Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America (review)

In December 1832 H.M.S. Beagle reached the southernmost tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego. During an inland expedition from the ship, the Beagle’s gentlemanly naturalist witnessed, for the very first time, the “sight of a naked savage in his native land.” This was, Charles Darwin later reflected, “an event which can never be forgotten” (qtd. in Schmitt 38). Darwin’s already much-discussed initial encounter with this miserable and abject (or so he assumed) Fuegian on a wild and desolate shore at the farthest reaches of the earth stands at the very centre of Cannon Schmitt’s fascinating Darwin and the Memory of the Human, and is, as it were, repeatedly circled around and viewed from a number of different perspectives. As an instance of what Schmitt describes as a “savage mnemonics,” this literarily unforgettable encounter instigates a “play of memory and forgetting” that is actually “requisite to theorizing evolution” (56). While coming to terms with evolution necessitates a forgetting of what is disagreeable (things such as starvation or extinction), the memory of the Fuegian—and so-called savages more generally—cannot be so easily erased, and, Schmitt proposes, thus allows, or perhaps even forces, Darwin to think through and understand the workings of natural selection. In particular, the wretched Fuegian whom Darwin appears to have considered somehow less civilized than charmingly anthropomorphic animals with an incipient sense of virtue, such as loyal domestic dogs or brave kindly monkeys, allowed him to recognize that the hitherto sanctified concept of the human was in fact merely an arbitrary rhetorical construct rather than an actual entity, and to instead postulate an evolutionary continuum between the putatively human and inhuman.

Later in the book, Schmitt describes Darwin’s disgusted and thereby unforgettable response to the abject Fuegians as a “xenophobic recoil” (65), which offers a very different perspective on the evolutionist’s attitudes to race from that presented in Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s recent Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (2009). At the same time, the suggestion that an incipient racism might have helped facilitate Darwin’s thinking about human evolution recalls George Levine’s argument in Darwin Loves You (2006) that Darwin’s thinking on issues like sexual selection, with its radical emphasis on female choice, was actually enabled by his own adherence to reactionary Victorian values, which caused him to be disconcerted by the apparent agency of females in animal courtship and thus to attend to it still more closely in constructing his theory. Unlike Levine’s book, Darwin and the Memory of the Human also examines other evolutionary thinkers from a similar perspective. Alfred Russel Wallace’s own first encounters with the “true denizen[s] of the Amazonian forests” in the late 1840s (65), for instance, were themselves “not to be forgotten” because of his favourable impression of their autonomy and self-possession (64); a “xenophilic complement” to Darwin’s equally marked chauvinism according to Schmitt (65). Yet Wallace’s delight in the remarkable dignity and capacities of these indigenous peoples, whose customs he often views as more civilized than those of capitalist and industrial Britain, compels him to postulate humankind as something unique and exceptional that must have evolved to its high condition by the guidance of an external intelligence rather than merely through the secular processes of natural selection. There is, Schmitt’s persuasive account implies (although it is at no point made explicit), no contradiction between those “Victorian” aspects of Darwin’s attitudes that we might now feel distinctly uncomfortable with and the most radical and apparently modern components of his evolutionary theorising.

The central focus of Schmitt’s argument, however, is neither Darwin nor his dismayed response to savage humanity in the raw, and with the chapter specifically on Darwin actually the shortest in the book—at just twenty-four...