put his trust in God as the one who would fulfill His promises, he received by divine reckoning the righteousness that only God can give. Accordingly, the same God who permitted sin to occur also provided a Savior in the person and work of Jesus Christ, which now makes it possible for sinners to be saved and be considered righteous in God’s sight.

The principle of imputation of righteousness to those who believe in Christ is the basis for our justification and is mentioned frequently in Scripture (Rom. 3:22; 4:3, 8, 21-25; 2 Cor. 5:21; Philem. 17-18). Though it is difficult to understand completely what Christ did when He died, He died as our sin-bearer, as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, a fact that is mentioned many times in Scripture (Isa. 53:5; John 1:29; 1 Peter 2:24; 3:18). The fact that Christians have been made righteous and justified before a holy God makes it possible for them to be a part of the body of Christ through the baptism of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13).

Just as the Scriptures make clear that a believer in Christ is justified by faith, or declared righteous in the sight of a holy God, so it is also true in Scripture that one outside of Christ has none of the benefits of Christ’s redemption. The unsaved have the sin of Adam reckoned to their account; they are born with a sin nature that naturally sins against God; and to this their personal sins are added. Because of Adam’s sin everyone, even those who are Christians, experiences physical death (Rom. 5:12-14). Those who are not saved through faith in Christ are spiritually dead and are separated from God (Eph. 2:1; 4:18-19). They will also experience the second death, which is defined as eternal separation from God (Rev. 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8).

Human Origins Studies: A Historical Perspective

• Tom Gundling 1  

Evolution: Education and Outreach volume  3 ,  pages 314–321 ( 2010 ) Cite this article

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Research into the deep history of the human species is a relatively young science which can be divided into two broad periods. The first spans the century between the publication of Darwin’s Origin and the end of World War II. This period is characterized by the recovery of the first non-modern human fossils and subsequent attempts at reconstructing family trees as visual representations of the transition from ape to human. The second period, from 1945 to the present, is marked by a dramatic upsurge in the quantity of research, with a concomitant increase in specialization. During this time, emphasis shifted from classification of fossil humans to paleoecology in which hominids were seen as parts of complex evolving ecosystems. This shift is in no small part due to the incorporation of neo-Darwinian synthetic theory. Finally, technological innovation and changes in social context are considered as influences on human origins studies.

Introduction

Considering the grand sweep of history, the realization that human beings gradually evolved from some non-human ancestor represents a very recent insight. Even so, the goal of this one brief essay cannot be to provide an in-depth description and analysis of every significant development within the field of paleoanthropology, but rather to identify broad patterns and highlight a collection of “events” that are most germane in shaping current understanding of our evolutionary origin. These events naturally include the accretion of fossil material, the raw data which is the direct, if mute, testimony of the past. These fossil discoveries are situated among technological breakthroughs, theoretical shifts, and changes in the sociocultural context in which human origins studies were conducted. It is only through such a contextualized historical approach that we can truly grasp our current understanding of human origins. Foibles of the past remind us to be critical in assessing newly produced knowledge, yet simultaneously we can genuinely appreciate the enormous strides that have been made.

In addition to selective coverage, a second caveat is that this review will focus on research by scientists writing in English. Non-modern hominids Footnote 1 are a cosmopolitan bunch, having been discovered throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, and there is a significant literature in other languages. In an effort to ameliorate both of these shortcomings, numerous secondary references are included in the bibliography, providing more in-depth information on specific topics. For example, some texts approach the history of paleoanthropology by detailing a single time period (Bowler 1986 ), early human species (Walker and Shipman 1996 ), or researcher (Morell 1995 ), and there are quite a few that consider the subject more comprehensively (Leakey and Goodall 1969 ; Reader 1988 ; Lewin 1997 ; Tattersall 2008 ). In addition, there are a handful of encyclopedia format tomes (Jones et al. 1994 ; Spencer 1997 ; Delson et al. 2000 ), textbooks (Conroy 2005 ; Cela-Conde and Ayala 2007 ; Klein 2009 ), and “coffee table” popular volumes (Stringer and Andrews 2005 ; Johanson and Edgar 2006 ) that in part address the history of human origins studies. Moreover, these texts contain abundant references to the primary literature if that level of scrutiny is desired.

In seeking to provide a useful heuristic framework for the purposes of this particular essay, human origins studies can be broken down into two very broad periods. The first is roughly the century between 1850 and 1950 when research, often conducted by individuals with training outside of anthropology, focused on taxonomy and phylogeny. In other words, although scientists were cognizant that climate change (e.g., northern hemisphere glaciations) would have directly impacted the evolution of early humans, they were mainly interested in collecting “missing links,” naming them, and creating family trees. The second period, from 1950 to the present, is characterized by the relatively rapid development of paleoanthropology as it is currently practiced. Here the emphasis is only partly on the hominids themselves, with ecological context being of equal importance.

The Emergence of Human Origins Studies

This review begins with two mid-nineteenth century developments which are often conflated, but were initially distinct. The first is the acceptance of a temporal association of human material culture (stone tools), with extinct Ice Age mammals (Van Riper 1993 ; Sommer 2007 ). This was significant in that it opened up a considerable prehistory for the human species, well beyond estimates derived from literal scriptural interpretation. However, while acknowledging a lengthy antiquity for the human species, there was, at the time, no reason to suspect that the makers of the stone tools were not fully modern humans in a biological sense. The second major development was the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 (Darwin 1859 ). Darwin is rightfully credited with being the most influential, although by no means the first individual to broach the subject of descent with modification, or transmutation theory, as he put it (for an overview of pre-evolutionary ideas related to human origins, see Greene 1959 , Bowler 2003 ). Darwin’s central thesis was that all living species shared a common ancestry, with “endless forms most beautiful” having diverged via natural selection, and although he only briefly mentioned his own species the inference was clear. These two events dovetailed into the now quotidian, but then controversial, notion that humans had evolved over a vast expanse of time (Grayson 1983 ).

