"Darwin & the descent of man
"Charles Darwin’s theories of natural and sexual selection apply to humans as they do to any other species. Recent editions of his most famous book, On The Origin of Species, often feature a schematic of human evolution on the cover. In fact, there is little mention of human evolution in this book. Despite writing about the implications of his ideas for the human species very early, Darwin chose not to include the topic in his great masterpiece except to say that ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’.
"Eventually, twelve years after The Origin was published, Darwin did publish his thoughts on human evolution in The Descent of Man in 1871. In this book and his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin helped lay the foundations for modern biological anthropology, the study of human variation and evolution. But what did Darwin really say about human evolution? Why did he not say it in The Origin? And how has he exerted such an influence over the last 150 years of anthropology?"
SOURCE: http://darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk/pages/index.php?page_id=c8
Weary of Wonderland
November 17, 2013
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
