Charles Darwin developed early fascination with natural history.
Educated at Edinburgh in Cambridge, his advisers urged him to pursue, his
passions. And so, he began to explore the world,
this world that's becoming not just more inter connected, but interdependent.
And he, in a sense, is an example of the ways in which the worlds horizons opening
up after the upheavals of the technological revolutions, the French
revolution, the advent of free trade, and so on.
And so, he embarked on a five year journey on a vessel called the H.M.S.
Beagle, to South America, to the Galapagos Islands, to Australia.
And he gathered evidence of fossils, marine invertebrate.
He was fascinated by all of the artifacts that he was able to gather from these
distant corners of the world. And he was also a great observer of animal
behavior. In fact, Darwin's last book was a book
about earthworms. Now, we are beyond, something that we
talked about earlier in lecture, the relationship between collecting and a
conquest, we're into a whole new scientific domain.
At the end of his five year journey, Darwin would write and publish, in 1839,
The Voyage of the Beagle. And while he was on his trip, he took
notes, vast notes, and he doodled. Let me show you one of his doodles.
This image we have is that, from an 1837 sketch in his notebook.
And it's a tree depicting the phylogenetic relationships among the species.
Notice some of the key words here, I don't know, Dan, if we can capture it here, I
think, his search for words to describe the different branches of this thing that
he would eventually call the tree of life. In 1859, Darwin would publish On the
Origin of Species. This image of the front of the book, I'd
like you to pay some attention. Notice some of the keywords here too.
Singular origin, multiple outcomes. Note, the singular to the plural.
The evolutionary principles that Charles Darwin was fathoming here, he wanted to
help explain diversification in nature, diversification in nature.
To argue that variation and adaptation take place over time.
So, in looking at animal life in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of
Ecuador, he began to observe how animals and insects mutated and became more
speciated over time. They were not born different, they evolved
to become different. And so, in 1871, when he would publish his
Opus, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, this was his big book,
based on a lifetime of observation of orchids and moths, animals from around the
world. He argued, for a concept of human
evolution and sexual selection. One of the fundamental principles of the
book was that all humans are one species. And all species share some fundamental
propensities. And from a common descent, we get
diversity. From common descent, we get diversity.
Humans among others, belong to a single animal kingdom.
In his conclusion to this book, Darwin would argue, that man with all of his
noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence
which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his
god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the
solar system. With all these exalted powers, man still
bears, in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
These were very powerful and revolutionary words.
We are all, in some respects, belong to the same kingdom.
A kingdom that, for Darwin, God created but we descended into speciated
differences. And you can imagine, [laugh] the brouhaha
that would be produced by words such as these.
This was a blow to prominent theories, about living beings, about humanity, and
about global history. This is the reason why I'm bringing up
Charles Darwin for us. Because until Darwin came along, the
prevailing dogma was that we were fundamentally different.
Within, and the different species obeyed different laws or had laws of their own.
And, that these natural laws also apply to human races and nations, words that could
often be used interchangeably. So that people came from entirely
different origins, right? And this idea of a fundamental species
separation among humans was a theory called pluralsim, or these were pluralists
as they were often called. And they were obsessed with the science of
phrenology, the measurement of the skull, right?
As a way to provide metrics to determine what race different people belonged to.
Of course, with a, a strong racial ideology backing them up, putting of
course, Negroes at the very bottom of the ladder of human superiority and
inferiority. This theory, this pluralist theory
champion, was champion by proponents of institutions that argued that people had
to be kept in their places. Kept separated from each other when they
belong to different races and species, according to different statuses.
And, of course, you can hear behind this a whole racial argument for slavery.
That physical differences between people were essential characteristics of people,
and that we all belong to fundamentally different races.
And so, along comes Charles Darwin who argues that the laws of natural selection
applied to all creatures. But, he was also arguing for a different
model, a different, a different concept of mankind, of humankind.
In his tree of life, humans all branch from a shared trunk.
Africans, Indians, Europeans that it's often forgotten that Darwin was a lifelong
abolitionist and a profound humanitarian. His science buttressed his moral code and
he was appalled in, in the chronicle from the Beagle at the sight of slavery in
Brazil and in South Africa. So, let's pause here and ask ourselves,
how Darwin's insights about our common origins, how they might inform, our
thinking about the history of the world.