According to Mr. Darwin, racial differences are due to the different
standards of beauty, whereas, according to the theory here indicated,
the different standards of beauty are due to racial differences. “Let
us suppose,” says Mr. Darwin, “the members of a tribe, practising
some form of marriage, to spread over an unoccupied continent, they
would soon split up into distinct hordes, separated from each other
by various barriers, and still more effectually by the incessant wars
between all barbarous nations. The hordes would thus be exposed to
slightly different conditions and habits of life, and would sooner or
later come to differ in some small degree. As soon as this occurred,
each isolated tribe would form for itself a slightly different standard
of beauty; and then unconscious selection would come into action
through the more powerful and leading men preferring certain women to
others. Thus the differences between the tribes, at first very slight,
would gradually and inevitably be more or less increased.”[1622] This
theory—that racial differences are due to sexual selection—obviously
presupposes either that the human organism is alike well fitted to any
climate and natural conditions; or that no correlation exists between
the visible parts of the body and its functions. Otherwise, of course,
little effect could be produced through the preference given to certain
individuals; for in a savage state, where celibacy is an exception,
those men and women whose constitution was best suited to the
conditions of life would, in any case, in the end, determine the racial
type. It is also difficult to see how those slight variations from the
original human type, which, according to Mr. Darwin, characterized
the distinct hordes or tribes into which mankind was split up, could
have developed into such enormous differences as we find in the colour
of the skin of, for example, a negro and a European—only through the
selection of the best representatives of these tribal peculiarities,
these slight variations. Finally, it seems doubtful whether Mr. Darwin
would have ascribed racial differences in colour to the influence
of sexual selection, had he considered the important fact, already
mentioned, that the larger apes have the same colour of the skin as the
human races living in the same country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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