TY - JOUR
T1 - Darwin and the French
T2 - The species question and ‘man’ in Oceania
AU - Douglas, Bronwen
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2022/2
Y1 - 2022/2
N2 - Reading Darwin with a strong sense of déjà vu, French scholars often give him a long French intellectual genealogy. So the physical anthropologist Topinard averred in 1876 that ‘transformism is of French origin … the honour is entirely due to M. Lamarck’ and defined Darwinism as ‘Natural selection through the struggle for existence, applied to Lamarck's transformism’. Using detailed exegesis, this article traces antecedents, intersections, rebuttals, appropriations, shifts, and mutual misunderstandings in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transmutationist thinking in France and Britain. With specific reference to unstable concepts of evolution and species, the article samples French and francophone reception and interpretation of Darwin's writings and his responses to critics or supporters. Relative to ideas of race or civilization, human unity or diversity, and the interplay of empirical or deductive logic, I compare Darwin's work with that of the French physical anthropologist Broca in debates on racial ranking, extinction, and the ‘descent of man’, particularly in Australia and Oceania more widely. I conclude that, notwithstanding Darwin's personal humanitarian values, his science of man made important contributions to the theoretical underpinnings of the science of race, or raciology, which had emerged and developed mainly in France in the half century after 1800.
AB - Reading Darwin with a strong sense of déjà vu, French scholars often give him a long French intellectual genealogy. So the physical anthropologist Topinard averred in 1876 that ‘transformism is of French origin … the honour is entirely due to M. Lamarck’ and defined Darwinism as ‘Natural selection through the struggle for existence, applied to Lamarck's transformism’. Using detailed exegesis, this article traces antecedents, intersections, rebuttals, appropriations, shifts, and mutual misunderstandings in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transmutationist thinking in France and Britain. With specific reference to unstable concepts of evolution and species, the article samples French and francophone reception and interpretation of Darwin's writings and his responses to critics or supporters. Relative to ideas of race or civilization, human unity or diversity, and the interplay of empirical or deductive logic, I compare Darwin's work with that of the French physical anthropologist Broca in debates on racial ranking, extinction, and the ‘descent of man’, particularly in Australia and Oceania more widely. I conclude that, notwithstanding Darwin's personal humanitarian values, his science of man made important contributions to the theoretical underpinnings of the science of race, or raciology, which had emerged and developed mainly in France in the half century after 1800.
KW - Australia
KW - Darwin
KW - French on Darwin
KW - Oceania
KW - Race
KW - Species
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85122484750&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.10.018
DO - 10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.10.018
M3 - Article
SN - 0039-3681
VL - 91
SP - 168
EP - 180
JO - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
JF - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
ER -