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

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THE LINNEAN 2009 VOLUME 25(3)
though it may be necessary now, in the context of neo- or post-Darwinism, to understand
that biological evolution can continue in interwoven relationship with the cultural
and historical development of humanity, generally Darwinism has in the past failed,
and still does fail now, to distinguish between the two processes. From Darwin himself
to Herbert Spencer, through to many Darwinian biologists who today attempt analyses
of human history and society, the confusions are deep, and persist, as many writers
have attempted to show. Darwin’s ‘swerving’, his ‘disturbance’(to use Beer’s words),
in his meditations on the Fuegians, and their imagined similarity or difference from
animals, is conducted in a confused, moralistic, and derogatory mode of thinking
which is as common today as it was in Darwin’s own. It absolutely fails to see that
different human societies have different cultures, different behaviours and different
ethical systems and attitudes: conditioned greatly by natural and environmental factors
and processes, in ways that are extremely complex, but again, not in ways that mirror
the environmental determinism of other animals’ physiology or behaviour.
Human societies can only be judged one against another according to the taste of
he or she who judges or according to ethical principles which should be made absolutely
explicit in the course of making such judgements, and according to which certain
Western cultures, vis-a-vis the morality of killing other human beings for example,
would rank very low in any pan-human table of ethical comparison. Human beings
are animals, yes, but as members of one animal species, Homo sapiens. Yet it is
remarkable how often European or Neo-European individuals and nations that want
to justify and rationalize their nastiest kinds of behaviour (ethically speaking), draw
upon the fact that human beings are, after all animals.
Major differences between human beings are either individual, or culturally based;
though it is true that the roles of biology and genetics in understanding these differences
are only just beginning to be understood.
A NOTE ON H.W. BATES
Two quotations from H.W. Bates’ science-cum-travelogue book The Naturalist
On The River Amazons may suffice to indicate some of the differences between Bates’
and Darwin’s approaches to the human dimensions of their experiences in South
America. Bates certainly has some stereotypical European prejudices, and his
perceptions are often constructed through characteristic nineteenth-century tropes,
themes, vistas, and metaphors belonging to a British colonial view of ‘tropicality’,
with his readership at home always in mind. But, like Alfred Russel Wallace, who
also displayed “a somewhat baffling mixture of the conventional and the unconventional
........ (in an attitude of) unsettled ambivalence” (as explained in Nancy Stepan’s book
Picturing Tropical Nature), Bates has at the same time a spontaneous sympathy and
empathy with people, and a more admiring attitude towards the people he meets, than
Darwin evinces:
(I) “On the morning of the 28th of May we arrived at our destination (Belém de Pará).
The appearance of the city at sunrise was pleasing in the highest degree. It is built on a
low tract of land, having only one small rocky elevation at its southern extremity; it
therefore affords no amphitheatral view from the river; but the white buildings roofed
with red tiles, the numerous towers and cupolas of churches and convents, the crowds of