While Darwin was initially reticent to discuss human evolution in any detail, his colleague Thomas H. Huxley harbored no such reluctance when he published Man’s Place in Nature: Essays in 1863 (Huxley 1900 ). Darwin freely admitted that the veracity of his audacious proposal would have to withstand paleontological scrutiny and that his theory would collapse in the absence of transitional fossil forms. Huxley’s advantage, beyond his more outspoken personality, was that he actually had a fossil human to describe. The first Neandertal recognized by science was discovered in 1856; however, its description only appeared in English three years later, just as Darwin was going to press (Trinkaus and Shipman 1993 ). Huxley provided a detailed description of the eponymous cranium coupled with carefully composed line drawings (Huxley 1900 ). However, while the importance of the Neandertals in providing empirical evidence documenting an ancient and morphologically distinct human form cannot be discounted, these people hardly bridged the gap separating humans and the great apes. Although a few dissenting voices denied the close evolutionary relationship among humans and the “man-like” apes, and consequently an ape phase of human ancestry, most scientists accepted the overwhelming morphological and embryological evidence in support of just such a relationship. This acceptance was in no small part due to Huxley’s meticulous comparison of gorilla and human anatomy in which he concluded that the gorilla and its close relation, the chimpanzee, represented the nearest approach to humanity in nature.

If Neandertals were more or less human, then more distant, primitive “missing links” remained to be discovered. Just such fossils were recovered on the island of Java in the 1890s by Dutch physician Eugene Dubois, who had traveled to Indonesia as part of the army but with the express purpose of finding the remains of primitive humans (Shipman 2001 ). Java Man consisted of a skull cap, a femur, and a few isolated teeth which taken in combination suggested an early human with a much smaller cranial capacity relative to Neandertals or Homo sapiens (roughly 1,000 vs. 1,500 cubic centimeters), although the femur appeared modern. Dubois did not receive the universal accolades and acceptance he coveted, but his fossils bolstered the conventional wisdom at the time that humans first evolved somewhere in Asia.

During the early twentieth century, the early hominid fossil record grew significantly, if not exponentially, and evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles even while large segments of the lay public remained skeptical. Certainly, there were disagreements over whether natural selection was a sufficient evolutionary mechanism in itself (Bowler 1983 ), but the basic premise of biological change through time was affirmed. The recovery of additional Neandertal remains in Europe refuted lingering claims of pathology regarding the original Neander Valley specimen and solidified the interpretation that the latter was representative of a population of archaic humans occupying Ice Age Europe. Some Neandertal remains were interpreted as not only indicating intentional internment but also associated funerary ritual. The European fossil record was extended significantly with the recovery of a robust lower jaw from Mauer, Germany discovered in 1907.

In 1912 in England, heretofore devoid of non-modern hominid remains despite the prominence of several British scholars in human origins studies, the announcement of hominid fossils from Piltdown was warmly received locally, if with some incredulity abroad. Piltdown was significant since it reified the “brain first” hypothesis, in which primitive humans evolved a large brain before other key human traits evolved. Although a favorite of intelligent design creationism advocates, Piltdown is actually a beautiful example of the scientific method at work, whereby new evidence eventually calls into question prior interpretation, and in this case recognition of intentional fraud (Spencer 1990 ). It was, after all, a new relative dating method measuring the fluorine content of fossils that in 1953 exposed the non-contemporaneity of the jaw and skull. In any case, in the first decades of the twentieth century, a fairly simple human family tree was beginning to emerge (see McCown and Kennedy 1972 and especially Delisle 2007 for exceptions). Relatively small-brained Pithecanthropus led to the more capacious Neandertals and Piltdown, who in turn evolved into modern H. sapiens . Yet the truly ape-like human ancestors remained elusive.

Africa as the Cradle of Humanity

In 1921 a skull bearing superficial resemblance to European Neandertals was recovered as part of mining operations at a place called Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Rhodesian Man marks the recovery of the first in a very long line of non-modern hominids from the African continent. A mere four years later, University of Witwatersrand anatomist Raymond Dart, Australian by birth and having been trained in England, published a brief paper describing the fossil skull of a juvenile “ape” discovered in a limestone quarry near Taung, South Africa. Dart identified certain features of the face, the teeth, the cranium, and the brain of Australopithecus africanus that foreshadowed those of H. sapiens and made the startling claim that what was essentially a bipedal ape signaled the beginning of the human lineage separate from the African great apes.

Initially, with only the one individual, and a juvenile at that, Dart found little support. His most ardent advocate, Scottish physician and paleontologist Robert Broom discovered additional fragmentary remains of the australopithecines, as they were then called, in other South African caves in the 1930s, but these were initially insufficient to sway opinion (Dart 1959 ). This was perhaps due to the near-simultaneous discovery of significant hominid remains from Zhoukoutien (Dragon Bone Hill) in China which quickly eclipsed whatever controversy the diminutive skull from Taung elicited, and despite Broom’s ongoing efforts. As was the case with Java Man, the more complete Chinese fossils fulfilled the expectations of many scientists who anticipated that earliest human ancestors evolved to the East. Comparative analysis of the Javanese and Chinese fossils revealed a great deal of similarity, and all of the fossils were ultimately subsumed in the species Homo erectus .

The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis and the New Physical Anthropology

For several disparate reasons, the decades following the end of World War II (WWII) rather quickly led to a science of paleoanthropology that is recognizably modern. One significant factor relevant in the U.S. if not everywhere, was the dramatic upsurge in enrollment at colleges and universities. The G.I. Bill and subsequent effects of Civil Rights legislation that greatly increased access to higher education meant that millions more students went to college and hence the expansion of existing campuses and programs and in some cases the appearance of entirely new colleges and universities Footnote 2 . As a result, greater numbers of faculty were required who could teach courses and supervise research in diverse academic programs, which in turn led to an attendant rise in the numbers of graduate students themselves who went on to secure positions at institutions of higher learning. Consequently, many disciplines experienced significant increases in research activity, including physical anthropology, and it is worth noting that this was the first generation of researchers whose formal training was in physical anthropology, not in some allied field such as anatomy or medicine. The dramatic rise in practitioners not only increased the knowledge base in terms of simple quantity, but specialization within the field also began to emerge.

A second crucial development that transformed human evolutionary studies was theoretical in nature. Changing ideas regarding the process of evolution had been fermenting and roiling in biology circles for several decades before they infiltrated the study of human origins. In essence, a consensus was reached among biologists ( sensu lato ) that Darwinian natural selection acting on variation arising from random mutation was a sufficient mechanism to explain evolutionary change. For anthropologists, although questions of taxonomy and phylogeny remained important, the intellectual fallout of the so-called neo-Darwinian synthesis led to the “New Physical Anthropology” in which early hominid fossils, rather than representative of some platonic archetype, were interpreted as unique members of variable populations. Focusing on evolution as a process effecting change in populations over time, in contrast to the comparatively myopic sorting of the resulting pattern , arguably represents the most significant theoretical shift in thinking about evolution since Darwin.

