One such reinvention was Alfred Tennyson’s Arthurian epic Idylls of the King, published serially between 1859 and 1872, easily the most popular poetic work of the day. Book 10, “The Last Tournament,” was coincidentally published in the same year as The Descent of Man. Like many Victorian works of poetry and song, Idylls of the King is about the chivalric virtues to which Victorians aspired, but almost every plot point involves fighting over women. Men continue to fight over women and bully them into submission even in the twenty-first century, and while most of these battles are conducted with weapons of words or music (Mick Jagger) or money (Donald Trump), that is unfortunately not always the case. To be perfectly fair to Darwin, though, it must be admitted that the complex connections among physiology, behavior, and reproductive success have continued to be one of the most contentious themes in modern primatology, not to mention biology, anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and psychology.
Darwin continued to revise The Origin of Species throughout his life, integrating new information, closing gaps, and answering friendly and unfriendly critics. His theories of natural selection and the struggle for existence—which became known in common parlance as “evolution” and “survival of the fittest”—were soon generally understood and applauded among most of the scientific community.
III
So, in Darwin’s scheme of things, an investigation of species origins necessitates an investigation of sexuality in particular and behavior in general, as well as—one discovers in following Darwin’s train of thought through all of his books—investigations of mind and emotion, not just in humans, not just in primates and other animals, but sometimes even in plants.
It might surprise (or appall) those critics of Darwin who have not studied his work that almost a third of the first volume of The Descent of Man is an impassioned analysis of connections among emotions, mental abilities, and morality in humans and their mammalian kin. Although courtship, mating, and embryonic development are strikingly similar in all mammals, in infancy and adolescence, humans are even more obviously related to apes and monkeys than to other mammals: Darwin points out that monkeys are nearly helpless when they are born and that most orangutans are not mature until they are ten or more years old—not very different from humans in some societies. Consequently, parenting, which in humans is usually institutionalized as motherhood, is essential to the survival of the species. In one of the warmest passages in The Descent of Man, Darwin recounts anecdotes of human-like motherly devotion: a capuchin driving flies away from her infant; a gibbon washing the faces of her children in a stream; captive primate mothers whose grief at losing an infant is so intense that they are suicidal; the adoption of orphan monkeys by unrelated adult females; monkey mothers carefully dividing food among the young; female baboons mentoring the young of other species; even a female baboon who adopts a kitten. (In the first edition of The Descent of Man, Darwin comments on the intelligence displayed by this baboon, who bit off the kitten’s claws after she was scratched. After a critic expressed doubt about the episode, Darwin added a footnote in the second edition, claiming that he bit off a kitten’s claws himself to prove that it could be done by primate teeth.) Although some of these claims have not been verified in modern behavioral observations, they are still good evidence of Darwin’s views. In his opinion, then, the primate maternal instinct is so strong that it can operate independently of parturition or genetic kinship. Maternal instincts are allied to and perhaps the origin of other forms of altruism, including, Darwin suggests, the moral instincts developed by archaic humans.
Following his discussion of the maternal instinct, Darwin develops a more general description of the social instincts. “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important,” he remarks.24 But he also observes that “any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.”25 In addition to the nurturing activities that can be associated with mothering, Darwin argues that warning cries, social grooming, mutual defense, cooperative hunting, obedience to a leader, and defense of the weak by the strong can be interpreted as protomoral behaviors. Even vengeance and jealousy, if not moral in themselves, reveal a mental capacity that can be channeled into moral behavior, as Darwin illustrates through an anecdote added in the second edition:
Sir Andrew Smith, a zoologist whose scrupulous accuracy was known to many persons, told me the following story of which he was himself an eye-witness; at the Cape of Good Hope an officer had often plagued a certain baboon, and the animal, seeing him approaching one Sunday for parade, poured water into a hole and hastily made some thick mud, which he skilfully dashed over the officer as he passed by, to the amusement of many bystanders. For long afterwards the baboon rejoiced and triumphed whenever he saw his victim. 26
Two additional anecdotes, first given in volume 1 and later repeated in the “Summary and Concluding Remarks” at the end of volume 2, exemplify Darwin’s thinking about the moral or protomoral instinct in primates. In the first anecdote, he writes,
I will give [an] instance of sympathetic and heroic conduct in a little American monkey. Several years ago a keeper at the Zoological Gardens, showed me some deep and scarcely healed wounds on the nape of his neck, inflicted on him whilst kneeling on the floor by a fierce baboon. The little American monkey, who was a warm friend of this keeper, lived in the same large compartment, and was dreadfully afraid of the great baboon. Nevertheless, as soon as he saw his friend the keeper in peril, he rushed to the rescue, and by screams and bites so distracted the baboon that the man was able to escape, after running great risk, as the surgeon who attended him thought, of his life. 27
A baboon is the hero of the second anecdote, from Alfred Edmund Brehm, like Rengger one of Darwin’s most reliable and complete sources of information on primate behavior. Brehm observed that when a troop of baboons fled from a pack of dogs, the dominant males managed to hustle all of the adolescents out of the way except one, who got stranded on a boulder. When one old patriarch, “a true hero,” returned to the boulder, “coaxed him, and triumphantly led him away,” the dogs were so “astonished” that they did not attack.28 Darwin notes that many mammals, including and especially dogs, have instincts for the “more complex emotions” of loyalty and fellow feeling, but the focus in this part of his argument remains on primates.29
Since there were no behavioral science labs in Victorian England, the only people able to give detailed accounts of animal cognition were zookeepers and the impresarios of animal shows and menageries. In fact, since their livelihood depended on intelligent, reliable animals, impresarios and animal trainers developed strategies not only for training their animals but also for identifying those with the most potential. One of Darwin’s sources was a Mr. Bartlett, whose approach was based on his observations of attention span: the longer a monkey was able to pay attention without being distracted, the greater its potential as an actor, and the more Mr. Bartlett was willing to pay for the animal. Since, in Darwin’s analysis, moral or protomoral behavior is allied to intelligence, the discussion of morality in The Descent of Man is bound up with the discussion of primate intelligence, which (in a parallel to Kant’s explanation of the human mind) is a function of both inherited capacities and learning. For René Descartes, whose 1637 treatise Discourse on Method initiated the European cultural emphasis on reason, humans were the apex of organic life, qualitatively different from the lower animals in their capacity for reason, which was expressed in human language and only human language. In contrast to the human, animals were always on automatic pilot, according to Descartes and the mainstream of Enlightenment philosophy that developed from his work. Although a century later the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham pointed out that this analysis of animal nature did not excuse the mistreatment of any creature that could feel pain, the idea of “organic machines” was the default position in science and philosophy until Darwin returned to it.
Darwin
