What Charles Darwin believed about the Races of Man: No such thing as Equality!

Charles Darwin applied his ideas about evolution to humans in “The Descent of Man”(1871). In that book is a chapter called “The Races of Man”. There Darwin considers three main questions (I use his terms):

1. Do the races of man belong to the same species?
2. Why are savages dying out?
3. Why do negroes have such dark skin?

On skin colour he leans towards sexual selection: that negro men love dark skin in women. But then again maybe it is climate or sunlight or immunity to disease. Or something else. It is hard to tell. He doubts it is sunlight because the natives of South America, right across the ocean from Africa, do not have black skin. It could be that black skin somehow protects against tropical diseases: negroes have by far the best immunity, even to diseases of South America and the Caribbean where they are not native to the region.

Savages dying out: You might think it was from European disease and war, but according to censuses taken in the 1800s of Tasmanians, Maoris and Hawaiians, it was mainly because women were not having enough children, shockingly few, in fact. This seems to take place when civilized people move savages from where they had always lived or otherwise cause a change in their way of life, like in food and clothing. Darwin compares it to how wild animals in captivity hardly have any offspring.

One species: Unlike horses and donkeys, it seems that humans from different races can mate and give birth to fertile offspring. When two species live side by side there is no mixing. But when races of humans do, there is plenty of mixing. So much so that it is hard to tell where one race ends and the next one begins – or for scientists to even agree on how many races there are.

Polygenists and monogenists: Most scientists who argued that races were separate species were polygenists. They believed each race was a separate creation by God or nature. They would say that only whites or Caucasians came from Adam and Eve. Darwin was the opposite, a monogenist, believing that races came from a common root. The races were too much alike for it to be an accident:

The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Feugians on board the “Beagle,” with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate.

Subspecies: Like Linnaeus in the 1700s, Darwin regarded human races as subspecies.

Darwin did not believe in racial equality. He divided humans into civilized and savage, which he likened to domesticated and wild animals. Savages had smaller brains and less intelligence. They had different emotions. Negroes, he said, had distinct “mental characteristics”, like being “light-hearted, talkative”.