January 2018

In her Introduction to the 2013 re-publication of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (in the series Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) Janet Browne of Harvard University doesn’t duck the evidence ‘he (Darwin) believed that sexual selection fostered inbuilt male superiority …In early human societies, the necessities of survival, he […]

Darwin decided that the various races of homo sapiens around the globe in the 19th century constituted but one species. Also when on his voyages of the 1830s he took a benign interest in the language and culture of the ‘primitive’ tribes-people’ encountered in South America, Tierra del Fuego, Australia and New Zealand. But how/why, he

Recently attended lecture at the Royal Station Hotel, Ferensway, Hull (see above) organised by the Hull Literary and Philosophical Soc. which is a society with a proud history stretching back to 1822 (book recently published on the history of the Society). The subject of the presentation was the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador and

Part one of Darwin’s On the Descent of Man dealt with many lines of thought discussed in the Origin of Species but now as directly relating to Man the animal rather than avoiding that species (s.p.b.). Darwin argued that as well as anatomically (see previous illustration) Man’s mental faculties can be explained as having gradually

Having published On the Origin of Species in 1859 (John Murray publisher) Charles Darwin waited until 1871 before having his two-volume The Descent of Man an Selection in Relation to Sex published. Although he had been considering the content of this his second great volume since his experiences on the Beagle expedition nevertheless he had

‘Darwin’s Finches’ are a well-known example of wildlife discoveries that Charles Darwin made during (and after) his five-year voyage in the 1830s on board HMS Beagle, the main purpose of which was to map the coast of South America. Initially Darwin did not realise the significance of his studies in terms of evolution. He was no