Darwin’s females
How science was distorted to reconstruct gender norms in the Victorian Period
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Darwin’s Females: How Science was Distorted to Reconstruct Gender Norms in the Victorian Age
Introduction
Classification is a time honored species of scientific inquiry. To research phenomena it is strictly necessary to separate a phenomenon in which significant variables are present, from a phenomenon in which those variables are absent. We cannot form conclusions without the differentiation of data. Indeed, one may turn to the earliest material productions of human culture to discover there the human obsession with the classification of kinds. It is a series of exquisite cave paintings at Chauvet-Pont-d-Arc Cave in the Ardeche department of southern France.[1] The purpose that was meaningful to those who produced these paintings is lost, but one fascination is common throughout every production in the caves. This fascination is difference. An example of this is the Brunel Chamber Wall of Dominos Hindquarters of an Animal. This is a mixed profile image of only the rear parts of an animal, possibly an Ibex. It is as though the artist wanted to use the cave canvas as a sort of magnifying glass through which to observe an interesting specimen for anatomical purposes. The exaggerated penis is the clear focal point for the production as we now have it, and of the artist if indeed the original also did not feature the front quarters.[2] This is taken as a representative sample of the kinds of emphases extant throughout the artistic productions in Chauvet Cave. It is one of the first images presented to the viewer who enters the modern entrance, and it tempts one to hear the primeval voice of taxonomic inquiry into difference, into classification, speaking across the epochs.
There is nothing very controversial here. If there is a purpose to the portrait, it might be that male Ibex have penises, and females do not. Thus is provided a test by which a kind may be defined. If one encounters a specimen, and wishes to classify it as male or female, look for the penis. That makes good, scientific sense, with certain obvious limitations.[3] This is a description of the scientific study of sexual dimorphism, the simple study of morphological differences between males and females of a single species. It is when we ask about the implications of these new classified kinds that the discussion becomes less benign. Suppose the artist had another purpose in mind. Suppose the artist intended to assert the superiority of one or the other of the new classes she or he introduced. Here the existence of the penis, even as a somewhat isolated and magnified portrait, is not the issue. The issue is the exaggeration and emphasis of the penis, which leads one to conclude that the image serves a rhetorical purpose, not a strictly descriptive one. The artist has not simply cited the Ibex (if indeed these are the hindquarters of an Ibex), but emphasized a specific image of the Ibex, to make a point. This is where one leaves the sterility of science and enters the fermenting, beautiful, messiness of art.
Prospectus
The Hindquarters of an Animal painting is a useful example of what humans do when they attempt to portray the world, and have a specifically regimented interpretation of the meaning of the data. What we have is a caricature of reality specifically manipulated to assert the conclusions of the artist, rather than objective data that inevitably leads one to a specific conclusion. Too often artists confuse these two modes, especially in the artistic presentations of science. Here we will focus on the late Nineteenth Century attempts to sketch sexual dimorphism, and the cultural assumptions that influenced this endeavor.
First we will discuss Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and the ways that he applied this theory to the issue of sexual difference, and to what effect. Here it is worth noting that the establishment or disestablishment of the veracity of any theoretical claims discussed in this paper, is not the intended purpose of this paper. Darwinian evolution may very well be the mechanism by which all speciation, including sexual dimorphism within species, has come to be. The issue, however, as to whether or not that is the case must be raised in the scientific journals. Here we are discussing the development of the sexual image through scientific and artistic media. Darwin’s evidence, therefore, will not be as valuable as his implicit assumptions, and the way that these influenced his conclusions. Of particular interest will be those conclusions upon which Darwin insisted, that do not follow from his evidence at all. Indeed the discoverer of the mechanism of natural selection often maintained unscientific premises that do not follow from natural selection. Darwin appealed to Lamarckian evolution, bilateral inheritance, and many other evolutionary mechanisms that he refuted elsewhere to maintain cultural assumptions he did not feel the need to question. These terms shall be defined and discussed in detail later, and so we will whet the appetite and proceed.
Next we shall discuss the osteological studies of the Victorian era, which made the first attempts to sketch the female skeleton as distinct from the male skeleton. Our discussion of this topic will focus on Londa Scheibinger’s 1986 study of this topic. Schiebinger utilized the case study of medical attempts to sketch the sexual difference between males and females at the skeletal level to demonstrate that science is often influenced by cultural variables. This dependence upon culture means that scientific inquiry will often be necessitated by a cultural need to justify the status quo. Schiebinger argues that skeletal sexual dimorphism became an important question in the late Eighteenth-through the Nineteenth centuries because medical science had undone the Galenic Theory of Humors, which presented the humorous disposition toward sedentary life in females. Thus Victorians needed a new, more specific and scientific, verification of the status quo, and early osteological studies provided that verification.
