A problem in human evolution.

  • Allen, Grant.
Date:
[1879]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A problem in human evolution. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    “ Hardly any view advanced in tliis work,” says the illustrious author of the Descent of Man, “ has met with so much disfavour as the explanation of the loss of hair in mankind through sexual selec- tion.” Indeed the friends and foes of Mr. Darwin’s great theories have been equally ready, the one party to disclaim and the other party to ridicule the account which the founder of modern philoso- phic biology has given of the process whereby man, as he supposes, gradually lost the common hairy covering of other mammalia. Mr. Wallace, with all his ability and ingenuity, finds it necessary to call in the aid of a dens ex machina to explain the absence of so useful and desirable an adjunct; for he believes that natural selection could never have produced this result, and he therefore feels compelled to put it off upon “ some intelligent power,” since he denies altogether the existence of sexual selection as a vera causa. Mr. J. J. Murphy in his recently published revision of Habit and Intelligence has taken up the same ground with a more directly hostile intent ; and Spengel has also forcibly given expression to his dissent on the plea of inade- quate evidence for the supposed preference. It seems highly desirable, therefore, to prop up Mr. Darwin’s theory by any external supports which observation or analogy may suggest, and if possible to show some original groundwork in the shape of a natural tendency to hairlessness, upon which sexual selection might afterwards exert itself so as to increase and accelerate the depilatory process when once set up. The curious facts for which we have to account are something- more than the mere general hairlessness of the human species. In. man alone, as Mr. Wallace clearly puts the case, “the hairy covering of the body has almost totally disappeared; and, what is very re- markable, it has disappeared more completely from the back than from any other part of the body. Bearded and beardless races alike have the back smooth, and even when a considerable quantity of hair appears on the limbs and breast, the back, and especially the spinal region, is absolutely free, thus completely reversing the characteristics of all other mammalia.” When we consider the comparatively help- less condition to which man has been thus reduced, as well as the almost universal human practice of substituting artificial clothimr, derived from the skins or wool of other animals, for the natural apparel which the species has so unaccountably lost, it does not seem sur- prising that even Mr. Wallace should be staggered by the difficulty, and should fall back upon an essentially supernatural explanation.