The making of the adamic bomb

These four books center on making sense of evolution, which we, as anthropologists, or at least as people who read a journal with the word ‘‘anthropology’’ in its title, ought to be interested in. All four seek to temporalize, relativize, or extend, in one way or another, the ‘‘one long argument’’ at the heart of Darwinism: that species are genealogically linked and, consequently, that the diversity of life is to be understood as history rather than as miracle. David Livingstone traces the development of the idea that there were people before Adam – a radical view for its time – in the early modern world. He begins with the imposition of the three sons of Noah on the three continents known by early Medieval scholars, and alights on the life and literary career of one Isaac de la Peyrère, who published a book in 1655 suggesting that perhaps the diverse peoples of the world were the products of separate creative acts, of which the Biblical account of Adam and Eve is but the final one. Many refutations of his work quickly appeared, and he ended his days unexpectedly in the care of the Inquisition, who used their familiar tactics of fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope (and nice red uniforms), to derive a retraction from Peyrère. By the late 1700s, Biblical monogenism had pretty much routed Peyrèrian polygenism in scholarly circles. To people of that age, and all others, history and politics were enmeshed: ‘‘the adamic narrative not only had laid out some foundations of civil society – marriage, family, agriculture, ritual, urban life – but it also delivered a universal anthropology that knit together, in one way or another, every human being regardless of racial, religious, ethnic, or national identity. Tampering with that received story was itself a political intervention. . ..’’ (p. 54). This is certainly the most comprehensive account of premodern thought on human origins since John C. Greene’s 1959 classic, The Death of Adam. The most significant lesson is that the potted histories of evolutionary theory, centered on the scientific wonderment stimulated by dinosaurs, giraffes’ necks, finches, tortoises, and the like, are all rubbish. Theorizing the origin of the differences among human populations was simply crucial to the development of evolutionary ideas in the century before Darwin. If Adam and Eve were white, you had to account for black people, and any way that you accounted for them necessarily implied some model of biological instability, of physical mutability away from the original form, whatever that form may have been. If you are looking for evolution, you need look no further. The alternative, that people are as they always have been, was polygenism. The eighteenth-century advocates claimed Isaac de la Peyrère as ancestor, and transiently achieved a measure of scholarly popularity when linked to the slavery issue in the nineteenth century. Moreover, a separate but related question is: What is the relationship of living people to near-human monsters or apes? Are they equidistant from all people, as both a modern account and a Biblical literalist account would have it, or are they especially related to certain people such as, say, Africans, as many nineteenth-century accounts, both preand post-Darwinian, had it? Livingstone’s book is consequently important for centralizing bio-anthropological questions in the emerging evolutionary world view of nineteenth-century scholarship. To Livingstone, Darwin’s singularly relevant contribution was to harmonize the unity of the human species and its single origin (monogenesis) with the existence of a world before Adam. The first was the morally superior alternative; the latter was the empirically superior alternative. And paramount to all higher thought in the nineteenth century was the question of the natural place of different groups of people: classes, races, primitives, nobilities, entrepreneurs and, of course, slaves. Darwin’s Sacred Cause by Desmond and Moore makes the case that this question inspired Darwin’s own thinking. Darwin, it seems, was an abolitionist and came from a pedigreed family of abolitionists; two of them, in fact. At the same time that Darwin was reading Lyell at sea, the British were outlawing slavery throughout their empire. Charles, however, wasn’t as active as his family members were in such things, so he didn’t leave an obvious paper trail for future historians. The argument, then, is that the anti-slavery movement diffused into the impressionable young naturalist and remained in the background of his scientific work. There is a weak version of the thesis (that monogenesis implies evolution, and that a commitment to the former eventually leads to the latter) and a strong version of the thesis (that Darwin himself was motivated by political sentiment, and that The Origin of Species is a culmination of his political BOOK REVIEW