Darwinism stated by Darwin himself / Characteristic passages from the writings of Charles Darwin

by Charles Darwin

REVERSION IN THE HUMAN FAMILY.

Animals and Plants,
vol. ii, page 1.

When the child resembles either grandparent more closely than its immediate parents, our attention is not much arrested, though in truth the fact is highly remarkable; but when the child resembles some remote ancestor or some distant member in a collateral line—and in the last case we must attribute this to the descent of all the members from a common progenitor—we feel a just degree of astonishment. When one parent alone displays some newly-acquired and generally inheritable character, and the offspring do not inherit it, the cause may lie in the other parent having the power of prepotent transmission. But when both parents are similarly characterized, and the child does not, whatever the cause may be, inherit the character in question, but resembles its grandparents, we have one of the simplest cases of reversion. We continually see another and even more simple case of atavism, though not generally included under this head, namely, when the son more closely resembles his maternal than his paternal grandsire in some male attribute, as in any peculiarity in the beard of man, the horns of the bull, the hackles or comb of the cock, or, as in certain diseases necessarily confined to the male sex; for, as the mother can not possess or exhibit such male attributes, the child must inherit them, through her blood, from his maternal grandsire.

The cases of reversion may be divided into two main classes, which, however, in some instances, blend into one another; namely, first, those occurring in a variety or race which has not been crossed, but has lost by variation some character that it formerly possessed, and which afterward reappears. The second class includes all cases in which an individual with some distinguishable character, a race, or species, has at some former period been crossed, and a character derived from this cross, after having disappeared during one or several generations, suddenly reappears.

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Page 21.

From these facts we may perhaps infer that the degraded state of so many half-castes is in part due to reversion to a primitive and savage condition, induced by the act of crossing, even if mainly due to the unfavorable moral conditions under which they are generally reared.