The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from Natural Selection

Those primitive and mentally undeveloped populations with whom Europeans come into contact—such as the Native Americans original: "red Indian" in North America and Brazil, or the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania, Australia, and New Zealand in the Southern Hemisphere—are disappearing. This is not due to any single specific cause, but rather the inevitable results of an unequal mental and physical struggle. The intellectual and moral, as well as the physical qualities of the European, are superior. The same powers and capacities that have enabled him to rise in a few centuries from the condition of a wandering primitive original: "savage"—with a small and stagnant population—to his present state of culture and progress, with a longer average lifespan, greater average strength, and the capacity for more rapid growth, enable him to prevail in the struggle for existence when in contact with primitive man. He increases at the expense of others, just as more favorable varieties in the animal and plant kingdoms increase at the expense of less favorable ones. This is similar to how European weeds overrun North America and Australia, or how they extinguish native species through the inherent vigor of their biological makeup and their greater capacity for survival and reproduction.

If these views are correct—if man’s physical structure ceased to be affected by the operation of "natural selection" as his social, moral, and intellectual faculties developed—then we have a most important clue to the origin of races. For it would follow that those striking and permanent physical characteristics which distinguish the great divisions of mankind could not have been produced or made permanent after the power of selection had transferred from physical to mental variations. These traits, therefore, must have existed since the very infancy of the race. They must have originated at a period when man lived in groups but was scarcely social, possessing a mind that could perceive but not yet reflect, and before any sense of right or feelings of sympathy had been developed in him.

By a powerful effort of the imagination, it is just possible to perceive him at that early epoch existing as a single, uniform race without the faculty of speech, and probably inhabiting some tropical region. He would still be subject, like the rest of the organic world, to the action of "natural selection," which would keep his physical form and constitution in harmony with the surrounding universe. Even then, he must have been a dominant species, spreading widely over the warmer regions of the earth as it then existed. In agreement with what we see in other dominant species, he would have gradually become modified according to local conditions. As he ranged farther from his original home and became exposed to greater extremes of climate, major changes in food, and new enemies—both organic and inorganic—useful variations in his physical makeup would be selected and rendered permanent. On the principle of the "correlation of growth," these would be accompanied by other changes.

• "It is probable that the current state and condition of New Zealand exhibit more closely than any other the condition of Britain when the Romans first entered it." (Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, i, p. 69.) "When the Romans first became acquainted with Germany, the natives had advanced only a few steps beyond the primitive state." (Encyclopaedia Britannica, article: Germany.)