Given the comparative de-emphasis on iconic types, the bloated alpha taxonomy of the past was reduced to a mere handful of hominid species displaying previously under-appreciated within species variability. This great reduction in hominid names and consequent simplification of hominid family trees has led some modern scholars to lament what they see as a return to the bad old days of teleology and orthogenesis. Yet there can be little doubt that the “splitting” taxonomic philosophy of the past where almost every new specimen received a new species or quite frequently a new genus name was in dire need of revision.

Just as species types came under scrutiny, so did the concept of evolutionary grades which had up to this point made clear distinctions between the categories of ape and human. While this may have provided some welcome taxonomic clarity, it was artificial in that it ignored the evolutionary reality that at some point members of the human lineage were very ape-like. This realization, obvious in retrospect, led to the widespread acceptance of the South African australopithecines as human ancestors, and the important corollary that bipedalism preceded other distinctive human attributes (Gundling 2005 ).

In addition to increased research activity and theoretical shifts, by the early 1960s technological innovations for the first time permitted the creation of a reliable absolute timescale of human evolution. Comparative protein analysis demonstrated that the African apes were most similar genetically to H. sapiens , inferring their recent common ancestry to the exclusion of other apes and monkeys. Molecular clocks based upon mutation rates and calibrated by the fossil record suggested that this common ancestor lived as little as a few million years ago, although recent estimates put this ancestor at seven to five million years ago. Consequently, known early and middle Miocene ape species became suspect as purported human ancestors, since they preceded the split between the hominid and great ape lineages. Most notably this eventually led to the downfall of Ramapithecus , a Miocene ape genus once widely hailed as a very ancient and very primitive hominid Lewin ( 1997 ).

While molecular studies of living species effectively imposed a theoretical maximum on the age of the hominid lineage, the temporal framework of human origins was further clarified with the introduction of the new potassium argon (K-Ar) method of absolute dating. Louis and Mary Leakey had been scouring the fossil-bearing sediments in and around eastern Africa’s Great Rift Valley for decades when Mary discovered the skull of a robust australopithecine at Olduvai Gorge in 1959. Significantly, Zinjanthropus , the genus coined for the new skull, was discovered within sediments near the base of the Pleistocene Epoch. Volcanic minerals from associated strata were dated to approximately 1.75 million years ago using the K–Ar method, nearly double the age estimated from using other more crude means. This greatly expanded time range certainly bolstered claims for the australopithecines as human ancestors rather than extinct collateral cousins to the “true” human lineage, yet to be discovered.

As an aside, Louis Leakey’s interest in understanding the human past was not limited to the collection of fossils. Sherwood Washburn, a main architect of the new physical anthropology, along with Irven DeVore, conducted pioneering studies of savanna baboons, large-bodied, terrestrial, and highly social primates that served as living proxies for modeling early hominid behavioral ecology (Washburn and DeVore 1961 ). Leakey, on the other hand, took a more phylogenetically based approach and hired scholars to conduct research into the behavior of the great apes as a potential new data source informing hypotheses of early hominid behavior. Jane Goodall was the first, studying chimpanzee behavior at Gombe in Tanzania, then came Dianne Fossey who undertook a longitudinal study of mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and finally Birute Galdikas traveled to Indonesia to conduct field studies of the orangutan (see Kinzey 1987 and De Waal 2001 for more recent primate studies that explicitly address questions of human behavioral evolution).

The emergence of paleoanthropology as a truly multidisciplinary endeavor, concerned with a more holistic picture of our evolutionary past, was a logical extension of the post-WWII new physical anthropology which eschewed simple classification and promoted variable populations as the unit of study. Naturally, these hominid populations did not exist in a vacuum but were components of complex, evolving ecosystems. Hence, field work began to emphasize the collection of greater contextual data in an effort to reconstruct biological and physical environments in which these human ancestors existed and evolved. One of the first field projects to adopt this new approach was an international expedition centered around the Omo River Valley in southern Ethiopia, beginning in 1967. Remarkably, of the 50 papers collected in the resulting volume, only five primarily focus on the hominid remains themselves (Coppens et al. 1976 ).

Early Human Diet and Subsistence

One major aspect of early hominid ecology that occupied researchers engaged in such multidisciplinary efforts was subsistence, which has understandably been of great interest to paleoanthropologists, particularly after 1950 as scientists endeavored to contextualize the fossil remains of distant ancestors. What early humans ate, how food was acquired and processed, even how it was distributed among members of a social group, became viable questions. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s it was widely assumed that the social, cognitive, and technological skills associated with big-game hunting drove the evolution of the human species; in fact the allure of “Man the Hunter” is longstanding in Western thought (Cartmill 1993 ). Raymond Dart, as part of his second foray into human origins studies, proposed that Australopithecus had already developed a hunting strategy facilitated by a technology comprised of durable animal parts that he referred to as the osteodontokeratic (bone, tooth, horn) culture. This concept was enthusiastically embraced by writer Robert Ardrey, who published a series of four popular novels documenting the success of these “killer apes” in the context of a changing environment (e.g., Ardrey 1976 ). Research scientists were only slightly less enthusiastic in championing such ideas (Lee and DeVore 1968 ) which remain popular, if more nuanced today (Wrangham and Peterson 1996 ).

Mirroring changes in the broader society, by the early 1970s some anthropologists challenged the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis and developed an alternative that focused on the central role of women in child rearing and gathering of food resources (Dahlberg 1981 ). These studies used ethnographic data from extant food-foraging societies, the rarity of which injected a sense of urgency on the part of anthropologists. Not long after the “Women the Gatherer” model appeared as a second wave feminist rejoinder to the previously unquestioned authority of “Man the Hunter,” another group of researchers also began to question the big-game hunting scenario. Archeologists, geologists, and paleontologists began working on “site formation processes” to get a better understanding of how assemblages of fragmented animal bones and stone tools came to be commingled. Over the next few decades, often with recourse to modern ecosystems as analogs, one of the main conclusions drawn from the new science called taphonomy (=laws of burial) was the potential importance of scavenging. The association of “bones and stones” was no longer assumed to be the signature of hominid big-game hunting but instead interpreted as meals containing essential fat and protein scavenged by early humans. Perhaps even more disconcerting, some sites were reinterpreted as the remains of carnivore kills occasionally including early humans themselves (Brain 1981 ; Hart and Sussman 2008 ).

