The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

work by Darwin

Learn about this topic in these articles:

animal learning

  • In animal learning: Complex problem solving

    …however, the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) that stimulated scientific interest in the question of mental continuity between man and other animals. Darwin’s young colleague, George Romanes, compiled a systematic collection of stories and anecdotes about the behaviour of animals, upon which he built an elaborate theory of…

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anthropology

  • Margaret Mead conducting fieldwork in Bali
    In anthropology: History of anthropology

    In 1871 Darwin published The Descent of Man, which argued that human beings shared a recent common ancestor with the great African apes. He identified the defining characteristic of the human species as their relatively large brain size and deduced that the evolutionary advantage of the human species was…

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discussed in biography

  • Charles Darwin
    In Charles Darwin: The private man and the public debate

    …by Darwin in his two-volume The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). The book was authoritative, annotated, and heavily anecdotal in places. The two volumes were discrete, the first discussing the evolution of civilization and human origins among the Old World monkeys. (Darwin’s depiction of a…

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evolution

instinct

  • Foraging is an example of an instinct driven by impulses serving specific biological functions.
    In instinct: Instinct as behaviour

    His answer, in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), was “sexual selection”—enhancement of reproductive success as a consequence of behaviour that includes conspicuous courtship displays. This comes in two forms: (1) competition between members of one sex for access to the other sex,…

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Quick Facts
Born:
April 7, 1847, Thisted, Jutland, Denmark
Died:
April 30, 1885, Thisted (aged 38)
Movement / Style:
det moderne gennembrud
naturalism
Subjects Of Study:
English language

Jens Peter Jacobsen (born April 7, 1847, Thisted, Jutland, Denmark—died April 30, 1885, Thisted) was a Danish novelist and poet who inaugurated the Naturalist mode of fiction in Denmark and was himself its most famous representative.

The son of a Jutland merchant, Jacobsen was a student of the natural sciences. He became a follower of Charles Darwin and translated into Danish both On the Origin of Species, in 1871–73, and The Descent of Man, in 1874. His own literary work was limited to two novels, some short stories, and a few poems.

He struggled for his last 12 years with tuberculosis until it overcame him. During those years he produced almost all of his works in slow and painful daily stints. He was a master of description, attempting to portray all facets of reality as meticulously as he had observed them in nature.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:
Britannica Quiz
Poetry: First Lines

While at the University of Copenhagen, he heard the lectures of Georg Brandes, an advocate of realism, naturalism, and socially conscious art. Jacobsen’s novella Mogens (1872; Eng. trans. in Mogens and Other Stories), whose protagonist’s name gives the book its title, is considered the first Naturalist writing in Danish literature and was greatly admired by Brandes, who hailed Jacobsen as one of “the men of the modern breakthrough.” Jacobsen’s first novel, Fru Marie Grubbe (1876; Marie Grubbe: A Lady of the Seventeenth Century), is a psychological study of a 17th-century woman whose natural instincts are stronger than her social instincts and result in her descent on the social scale from a viceroy’s consort to the wife of a ferryman. The book was attacked by the conservative press for its crass realism. Niels Lyhne (1880; Eng. trans. Niels Lyhne), his second novel, is a contemporary story of a man’s vain struggle to acquire a philosophy of life. The intensity of its atmosphere and the depth of its psychology interested Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann, among others, but its lack of ideological progressiveness was a disappointment to Georg Brandes. Jacobsen’s poems were collected and published posthumously in Digte og udkast (1886; “Poems and Sketches,” partially translated into English as Poems [1920]). At the turn of the 20th century, his writings and exquisite style exerted a spellbinding influence upon a great number of writers both in Denmark and abroad. Among his most ardent worshipers were such poets as Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Poul Houe