It will then be necessary to tie these thoughts into a conclusion about the role of culture in the discipline of science. If scientists enter upon an inquiry with cultural assumptions that will influence their conclusions, can their conclusions be relied upon as objective?
Darwin and the Evolution of Sexual Difference
Charles Darwin is best known for his book-length presentation of the theory of evolution through natural selection. Commonly referred to as On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s most popular book emphasized generational development of animal species over time as specimens better adapted to their environment survive, and therefore pass their traits to subsequent generations.[4] In On the Origin of Species, Darwin presents a slick, calculated draft of simple scientific evidence and explanatory exposition. Darwin objectively portrays a history of materialistic causes that have produced the diversity of life on this planet. Darwin did not stop his work with the publication of On the Origin of Species, however. A little more than 10 years after the publication of Origin, Darwin wrote another influential book entitled The Descent of Man. Here Darwin’s expressed purpose was to, “put together my notes, so as to see how far the general conclusions arrived at in my former works were applicable to man.”[5] As Richard Dawkins, a leading expert on Darwin and the neo-Darwinian consensus, has recently expressed, “The details matter and the devil is in the cliché.”[6] It is in the details of The Descent of Man that a kind of devil informing Darwin’s work is revealed.
In a lengthy section on what Darwin sees as the traits indicating Homo-sapiens-Sapiens’ sexual dimorphism, he opens by stating that, “with mankind the differences between the sexes are greater than in most of the Quadrumana.”[7] Quadrumana is a Nineteenth century classification that includes all quadrapedal apes. It is a class that is no longer used in modern taxonomy. This seems like a rhetorical choice. There are very few species which exhibit less sexual dimorphism than Homo-sapiens-Sapiens.[8] Indeed Darwin seems to be aware of this fact even as he is attempting to argue against it. In a lengthy discussion about the perceived mental superiority of male humans over female humans, Darwin states that without what Nineteenth century evolutionists referred to as “trait swamping,”[9] men “would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.”[10] The point to be taken here, while admitting the seriousness of the illogically assumed conclusion that male human intellects are superior to female human intellects, is that Darwin has no explicit evidence to demonstrate this aspect of his sexual dimorphism. He only can appeal to extremities in dimorphism, as in the extreme difference between peacocks and peahens, as an analogy for human sexual dimorphism.
This is more than a frivolous attack on Darwin’s rhetorical style. It is evidence that Darwin did not, as he did in Origin, allow evidence to inform his conclusions, but rather allowed his prior conclusions to control his presentation of evidence. Two passages will demonstrate this point. In summary of Darwin’s section on human sexual selection, Darwin explicitly provides us with the conclusion upon which his presentation of evidence is based: “Man is more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger.”[11] Darwin goes on to say that, “the chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn (sic.) by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.”[12]
So much, then, for Darwin’s conclusions, what about his evidence? He provides three arguments from evidence, all of which reflect the same cultural bias toward male preference. First is Darwin’s list of more objective sexual dimorphisms: “Man on an average is considerably taller, heavier, and stronger than woman, with squarer shoulders and more plainly-pronounced muscles . . . the superciliary ridge is generally more marked in man than in woman. His body, and especially his face, is more hairy, and his voice has a different and more powerful tone.”[13] We might profitably think back in reference to this package to our Hindquarters of an Animal painting. Darwin has painted a word picture that isolates the anatomical features that are unique to male humans as opposed to female humans, much as the Chauvet cave painter isolated the hindquarters of the Ibex to highlight the same features. There is no scientific, or artistic, problem with this. Just as the Chauvet cave painter distorted the penis of the Ibex to make a rhetorical point, Darwin has added little, hardly noticeable, queues to indicate the specific inflation of details that he would like to emphasize. He does not emphasize the fact that females have larger brains relative to their body weight, but instead emphasizes the average difference in height between males and females. Not just an average difference, in fact, but a “considerably taller,” norm for males, emphasizing male “pugnacity,” and female “tenderness.”
Darwin’s second defense of his pugnacious male and tender female paradigm is his most confused and misleading. Darwin makes the argument that male competition for female sexual intercourse necessitated the development in pugnacity in males and tenderness in females. “Amongst the half-human progenitors of man,” he says, “there have been struggles between the males during many generation for the possession of the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined mind . . . These faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood; they will, moreover, have been strengthened by use during this same period of life.”[14] This inference that traits necessary for males to dominate in the competition for females, and then to defend their “female possessions,” can develop through use and be passed on to progeny is staggering in its implications. If this were truly the case, it would not be evolution by natural selection, but a different mechanism of evolution advocated a generation earlier than Darwin by Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet Lamarck, commonly referred to Lamarckian evolution.[15] Any child with a body-builder for a father knows that acquired attributes are not passed down through generations, and it was precisely against this theory that Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species. Thus, in his strictly scientific mode, Darwin’s ideas were incomparably brilliant and supported by evidence. In his mode as apologist for cultural norms, however, he went to great lengths and ultimately cut himself on his own razor-like logic.