Here’s Lucy

If Mary and Louis Leakey’s discoveries at Olduvai put the Great Rift Valley on the map, during the 1970s eastern Africa was validated as the center of early hominid studies. The Leakey’s son Richard established himself on the east side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, where his expeditions uncovered a prolific cache of early hominid fossils, some of which corroborated the occasionally controversial claims made by his parents a decade earlier. Sediments around the lake yielded hominid fossils of robust australopithecines, early members of genus Homo , and an early African variant of Asian H. erectus , these days referred to as Homo ergaster (Leakey and Lewin 1978 ). The latter includes a mostly complete skeleton, KNM-WT15000, which has become iconic for the species (Walker and Shipman 1996 ).

Arguably the most significant fossil discovery of the 1970s was another partial skeleton, AL-288, from Hadar, Ethiopia, better known as Lucy (Johanson and Edey 1981 ). Here was a single individual represented by numerous skeletal elements, and although her morphology was generally similar to the “gracile” australopithecines of South Africa, she was even more primitive in some respects. Consequently her discoverers coined a new species name, Australopithecus afarensis that included not only the Hadar specimens but fossils collected by Mary Leakey’s expedition at Laetoli in Tanzania. The latter is renowned for its famous footprint trail preserved in solidified volcanic ash, imparting convincing evidence for bipedalism at 3.6 million years ago. Hadar is also replete with datable volcanic sediments, and Lucy’s status as the most primitive hominid was reinforced by firm radiometric dates which placed the fossils at greater than 3.0 million years ago, at the time astonishingly ancient.

One other significant event from the 1970s bears mentioning. Although the American Journal of Physical Anthropology was first published in 1918, it is perhaps surprising that a journal explicitly dedicated to the study of human evolution did not appear in the U.S. until 1972. Since then the Journal of Human Evolution has been the premier academic forum for publications related to human evolution, and in 1992, the Paleoanthropology Society was established, which organizes its own conference and publishes an online journal.

Modern Human Origins

The question of modern human origins has been debated for centuries, long predating paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline. One of the central issues, which became particularly evident as Renaissance and Enlightenment Europeans began to travel the globe on a regular basis, was how to explain the physical diversity of human populations. Two broad perspectives emerged, one which viewed all people as having a single origin and another which believed that supposedly distinct races had separate origins. The pre-Darwinian debates between so-called monogenists and polygenists were recast with the advent of an evolutionary paradigm in the mid-nineteenth century. Within this new theoretical context, monogenists believed that all living humans evolved from a common ancestor that was already H. sapiens , while the polygenists believed that the races had deeper roots and had descended from different non-modern ancestors (e.g., H. erectus or in a few instances different ape species). A major step towards resolving this debate came in 1987 with an analysis of living human mitochondrial DNA diversity which concluded that H. sapiens had a recent African origin. The discovery of essentially modern human fossils at the 160,000-year-old site of Herto, Ehtiopia, provides paleontological support for a recent African origin, and many subsequent genetic studies have supported this basic conclusion. However, the possibility of some gene flow between migrating early modern humans and local archaic populations remains plausible (compare Stringer and McKie 1996 and Wolpoff and Caspari 1998 , also see Relethford 2003 for a geneticist’s perspective).

Conclusion: Twenty-First Century Paleoanthropology

New fossil discoveries, technological innovations, theoretical advances, and social transformations will continue to inform knowledge of our deep past. Recovery of hominid fossils, some from previously unknown time periods and geographic locations, continues at a brisk rate. Many of the most significant recent discoveries are beginning to fill in the crucial African late Miocene time period during which our lineage ramified from that leading to the chimpanzee (Gibbons 2006 ). Of particular note, one of these fossils was discovered in Chad, quite a distance from established sites in the Great Rift Valley, challenging the long standing hypothesis that hominids evolved in the savanna grasslands of eastern Africa while the African ape ancestors remained sequestered in their tropical rainforest refugium. Moreover, botanical, faunal, and geological evidence associated with very early fossil hominids in Ethiopia and Kenya intimate a forested environment, a discovery that clearly constrains hypotheses explaining the success of the bipedal adaptation.

Other significant fossil discoveries from the early Pleistocene site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia have energized discussion of the initial expansion of early humans beyond the tropics of Africa (Wong 2006 ). Not only are these fossils considerably older than prior known Eurasian specimens, but they are morphologically primitive, especially in terms of stature and cranial capacity, and are associated with very simple (“mode 1”) lithic technology. These early migrants hardly manifest the tall striding bipeds equipped with comparatively advanced Acheulian bifacial tools so often depicted in earlier “out of Africa” scenarios Footnote 3 , which are at least in part based on the iconic WT15000 skeleton mentioned earlier.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery of the last decade is the diminutive 18,000-year-old skeleton from the Indonesian island of Flores, which has sparked a spirited, occasionally acrimonious debate between those advocates of a replacement model of modern human origins and those inclined towards regional continuity (Morwood and van Oosterzee 2007 ). The former, comprised of the team who made the discovery and their allies, interpret the remains as those of a surprisingly primitive hominid akin to early Homo , and perhaps the first documented example of the effects of island dwarfing on an early human population. Other scholars believe the remains to be those of a pathological modern human, whose illness resulted in a cascade of skeletal and dental anomalies. Ongoing research on Flores and other nearby locations will undoubtedly resolve this debate.

New discoveries are not limited to the paleontological record but also include behavioral information gleaned from archaeology. Symbolic expression in the form of language, art (including music), and religion is undoubtedly one of the most distinctive human traits. Evidence for such behavior has proved elusive beyond the seeming cultural explosion perceived in the Upper Paleolithic of Europe beginning around 35,000 years before present. However, archeological evidence for at least some of these behaviors has recently been coaxed out of several sites in sub-Saharan Africa. Advanced utilitarian objects such as blades and harpoons have been recovered well back into the Middle Stone Age and use of ochre and shells for body adornment has been found at sites approaching 100 kiloannum (Balter 2009 ).

