Darwin’s Great Denudation
EVEN AS INDUSTRIAL and geopolitical change brought heightened attention to packaged depilatory powders, disdain for visible body hair remained relatively contained through the first half of the nineteenth century, an attitude considered specific to American “Indians.” Other than the men of science busily establishing racial differences in hair growth, the perfumers and druggists pushing treatments for low foreheads or side whiskers, and sideshow barkers seeking to profit from the exhibition of spectacularly hairy individuals, few Americans at midcentury appear to have given much thought to body hair.
After 1871, however, attitudes began to shift. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, perspectives on the relations between “man” and “brute” received a startling jolt.1 Darwinian frameworks and vocabularies, spread by scientific and medical experts and by the popular press, came to exercise enormous influence on American ideas about hair, fur, wool, and the differences—such as they were—between them. After Descent, dwindling numbers of Americans would attribute visible differences in body hair to divine design or to the relative balance of bile, blood, and phlegm. Instead, differences in hair type and amount came to be described as effects of evolutionary forces: the tangible result of competitive selection. Moreover, the same traditions of comparative anatomy that helped to launch evolutionary theory provoked ongoing interest in the scientific analysis of body hair. Although these diverse experts never spoke with one voice on the significance of body hair, collectively they succeeded in pathologizing “excessive” hair growth. By the dawn of the twentieth century, hairiness had been established as a sign of sexual, mental, and criminal deviance.
ALTHOUGH DARWIN HINTED in his 1859 introduction to the Origin of Species that the book would shed light on the contentious subject of “man and his origins,” not until 1871’s Descent of Man did he seek to explain both how man was “descended from some pre-existing form” and how apparent variations in physical characteristics came to be: why some bodies are darker or furrier or smaller than others, and so on.2
Body hair played a pivotal (and underappreciated) role in both explanations. The evolutionary ideas often said to have been “discovered” by Darwin were actually pieced together from many sources; chief among those sources were earlier comparative studies of hair.3 Among the many details from his encyclopedic notes that Darwin included in Descent are accounts of the eradication of eyebrows in South America and Africa; of the monetary value (twenty shillings) accorded to the loss of a beard in Anglo-Saxon law; and of the Fuegian Islanders’ threat to a particular young missionary (“far from a hairy man”) that they would “strip him naked, and pluck the hairs from his face and body.”4 Darwin took many of these examples from two American sources: Catlin’s two-volume 1841 ethnography of the manners and customs of North American Indians and Gould’s massive 1869 survey of Civil War soldiers.5
If Darwin wished merely to describe the influence of the aesthetic in human evolution—the role of “beauty” once noted by James Cowles Prichard—he might have focused on any number of characteristics: eye size, hip-to-shoulder ratio, limb length. (Twenty-first-century evolutionary biologists analyze all these features and more.) Hairiness, however, forced particularly challenging questions about man’s relations to his primate fore-bears, as Darwin, like earlier naturalists, well realized. On the one hand, the very presence of hair would seem to fortify the claim that man is “descended from some ape-like creature.”6 As Darwin reasoned, “From the presence of the woolly hair . . . we may infer that man is descended from some animal which was born hairy and remained so during life.”7 And yet, that same thin scattering of hairs posed a rather inconvenient truth for the theory of natural selection, since the detriments of man’s relative hairlessness was readily apparent to anyone who had suffered through a clammy English winter. As Darwin explained, “The loss of hair is an inconvenience and probably an injury to man even under a hot climate, for he is thus exposed to sudden chills, especially during wet weather.”8 Darwin concluded that man’s “more or less complete absence of hair” reveals the limits of the arguments he laid out in the Origin of Species.9 “No one supposes that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man, so that his body cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection.”10
The problem Darwin faced in the Descent, then, was to make sense of characteristics that were useless at best and injurious or downright lethal at worst, given natural selection’s overarching insistence that advantageous variations persist over others. This dilemma was embodied most fully in what Darwin called the great “denudation of mankind”—man’s loss of hairy covering.11 Resolving this dilemma compelled Darwin to unfurl his controversial companion to the theory of natural selection: sexual selection. Thus the explicit goal of the latter sections of Descent, the chapters that discuss the inheritance of disadvantageous characteristics, is to show that such selection, “continued through many generations,” can produce effects on bodily form and appearance.12 Ultimately, Darwin attributed most of the differences of concern to his nineteenth-century readers—why some creatures were stronger or larger or more colorful than others—to the action of sexual selection. As he concluded in the Descent, “of all the causes which have led to the differences in external appearance between the races of man, and to a certain extent between man and the lower animals, sexual selection has been by far the most efficient.”13
DARWIN’S ADVOCACY OF sexual selection—and specifically its role in explaining man’s relative hairlessness—drove a wedge between Darwin and his longtime collaborator, Alfred Russel Wallace.14 Like Darwin’s Descent of Man, Wallace’s major book on human evolution, his 1870 Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, wrestled with how to accommodate seemingly useless or disadvantageous characteristics within the confines of the theory of natural selection. Chief among these troublesome characteristics was what Wallace called the absence of “hairy covering” in man. Other characteristics were similarly inexplicable, Wallace proposed, but perhaps not to “an equal degree.”15 Considering man’s hairless condition against the backdrop of other similarly perplexing phenomena led Wallace to conclude that man’s nakedness demonstrated “the agency of some other power than the law of the survival of the fittest.” In his view, hairlessness could be explained in no other way. As Wallace put it, a “superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose,” by means of “more subtle agencies than we are acquainted with.”16
More steadfast evolutionists quickly jumped on this point. In one 1870 lecture, the Devonshire naturalist and theologian T. R. R. Stebbing lambasted Wallace for failing to recognize the capacious meanings of “utility” in the struggle for existence. “[W]hat is selected through being useful in one direction may incidentally become useful in another,” Stebbing argued. “Had [Wallace] employed his usual ingenuity on the question of man’s hairless skin, he might have seen the possibility of its ‘selection’ through its superior beauty or the health attached to superior cleanliness.”17 Stebbing further mocked Wallace’s claims by ridiculing the idea of God as some sort of primordial cosmetologist:
[I]t is surprising that he should picture to himself a superior intelligence plucking the hair from the backs of savage men . . . in order that the descendents of the poor shorn wretches might, after many deaths from cold and damp, in the course of many generations take to tailoring and to dabbling in bricks and mortar.18
Such trappings of civility, Stebbing insisted, are “nothing more nor less than part and parcel of natural selection.”19
Recognizing body hair as the key point of contention, Darwin zeroed in on both Wallace’s statements and Stebbing’s critique. In Descent, Darwin echoed Stebbing’s dismissal of Wallace, and reasserted the absurdity of thinking that hairlessness was God’s way to force early men “to raise themselves in the scale of civilization
