Vol 25, no 3, October - The Linnean Society of London

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THE LINNEAN 2009 VOLUME 25(3)
any cultural, ethical, or aesthetic inferiority or superiority at all. A small-scale,
technologically ‘simple’ society that is well-adapted to existence in its environment is
in scientific terms merely successful at surviving in its natural environment.
Clearly however, Darwin‘s implicit view of humanity, though contradictory, rests
on one conspicuous presupposition. Whether it is a cultural or biological process,
humanity engages in, or can engage in, a process of ‘improvement’ of a kind which
Darwin will not build into his theory of the biological evolution of non-human living
organisms. It seems worth noting therefore, that a presupposition of human history
involving a kind of ‘linear progress’, an ideology that many have taken to result from
the uncritical translation of the fully developed Darwinian theory of organic evolution
onto human society – by such late nineteenth-century thinkers as Herbert Spencer for
example – was evidently in Darwin’s mind well before he had made the scientific
breakthrough into his theory of biological evolution.
“On the east coast the natives, as we have seen, have guanaco cloaks, and on the west,
they possess seal-skins. Amongst these central tribes the men generally possess an otterskin,
or some small scrap about as large as a pocket-handkerchief, which is barely
sufficient to cover their backs as low as their loins. It is laced across the breast by
strings, and according as the wind blows, it is shifted from side to side. But these Fuegians
in the canoe were quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It
was raining heavily, and the fresh water, together with the spray, trickled down her body.
In another harbour not far distant, a woman, who was suckling a recently-born child,
came one day alongside the vessel, and remained there whilst the sleet fell and thawed
on her naked bosom, and on the skin of her naked child. These poor wretches were
stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy
and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gestures violent and without
dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe they are fellow-creatures,
and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in
life some of the less gifted animals can enjoy: how much more reasonably the same
question may be asked with respect to these barbarians. At night, five or six human
beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate,
sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals. Whenever it is low water, they must rise
to pick shell-fish from the rocks; and the women, winter and summer, either dive to
collect sea eggs, or sit patiently in their canoes, and, with a baited hair-line, jerk out
small fish. If a seal is killed, or the floating carcass of a putrid whale discovered, it is a
feast: such miserable food is assisted by a few tasteless berries and fungi. Nor are they
exempt from famine, and, as a consequence, cannibalism accompanied by parricide.”
Darwin seems to imply here that the ‘small scrap’ the men wear is insufficient,
just as he assumes that the nakedness of other men and women is lamentable. His own
morality and preconceptions prevent him from asking whether these are not once
again effective adaptations to the environment. Attitudes like these of Darwin are
perfectly borne out in photographs of Yámana taken by missionaries later in the
nineteenth century, in which both men and women have been coerced humiliatingly
into hiding their genital regions with their hands.
Yet in a climate where rain is frequent, the Yámana found that not wearing clothes,
but instead applying oil or grease to their skins, was a better form of protection. Clothes
can often remain permanently wet when one is exposed to such an environment, whereas
water ‘trickles down’ a body covered in grease.