page_title: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
section_title: Human races
hierarchical_section_title: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex / Darwin's background issues and concerns / Human races
caption_attribution_description: English: Two views of Jemmy Button from Fitzroy's Narrative
context_page_description: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex is a book by English naturalist Charles Darwin, first published in 1871, which applies evolutionary theory to human evolution, and details his theory of sexual selection, a form of biological adaptation distinct from, yet interconnected with, natural selection. The book discusses many related issues, including evolutionary psychology, evolutionary ethics, differences between human races, differences between sexes, the dominant role of women in mate choice, and the relevance of the evolutionary theory to society.
context_section_description: Darwin was a long-time abolitionist who had been horrified by slavery when he first came into contact with it in Brazil while touring the world on the Beagle voyage many years before (slavery had been illegal in the British Empire since 1833). Darwin also was perplexed by the "savage races" he saw in South America at Tierra del Fuego, which he saw as evidence of man's more primitive state of civilisation. During his years in London, his private notebooks were riddled with speculations and thoughts on the nature of the human races, many decades before he published Origin and Descent.
  When making his case that human races were all closely related and that the apparent gap between humans and other animals was due to closely related forms being extinct, Darwin drew on his experiences on the voyage showing that "savages" were being wiped out by "civilized" peoples.
  When Darwin referred to "civilised races" he was almost always describing European cultures, and apparently drew no clear distinction between biological races and cultural races in humans. Few made that distinction at the time, an exception being Alfred Russel Wallace.
  In his book Why Freud Was Wrong, Richard Webster argued that The Descent of Man was influenced by racist prejudice, and that in it Darwin looked forward to the extermination of what he considered to be savage races.
caption: On the Beagle voyage, Darwin met Fuegians including Jemmy Button who had been briefly educated in England and was reasonably civilised.
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