The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

Wallace explains the development of the ideas of justice and benevolence by the advantages which would result from them to the tribe and to each individual. But faculties essentially individual, and without immediate utility to others, are not subject, according to him, to selection. “How,” says he, “could the struggle for existence, the victory of the most fitted and natural selection give any aid to the development of mental faculties,” such as ideal conceptions of space and time, of eternity and infinity, the artistic feeling, abstract ideas of number and form, without which arithmetic and geometry are impossible?

For a much more cogent reason, the development of the moral sense in the savage cannot be accounted for by considerations taken from utility, whether individual or collective. Wallace insists upon this point at some length; he quotes examples which prove that this feeling exists, in all which is most delicate and most opposed to utilitarian notions, among the most savage tribes of Central India. We could give many examples of this fact; among others, that the Red-skins have the greatest respect for their word of honour, though it should entail torture and death.

Our author bases numerous arguments upon the physical examination of man. “It is perfectly certain,” he says, “that natural selection could not have produced the present naked body of man from an ancestor covered with hair, for such a modification, far from being useful, would be injurious, at least in certain respects;” in civilised man a number of movements are executed by the hand of which savages have not the slightest idea, although no anatomical difference exists in the structure of the superior members; the larynx of our singers is constructed similarly to that of savages, and, nevertheless, what a contrast between the sounds produced!

From all these facts Wallace concludes that the brain, hand, and larynx of savages possess latent aptitudes, which being temporarily useless cannot be attributed to natural selection. Man, moreover, has not the power of acquiring them himself. Foreign intervention therefore is necessary, for the explanation of their existence. Wallace attributes this intervention to a superior intelligence which acted on the human species, just as the latter has acted on the rock-pigeon to produce from it the pouter or the carrier, and which employed analogous processes.

In short, natural selection, regulated by the laws of nature only, is sufficient to produce wild species; artificial or human selection can produce improved races of animals and plants; a kind of divine selection must have produced the present man, and can alone bring him to the highest pitch of intellectual and moral development.

In advancing this latter hypothesis, Wallace declares that it no more impairs the theory of natural selection than the latter is weakened by the fact of artificial selection. Few, I think, will accept this proposition. The chief apology for Darwinism in the eyes of men of science, its great charm to all its partisans, lies in the pretensions which it puts forward of connecting organic origins, those of man as well as those of plants, with the single action of second causes; and to explain the present state of living beings by physical and physiological laws, just as geology and astronomy explain the present state of the material world entirely by the general laws of matter. In making the intervention of an intelligent will necessary for the realisation of the human being, Wallace has set himself in opposition to the very essence of the theory. Such is the opinion of most Darwinists, who have treated him somewhat as a deserter.

I am not therefore called upon to examine this latter hypothesis of Wallace. I am, however, at liberty to state that most of the facts, which have induced one of the founders of Darwinism to separate from his chief upon so important a point, retain all their value as objections. The mistake of Wallace consists in failing to see that his statements upon the subject of man apply equally to animals, and Claparède has justly reproached him with a want of logic on this point. He has been less happy in the answers which he has made to his old ally. Doubtless, he who regards the question exclusively from a Darwinian point of view, and accepts as true everything which I have endeavoured to shew to be false, will readily find a solution for many of the difficulties raised by Wallace. But his statements upon latent aptitudes, upon the superior faculties of the human mind, and upon the moral sense, are very difficult to refute. Claparède has only alluded to the former. Darwin has attempted to go further; but his theories and hypotheses upon these important questions do not appear to me to have given much satisfaction to the most devoted of his followers. I cannot here enter into a discussion, which, to have any value, should be carried to some length, and I refer the reader to the work upon the Descent of Man, and to my articles in the Journal des Savants.

X. I cannot close this short account of the origins, which have been attributed to man during late years, without mentioning the new theory which has lately been put forward by an eminent botanist, to whose works I have often had to allude. M. Naudin has been one of the most important of Darwin’s precursors. Six years before the English naturalist, he compared the action exercised by natural forces in the production of species to the methods used by man in obtaining races; he admitted the derivation and filiation of species; he compared the vegetable kingdom to a tree “where roots, mysteriously hidden in the depths of cosmogenic time, have produced a limited number of branches successively divided and sub-divided. The first branches represent the primordial types of the kingdom, the subsequent ramifications the existing species.” We cannot fail to recognise in these words an idea very similar to Darwinism.

M. Naudin now proposes an evolution theory which is very different. He “entirely excludes the hypothesis of natural selection, unless the sense of the word is changed so as to make it synonymous with survival.” He rejects no less strongly the idea of gradual transmutations, which require millions of years to effect the transmutation of a single plant. He insists, on the contrary, upon the suddenness with which most of the variations observed in plants have been produced, and regards it as a representation of what must have taken place in the successive genesis of living beings. Let us remark in passing, that Darwin, in the last edition of his work recognises the reality of these sudden leaps, which have taken place without transitions between one generation and another, and confesses that he has not taken sufficient account of them in his earlier writings.