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

Mr. PUSEY: I do not wish to take up the Society's time, but it occurred to me that the fact of the con-genation common descent or originating from the same stock and yet the lack of transmutation the transformation of one species into another in the human race might possibly be explained by Darwin’s hypothesis. We might suppose that humanity proceeded from one stock, but is now separated into different species. We do see species in the lower animals resembling one another—we see dogs, for instance, resembling the wolf—but we never see species actually transformed into one another. However, if we suppose distinct species had a common origin, the transmutation hypothesis might account for these facts.

The PRESIDENT: Before I call upon Mr. Wallace for his reply, I will make a few observations. Like the rest of you, I was charmed by the paper. Indeed, I was so charmed by the extensive promises made at the beginning regarding what "natural selection" could achieve, that I felt a sense of disappointment at the conclusion. Those promises—which we were told would resolve the difficulties faced by anthropologists—were not quite fulfilled. When the author asserted that these difficulties would be resolved by the principle of "natural selection," I do not think he sufficiently weighed the evidence that justified him in making such a claim.

I think it is a pity that the two subjects of Darwin’s hypothesis and Mr. Wallace’s paper have been so conflated this evening; it would, perhaps, have been better if we had confined our remarks to the subjects touched upon in the paper itself. It appeared to me that the paper we heard relied very heavily on assumptions. Mr. Wallace told us that man may have sprung from one race; indeed, he goes further and says he must have. Now, this really seems to me to be a far from satisfactory argument. I could hardly have expected that a theory intended to solve all our difficulties would start with such a bold assertion, and I could not find any facts in the entire paper that justified it. There is no doubt that hypotheses like Mr. Darwin’s, and the one brought forward this evening, are very attractive because they attempt to explain so much. Does Mr. Wallace attempt to base his theory on known facts? If he does, he failed to provide those facts in his paper, and I am under the strong impression that he has no such facts to present.

Mr. WALLACE: What facts?

The PRESIDENT: Mr. Wallace asks me to specify the facts I am referring to, and I have no objection to doing so. Now, what do we learn from archaeology? Consider the collective remains from different continents, and what do we find? Go to America, and what do we find there? Do we find any signs of a different race living there than the race of men that exists now? Not at all; and it is the same wherever we go.

Of course, if you take a Neanderthal skull discovered in 1856; at this time, its status as a separate human species was hotly debated as a type of a race—even though there is good evidence to believe it is simply the skull of an individual with a mental disability—you beg the whole question assume the truth of the very thing you are trying to prove. Mr. Wallace’s theory appears to me to be unjustified by our current knowledge, and I do not think we can accept it. If the object of the paper was to help establish a science, that goal does not appear to have been achieved in the eloquent...