Recent advances also include a plethora of technological innovations that have allowed anthropologists to hone traditional inquiries in the areas of dating (e.g., single crystal, laser fusion, argon–argon dating), systematic analysis (e.g., geometric morphometrics), and paleoenvironmental reconstruction (e.g., stable isotope analysis). The badly distorted remains of the spectacular 4.4 megaanum skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus from Aramis, Ethiopia was restored in part using digital imaging technology (Gibbons 2009 ). Additionally, new technology is facilitating, perhaps even driving, novel questions such as those related to the emergence of the unique human life history pattern.

While fossils provide real-time evidence for human evolution, signals from our ancient past are also encoded into our modern DNA. The groundbreaking work of the 1960s effectively demonstrated our close affinity with the African great apes, and today’s genomic analyses comparing humans and chimpanzees are beginning to reveal differences in much finer detail than heretofore possible. Already several areas within the human genome have been identified as having undergone intense selection; these regions may be related to the evolution of the especially dexterous human thumb, reduction of muscles of mastication in the wake of the ability to cook food, the greatly enlarged neo-cortex, and our ability for spoken language.

In addition to modern DNA analyses, ancient DNA analysis has informed the “Neandertal problem” providing preliminary evidence in support of the replacement hypothesis, at least in Europe, whereby modern humans arriving there equipped with Upper Paleolithic technology drove the indigenous Neandertals to extinction. Even more recent genomic analyses, however, suggest that a small but detectable degree of interbreeding occurred when expanding modern human populations emerging from the African tropics encountered Neandertal populations in the Middle East around 120,000 years before present (Gibbons 2010 ).

In conclusion, our understanding of human origins, like all scientific knowledge, is the result of an ongoing, iterative process. Over the last few decades, the accelerating pace of fossil discoveries and the incorporation of innovative technologies have corroborated and enhanced much of what we already suspected to be true, although there have been a few surprises. No doubt this pattern will continue into the foreseeable future as we slowly, yet inexorably, piece together the circumstances by which our lineage became human.

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One of the most persuasive voices that during the last century raised the question of the “meaning of life” or, as we might also say, the question of “mythic,” “religious,” or “metaphysical” meaning, was that of C.G. Jung. But “loss of meaning” and “search for meaning” have to be seen as rather the two sides of the same coin. The sense of loss of meaning that creates a craving for meaning, so it is the idea of the dire need of a higher meaning that makes real life appear as intolerably banal and “nothing but,” merely “maya compared with that one thing, that reader life is meaningful.” From a strictly financial point of view it is absolutely amazing how much, for example, the Egyptians invested in their pyramids and tombs that did not serve any immediate practical purpose for the living. It expressed their metaphysical devotedness to something larger in which human existence as a whole was contained.

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Essays About History: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

History is the study of past events and is essential to an understanding of life and the future; discover essays about history in our guide.

In the thousands of years, humans have been on earth, our ancestors have left different marks on the world, reminders of the times they lived in. Curiosity is in our nature, and we study our history on this planet by analyzing these marks, whether they be ancient artifacts, documents, or grand monuments. 

History is essential because it tells us about our past. It helps us to understand how we evolved on this planet and, perhaps, how we may develop in the future. It also reminds us of our ancestors’ mistakes so that we do not repeat them. It is an undisputed fact that history is essential to human society, particularly in the world we live in today. 

If you are writing essays about history, start by reading the examples below. 

5 Examples On Essays About History

1. history of malta by suzanne pittman, 2. why study history by jeff west, 3. history a reflection of the past, and a teacher for the future by shahara mcgee, 4. the most successful crusade by michael stein, 5. god, plagues and pestilence – what history can teach us about living through a pandemic by robyn j. whitaker, writing prompts for essays about history, 1. what we can learn from history, 2. analyzing a historical source, 3. reflection on a historical event, 4. your country’s history, 5. your family history, 6. the impact of war on participating nations, 7. the history of your chosen topic.

“The famous biblical figure St. Paul came to Malta due to his ship getting wrecked and he first set foot on Malta at the beautiful location of what it know called St. Paul’s bay. St Paul spread Christianity throughout Malta which at the time has a mostly pagan population and the vast majority of Malta inhabitants have remained Christian since the days that St Paul walked the streets of Malta.”

Short but informative, Pittman’s essay briefly discusses key events in the history of Malta, including its founding, the spread of Christianity, and the Arab invasion of the country. She also references the Knights of Malta and their impact on the country. 

“Every person across the face of this Earth has been molded into what they are today by the past. Have you ever wondered sometime about why humanity is the way it is, or why society works the way it does? In order to find the answer, you must follow back the footprints to pinpoint the history of the society as a whole.”

West’s essay explains history’s importance and why it should be studied. Everything is how it is because of past events, and we can better understand our reality with context from the past. We can also learn more about ourselves and what the future may hold for us. West makes essential points about the importance of history and gives important insight into its relevance.

“While those stories are important, it is vital and a personal moral imperative, to share the breadth and depth of Black History, showing what it is and means to the world. It’s not just about honoring those few known for the 28 days of February. It’s about everyday seizing the opportunities before us to use the vastness of history to inspire, educate and develop our youth into the positive and impactful leaders we want for the future.”

In her essay, McGee explains the importance of history, mainly black history, to the past and the future. She writes about how being connected to your culture, history, and society can give you a sense of purpose. In addition, she reflects on the role black history had in her development as a person; she was able to learn more about black history than just Martin Luther King Jr. She was able to understand and be proud of her heritage, and she wishes to use history to inspire people for the future.  

“Shortly afterwards, Egyptians and Khwarazmians defeated an alliance of Crusaders-States and Syrians near Gaza. After Gaza, the Crusaders States were finished as a political force, although some cities along the coast hung on for more than forty years. The Egyptian Ayyubids occupied Jerusalem itself in 1247. The city now was not much more than a heap of ruins, becoming an unimportant backwater for a long time.”

Stein describes the Sixth Crusade, during which Emperor Frederick II could resolve the conflict through diplomacy, even gaining Christian control of Jerusalem by negotiating with the Sultan. He describes important figures, including the Popes of the time and Frederick himself, and the events leading up to and after the Crusade. Most importantly, his essay explains why this event is noteworthy: it was largely peaceful compared to the other Crusades and most conflicts of the time.

