Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871, twelve years after The Origin of Species. The first part makes explicit what the Origin had implied: that human beings are descended from earlier primates and share a common ancestor with the other great apes. Darwin argues this through comparative anatomy, embryology, and what he calls the "mental powers" of animals, demonstrating continuity between human and animal cognition, emotion, and social behavior. The second, longer section develops his theory of sexual selection, selection driven not by survival advantage but by mate choice, which he argues explains features that natural selection cannot, including certain sexually dimorphic traits.
The sexual selection argument was designed to address the perceived problem of natural selection in explaining traits that seem to reduce survival fitness, the peacock's tail, for example, which is conspicuous to predators as well as to peahens. Darwin's account of female choice as the primary driver of sexual selection was not fully accepted during his lifetime; Wallace and others preferred explanations based on male competition. The feminist implications of a theory in which females exercise selection pressure were not widely recognized by Victorian readers, who found other aspects of the book considerably more scandalous.
The Descent of Man is less commonly read than the Origin and contains more passages that reflect the specific limitations of Victorian evolutionary thinking, particularly in its discussions of human racial variation and social evolution. Reading it requires some historical context to distinguish what has been superseded from what remains empirically viable. What the book provides that the Origin does not is Darwin's direct engagement with the question of human nature, how much our psychology, our social behavior, and our moral sense can be understood as products of the same evolutionary processes that produced our anatomy.
The novel's enduring readability owes much to the precision of its construction, the economy of means by which it achieves its effects, and the care with which the author builds a world that is internally coherent enough to generate genuine surprise at the moments of revelation. These are qualities that no amount of time diminishes, and they are why the book continues to find new readers across generations.
Freud's Interpretation of Dreams sold only 351 copies in its first six years after publication.
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