In this illustration he overlooks the circumstance that man’s selection
is after all nothing more nor less than part and parcel of natural
selection. In his argument from the various uses and powers of the hand
and brain, which could have been of no service to men in a wild state,
he neglects the consideration that what is selected through being
useful in one direction may incidentally become useful in another.
Had he employed his usual ingenuity on the question of man’s hairless
skin, he might have seen the possibility of its ‘selection’ through its
superior beauty or the health attaching to superior cleanliness. At
any rate it is surprising that he should picture to himself a superior
intelligence plucking the hair from the backs of savage men, (to whom
according to his own account it would have been useful and beneficial)
in order that the descendants of the poor shorn wretches might, after
many deaths from cold and damp, in the course of many generations take
to tailoring and dabbling in bricks and mortar. In regard to the voice
he makes an assertion which is surely impossible for himself or any one
else to prove, namely, that ‘savages certainly never choose their wives
for fine voices.’ But upon this assertion the whole of his argument
about the voice depends. And as for the stress which he lays upon the
rudimentary moral and æsthetic faculties of savages, we have shown that
numbers of other animals likewise have rudimentary moral faculties,
while Mr. Wallace himself makes it probable that many have a taste for
colour[40], and that ‘their powers of vision and their faculties of
perception and emotion must be essentially of the same nature as our
own[41].’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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