“Jillings describes the arrest of a Scottish preacher in 1603 for refusing to comply with the government’s health measures because he thought they were of no use as it was all up to God. The preacher was imprisoned because he was viewed as dangerous: his individual freedoms and beliefs were deemed less important than the safety of the community as a whole.”

In her essay, Whitaker explains the relevance of history in policymaking and attitudes toward the COVID-19 pandemic. She first discusses the human tendency to blame others for things beyond our control, giving historical examples involving discrimination against particular groups based on race or sexual orientation. She then describes the enforcement of health measures during the black plague, adding that religion and science do not necessarily contradict each other. From a historical perspective, we might just feel better about the situations we are in, as these issues have repeatedly afflicted humanity. 

In your essay, write about the lessons we can learn from studying history. What has history taught us about human nature? What mistakes have we made in the past that we can use to prevent future catastrophes? Explain your position in detail and support it with sufficient evidence.

We have been left with many reminders of our history, including monuments, historical documents, paintings, and sculptures. First, choose a primary historical source, explain what it is,  and discuss what you can infer about the period it is from. Then, provide context by using external sources, such as articles.

What historical event interests you? Choose one, whether it be a devastating war, the establishment of a new country, or a groundbreaking new invention, and write about it. Explain what exactly transpired in the event and explain why you chose it. You can also include possible lessons you could learn from it. You can use documentaries, history books, and online sources to understand the topic better. 

Research the history of a country of your choice and write your essay on it. Include how it was formed, essential people, and important events. The country need not be your home country; choose any country and write clearly. You can also focus on a specific period in your country’s history if you wish to go more in-depth. 

For a personal angle on your essay, you can write about your family’s history if there is anything you feel is noteworthy about it. Do you have any famous ancestors? Did any family members serve in the military? If you have the proper sources, discuss as much as you can about your family history and perhaps explain why it is essential to you. 

Throughout history, war has always hurt one or both sides. Choose one crucial historical war and write about its effects. Briefly discuss what occurred in the war and how it ended, and describe its impact on either or both sides. Feel free to focus on one aspect, territory, culture, or the economy.

From the spread of Christianity to the horrible practice of slavery, research any topic you wish and write about its history. How did it start, and what is its state today? You need not go too broad; the scope of your essay is your decision, as long as it is written clearly and adequately supported.

For help with your essay, check our round-up of best essay writing apps .If you’re looking for inspiration, check out our round-up of essay topics about nature .

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History is the Series of Victories Won by the Scientific Man Over the Romantic Man

• 08 Dec 2022

Romantic man is an individual who is a dreamer. He has a lot of feelings, idealism , and imagination. A romantic man is filled with hope, faith , and feelings. A romantic man goes through with his faith. He trusts in divine foresight. When it comes to scientific man , the quality outcomes are logic, reality, concentrated approach , being driven by a purpose, having a strategy and plan , and a clear-cut procedure. A scientific man tackles challenges of life with a clinical mindset . A scientific man lives his life objectively. He is reliant on careful foresight and planning.

History always remembers winners not losers and the right strategy always wins. Strategy is the fundamental characteristic of a scientific man rather than a romantic man. This is the reason why history is a series of victories won by the scientific man. However, there are several individuals within one person.

Different circumstances of life reveal the different characteristics of the same person or in other words we can say that the same individual has several faces. It is time or circumstances which reveal these secrets in front of society. Scientific man and romantic man are the two faces of the same individual which reflect in society as per the requirement of different circumstances. When an individual is doing something with a clinical approach or with a scientific mindset the probability of being successful will be very high as compared to a romantic approach. When it comes to the purpose of life rationality, strategy and planning are the most fundamental and vital requirements for success.

A romantic guy is a man with happiness, which is also extremely important to live a pleasant life. Aristotle was one of the greatest philosophers and scientists the world has ever seen. While Aristotle understood ultimate truth as physical objects that could only be known via the five senses, Plato thought that reality lived in ideas and could only be known through contemplation and inspiration.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy emphasized rationalism and a contemporary scientific approach and was heavily inspired by western modern philosophy. The period of enlightenment and liberal reformist modernization in India was ushered in by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the relentless social reformer known as the "Father of Modern India's Renaissance." According to him, sati violates all social and human emotions and is a sign that a race's moral standards have fallen. He considered that rather than working to improve societal conditions, religious orthodoxies were then causing harm to society, harming social interactions, and causing individuals problems and confusion.

During the post-Vedic period, the caste system was romanticized too much. It is too widespread in today's society as well. In the post Vedic period, the caste system was based on birth. This is a highly irrational system. The persons who raised the voice against the caste system are considered to have done an act based on human rationality and history remembers them. Such as B.R Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule and Kabir etc. They believed in the social equality of all human beings and thus were a strong opposer of the caste system.

Krishna’s philosophy of Karma in Bhagwat Geeta is a highly rational kind of approach in which Krishna says karma is the act which is devoid of worldly attachment. He advised that struggle is the fundamental element of life, and a Warrier must fight against all hurdles that come in life. In the purpose of life, the biggest hurdle is the human emotion. Because decision making is the most important aspect of life and if decision making is done under the influence of any kind of emotions, then the probability of making a wrong decision remains very high. Such kind of great knowledge enshrined in Bhagwat Geeta by Krishna. This is the reason why Krishna is the shining sun of Indian religious history.

One of India's most well-known social reformers and a highly regarded disciple of Mahatma Gandhi was Vinoba Bhave. He was a staunch supporter of egalitarian society. To establish equality in society and to eradicate inequality and poverty he started the Bhoodan Yojana i.e., Land-Gift Movement. A rational mind or scientific man can only think about bringing equality in society irrespective of their caste and a romantic man feels proud about his casteist superiority over others or he may suffer from casteist inferiority if belong to a depressed class.

Religion and associated sentiments basically fall in the category of belief and faith which is basically a romanticization of human feeling. But in census 2011 it has been reflected that the number of persons who identified themselves as having "no religion" has increased by more than 300% since the previous census, which was conducted in 2001. People are following religion and its customs blindly but census 2011 reveals that people are moving away from any kind of concept which forces them to follow something blindly. Thus, rationality is growing in the conscience of society.

