In
the Descent of Man, Darwin explains to us how we “higher order” creatures were
derived from simpler organisms of a “lower order”. In the picture that he
paints the conditions and the world in which our ancestors had to survive
slowly but surely forged our mind and various other traits into the state they
are in today, through the generations, via natural selection. Among the ‘higher
order’ traits he mentions is man’s great capacity for morality and reasoning.
It is these traits that we see revered in Natural selection and Scientific
wooing by Constance Naden. In these poems the baser, ‘lower order’ attributes
of man are held almost with contempt? In Natural selection Constance writes “
Of Science he hasn’t a trace/ He seeks not the How and the Why,/ But he sings
with an amateurs grace,/ and he dances much better then I…….Tis a low that with
Aves prevails/ and even in homo survives….Ah no! for since Chloe is false, I’m
certain that Darwin is true!”. Is the contempt for this lower order thinking in
man, and the way in which the two orders of thought and feeling are
distinguished from one another not misguided? Darwin writes that our enhanced mental
faculties are themselves the result of natural selection, so should we not
equally praise and admire the more base faculties which the unscientific youth
is filled with, the very same attributes that will win him (and not the
scientist) the young girl’s affections. Should we not be slower to be so judgmental
and dismissive about traits and faculties that have served our species and so
many others, so well, for so many generations?
The only thing I would ask is how this relates to those traits that are "not now of any service" (p234)? What place do these traits have? If every species is supposed to evolve then it seems a mystery that such non-useful traits have continued to survive. The world in 802, 701 from the Time Machine depicts the merging of species, through evolution, into only two species. I would argue that without the traits that may be seen as unimportant, all species would be more similarly related. Eventually, if nature wins, and we lose the ability to woo and dance, we will all become Murlocks or giant man-eating lobsters.
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