*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
Gregory Radick (University of Leeds), "Language, Darwinism and the Human/Non-Human Boundary"
Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) includes a famous passage on moral progress as due to human reason continuously expanding the range of beings to whom – and, eventually, to which – human sympathies extend. This chapter tracks the fortunes of this passage across the last century and a half of public Darwinism, dwelling in particular on three instances: first, its debut in Darwin’s Descent; second, its return in the 1950 UNESCO Statement on the “Race Question,” as the sole quotation from a scientific author; third, its return again in the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker’s 2011 bestseller The Better Angels of Our Nature, as an epigraph to the concluding chapter. Against any impression that this lineage might convey of a consensus stably enduring from Darwin’s day to ours, I aim to show on the contrary that beneath the surface continuity is a remarkable discontinuity, located in the years around 1900. Once we recognize this discontinuity, we can better understand how Darwinian theory came to be used in the twentieth century first to underwrite the concept of human rights biologically and then to undermine that concept.
Date
-