Rationalism and scientific temperament have been part of the Indian tradition since at least 6 th century BC. Ajita Kesakambalin, contemporary of the Buddha, was the earliest known teacher of complete materialism who stripped any spiritual pursuit in life.

The Constitution of India is a rational document which imposes on the government to govern the nation with rational approach. The Indian constitution is enshrined with Article 51A (H) which encourages citizens to "develop the scientific temper, humanism, and the spirit of inquiry and change." Hence the Constitution is also promoting rationalism and scientism . Scientism is the belief that science and the scientific method are the best means of determining the truth about the universe and reality.

Romanticism is a literary and artistic movement that began in the late 18 th century and emphasized inspiration, subjectivity , and the primacy of the person. Romanticism was both a response to rationality and a product of societal developments. Rationality gained popularity, and more individuals began to challenge the belief that human nature was based on rationalism. Rationalism is a certain perspective on how the world works, what we can learn from it, and what people are really like. The underlying principle is that only your intellect can be trusted; your senses cannot. Thus, Romanticism is essentially a thing of the heart and has to do with thinking out of emotion, whereas rationalism is what is actually happening intellectually or the actuality of anything.

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”

Immanuel Kant

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Tim's History of British Towns, Cities and So Much More

The History of Essay: Origin and Evolvement

These days, an essay is one of the key assignments at college. This particular task allows tutors to evaluate the student’s knowledge effectively. But it was not always a key assessment tool in the education sphere. So, when did an essay become so important for study purposes? And who invented the essay? According to Aldous Huxley, this particular literary piece can be used to describe almost everything. Essays have become very popular since the first day this type of paper was introduced. What is more, the first time the essay appeared in the far 16th century, it was a part of a self-portrayal done by Michel de Montaigne. The term essay was adopted from French “essayer”, which was adopted from Latin “exagere”. The last one means “to sort through”. In the far 16th century, the essay was mostly a form of a literary piece. Afterward, it has gained wider use in literature and study. It lost all its formality and has become quite a popular writing form. Besides, it has turned into quite a complicated study assignment. That is why many modern students need help writing an essay these days.

Difference Between Essay and Article

In contrast to an article that mostly has an informative purpose, an essay is more a literary paper. The “essay” concept can refer to practically any short piece of report or small composition. It can be a short story, some critical piece, etc. The essay differs from an article or other kinds of papers. Many prominent features distinguish essays from research papers, case studies, or reports. The essay paper has a standard structure in most cases. Sometimes, the layout can be a little bit creative. An article provides information on a certain topic. It has a mostly informative character and does not tend to deliver solutions or recommendations. Besides, it lacks a strict formatting style and outline. Still, it mostly refers to modern academic essays. In old times, essays had no defined format or structure. The origin of the essay does not affect its current usage. Now, it is an effective educational tool and one of the top college projects. Academic essays have an assigned structure and formatting style. You cannot ignore the provided requirements if you want to have a good grade. There are many strict rules to essays assigned at college. Students often check long tutorials to learn how to prepare a proper essay

Types of Essays and Its Characteristics

In the history of the essay, there were always different types of essays. First and foremost, essays were divided into formal and informal. Next, impersonal and familiar. Formal essays are mostly focused on the described topic. Informal essays are more personal and focused on the essayist.

Academic essays differ greatly with their wide variety of types and formats. You can count descriptive, argumentative, reflective, analytical, persuasive, narrative, expository essays’ types. The key types of academic essays include analytical, descriptive, persuasive, and critical.

Every of the mentioned types has its own essay format. They also differ by structure, length, main points to analyze, and purposes. In old times, writers were mostly concerned by the personal or impersonal tone of written composition. It takes more effort to learn all the types of academic essays these days. Besides, they all have a different focus and the final goal.

The most popular narrative essay is quite familiar to the one it was just a few centuries ago. In this paper, you tell the story and focus on a single idea. Such papers like argumentative or analytical essays are more like research papers. They require a thesis statement, strong arguments, and supporting evidence. You have to conduct research work. It is way more difficult than to tell a simple story. Still, even storytelling requires natural talents and a clever mind to be appreciated by readers.     

Essay Evolvement and Modern Use

The essay history describes the way the traditional essay was turned into a decent educational tool. First, the essay was a typical literary form of expression. Authors were mostly concerned to share their point of view about some ideas or themselves in the composition. It gained more personal coloring than any other paper in years.

Since being parted from a self-portrayal, this particular piece was mostly essayist-focused originally. Afterward, once the essay writers have figured out it can describe particularly everything, an essay has gained wider use. Not every modern essay writer knows how the term “essay” was created. Still, modern writers face even bigger challenges with these particular kinds of written papers.

The key reasons include a set of strict rules and requirements for academic essays. They force writers to come up only with the most interesting and unique ideas. Also, they make writers prepare papers formatted due to an assigned formatting style only. Besides, many types of essays require strong analytical abilities.

An analytical essay is like a research paper. It also requires all the elements of a research piece. Thus, the ability to conduct proper research work and provide a complex analysis is mandatory for a modern author as well.

Final Thoughts

Preparing an essay can take a lot of time and great effort these days. With lots of complex requirements and difficult writing instructions, students often need outside writing essay help to succeed.

A modern essay differs greatly from the one it was in the far 16th century. In the first years, this particular writing form was introduced, it was a part of self-portrayal. In many following years, it turned into one of the most popular compositions and the top college assignment.

Nowadays, there is probably not a single student who has never dealt with an essay. Therefore, knowing how it was created and who introduced it to the world can be quite interesting and surely very informative for everyone. Knowing history helps to recognize yourself in the world better. Knowledge can always be quite a driving force for every person.

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• Hersh Goldberg-Polin

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At the Jerusalem synagogue where Hersh Goldberg-Polin danced in life, grief and anger reign after his death

JERUSALEM — Three hundred and thirty-two days after Hersh Goldberg-Polin danced in the courtyard next to his Jerusalem synagogue on the holiday of Simchat Torah, more than a thousand people gathered there in grief and prayer to mourn his murder by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

During the Sunday night vigil, the courtyard railings were lined with oversized yellow ribbons to symbolize advocacy for the hostages, Hapoel Jerusalem soccer flags — the 23-year-old’s favorite team — and posters that read, “We love you, stay strong, survive,” a mantra coined by his mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin.

Just hours earlier, one of the posters had been hanging over the balcony of the home of Shira Ben-Sasson, a leader of Hakhel, the Goldberg-Polins’ egalitarian congregation in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem.

“We were sure we would take it down when he came home,” Ben-Sasson said.

The community wanted to unite while respecting the Goldberg-Polins’ desire for privacy, she said, prompting them to organize the prayer gathering.

“But it’s like a Band-Aid or giving first aid, it’s what you do in an emergency. I don’t know how we go on after this,” she said.

A covered courtyard at the Hakhel congregation was filled with mourners the day after Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose family are prominent members, was found to have been killed in Gaza. Hundreds of other people crowded outside the gates, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)

She added that the community, which has a large contingent of English-speaking immigrants, was not prepared for the High Holidays, which begin in about a month. She said, “Seeing his empty seat is hard.”

For Ben-Sasson, who wore a T-shirt bearing the Talmudic dictum “There is no greater mitzvah than the redeeming of captives,” the tragedy is especially painful because, she said, it could have been avoided with a ceasefire agreement that freed hostages.

“Hersh was alive 48 hours ago. We think a deal could have saved him. There is no military solution to this,” she said.

That feeling of bereavement, often mixed with betrayal, pervaded gatherings across Israel on Sunday, as the country struggled with the news that six hostages who may have been freed in an agreement were now dead as negotiations continue to stall. Speakers at protests in Tel Aviv blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who himself apologized for not getting the hostages out alive but blamed Hamas for obstructing a deal. The country’s labor union, the Histadrut, has called a national strike on Monday to demand a deal.

A rare early September rain lashed parts of Israel on Sunday, leading to a widespread interpretation: God, too, was weeping.

Some at the Jerusalem gathering, including the relative of another former hostage, said Netanyahu had chosen defeating Hamas over freeing the captives.

Josef Avi Yair Engel’s grandson Ofir was released from Hamas captivity in November. He paid tribute to Hersh Goldberg-Polin, murdered in captivity, in Jerusalem, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)

Josef Avi Yair Engel, whose grandson Ofir, 18, was released from Hamas captivity in November during that month’s ceasefire deal, expressed shock over Hersh’s murder but said he was not surprised, given the wartime policies of Netanyahu’s government.

“We knew months ago this was going to happen. Bibi’s formula, to dismantle Hamas and return the hostages, wasn’t logical. It’s an either/or situation,” Engel said, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. “He’s tearing the country apart. I’m afraid that in the coming months there won’t be a state at all.”

Engel said he felt a close bond with Hersh’s father Jon Polin, not only because of their joint activism in the hostage families’ tent outside the Prime Minister’s Residence, but also because of their shared identity as Jerusalemites.

“There aren’t many of us in the hostage circle,” he said. “We’re like family.”

Sarah Mann, who did not know the family personally, said the weekend’s tragedy reminded her of Oct. 7.

“This day has sparks of the seventh, which created numbness and an inability to talk. Just complete shock,” she said.

Mourners left notes at a gathering at Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s family synagogue in Jerusalem. Many of the messages used the Hebrew word for “sorry.” (Deborah Danan)

Part of the reason for that, Mann said, was Rachel, who she described as a “force of faith.” Goldberg-Polin’s mother emerged as the most prominent advocate for the hostages globally and became a symbol in her own right as she crisscrossed the world calling for her son’s freedom.

“Millions of people around the world held onto her. Once that was cut, people’s ability to hold onto faith was knocked out today. But even though this has shattered us, we need to keep holding onto God,” Mann said.

For Susi Döring Preston, the day called to mind was not Oct. 7 but Yom Kippur, and its communal solemnity.

She said she usually steers clear of similar war-related events because they are too overwhelming for her.

“Before I avoided stuff like this because I guess I still had hope. But now is the time to just give in to needing to be around people because you can’t hold your own self up any more,” she said, tears rolling down her face. “You need to feel the humanity and hang onto that.”

Like so many others, Döring Preston paid tribute to the Goldberg-Polins’ tireless activism. “They needed everyone else’s strength but we drew so much strength from them and their efforts, “she said. “You felt it could change the outcome. But war is more evil than good. I think that’s the crushing thing. You can do everything right, but the outcome is still devastating.”

Guy Gordon, with his daughter Maya, added a broken heart to the piece of tape he has worn daily to mark the number of days since the hostage crisis began, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)

Guy Gordon, a member of Hakhel who moved to Israel from Dublin, Ireland, in the mid-1990s, said the efforts towards ensuring Hersh’s safe return have been an anchor for the community during the war. The community knew him as the family described him in its announcement of his funeral on Tuesday, as “a child of light, love and peace” who enjoyed exploring the world and coming home to his family, including his parents and younger sisters, Leebie and Orly.

“It gave us something to hope for, and pray for and to demonstrate for,” he said. “We had no choice but to be unreasonably optimistic. Tragically it transpired that he survived until the very end.”

Gordon, like many others in the crowd, wore a piece of duct tape marked with the number of days since Oct. 7 — a gesture initiated by Goldberg-Polin’s mother. Unlike on previous days, though, his tape also featured a broken red heart beside the number.

Nadia Levene, a family friend, also reflected on the improbability of Hersh’s survival.

“He did exactly what his parents begged him to do. He was strong. He did survive. And look what happened,” Levene said.

She hailed Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s “unwavering strength and belief in God,” adding, “There were times I lost faith. I suppose I was angry with God. But she just kept inspiring us all to pray, pray, pray.”

Leah Silver of Jerusalem examined stickers showing Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s mantra for her son Hersh, who was murdered in captivity in Gaza, at a gathering after Hersh’s death, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)

Jerusalem resident Leah Silver rejected politicizing the hostages’ deaths.

“Everything turns political so quickly. I came here because I felt that before all the protests, we need to just mourn for a moment and to pray. And show respect for each other,” she said. “We’ve become confused about who the enemy is. It’s very sad.”

But not everyone at the gathering joined in to sing Israel’s national anthem at the closing of the prayer gathering.

“I’m sorry, I can’t sing ‘Hatikvah,'” Reza Green, a Baka resident who did not know the Goldberg-Polins personally, said. “I’m too angry. We shouldn’t be here.”

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