The Anatomy of Sexual Difference
It is worth reviewing why such blatant contradictions in Darwin’s work could be so widely accepted in the scientific community. It is not that his conclusions were wrong. The evidence that humans do in fact share a common ancestor with other primates is substantial. One may come to this conclusion, however, without seeing any evidence at all from The Descent of Man. Darwin’s masterwork On the Origin of Species may not have explicitly described the natural history of the development of man from previous types, but it did not provide such a history for any species. The logical demonstration in that book of directional change in species through natural causes, however, was sufficient evidence to establish that humans descended from former species. Ultimately The Descent of Man is not a useful treatise for establishing Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. It was in fact, however, even more popular and praised (as well as derided in the right crowd) than Origin. This is because for the Nineteenth century scientific community there was in fact a cultural agenda that Descent fulfilled. As the Galenic Theory of Humors, which was the pseudoscientific basis on which gender inequality was maintained, was debunked by modern science, Victorians looked for a new intellectual model to, “define and redefine sex differences in every part of the human body,” as Londa Schiebinger put it.[16]
Multiple fields participated in this pursuit. Londa Schiebinger’s essay “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy” traces the ways in which the medical community attempted to reinforce gender roles in the medical field of osteology. Osteology is the study of skeletons, specifically the study of what a person’s skeleton can tell us about one’s lifestyle, sex, age, and diet. Where Darwin argued that the evolutionary history of humanity reinforced Victorian notions of gender, these osteologists sought further, “scientific evidence . . . to show that human nature is not uniform but differs according to age, race, and sex.”[17] If it could be shown that the female skeleton was completely incompatible with disciplines traditionally considered masculine, the case could be maintained that gender norms were not cultural, but were physiological necessities.
One should not mistake Schiebinger’s purpose. She of course is not stating that the male and female anatomies are not different. Her point is simply and expressly stated: “Science has been shaped by social forces. One of those forces has been the persistent desire to distance science from the feminine, and to identify it with the masculine. The irony in the case of the female skeleton is that as modern science plunged headlong into the study of sex differences in the eighteenth century, it helped construct is own gender.”[18] Just as we stated earlier in our review of Darwin’s social agenda, the positive evidence in favor or disfavor of any theory is not the purpose of this paper. Leave the science to the scientists. From a humanistic standpoint, however, it is worth taking a critical look at the developments in science to see what motivated specific inquiries and informed conclusions. The unstated assumptions of science can have dramatic impacts on social structures and behavior. Moreover, such assumptions, if not acknowledged and recalibrated, often lead to terrible productions of science. Darwin’s The Descent of Man is one case in point, but Schiebinger’s osteological review of the same issue is an even more disturbing one. Far from simply sketching the male and female skeletons, these early attempts distorted the skeletons to fit the aesthetic and cultural assumptions of the artists and scientists. Three examples will demonstrate this point: the representations of the ribs, the representations of the hips, and the representations of the skull.
The emphasis on the ribs was a direct reflection of sexual preferences of the day. The most egregious example of this idealized skeleton manipulated to fit the sexual expectations of the day comes from, ironically, the only woman whose sketches were influential: Genevieve-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville’s. With her skeleton, “the skull is drawn extremely small, the ribs extremely narrow, making the pelvis appear excessively large.”[19] The distortion is so apparent that Schiebinger concludes that d’Arconville was actively attempting to appeal to cultural expectations, or that her model “had worn a corset throughout her life.”
With the corset we can see the full gravity of the issues surrounding the entire issue of cultural assumptions, supported by pseudoscience. As Valerie Steele points, out the corset represented a downward spiral of cultural expectations.[20] Women and men saw prominent women wearing corsets, which caused the body shape that the corset created to be seen as the ideal body type, which lead to more women wearing corsets, which actually changed the shape of their bodies, causing trauma to the skeletons and musculature. Far from merely creating what Victorians saw as the ideal body shape, however, the corset also reinforced the ideal disposition and habits of the proper Victorian lady. Barclay expressed this in his attack on Soemmerring’s skeletons, saying, “Women’s rib cage is much smaller than that shown by Soemmerring, because it is well known that women’s restricted life style requires that they breathe less vigorously.”[21] Thus the woman without the corset did not only not look right, did not beautiful in the way that Victorians saw beauty, but literally breathed incorrectly.
The small rib cage was essential to portray the woman’s proper role, which was sedentary, and at home. Perhaps more important for them, though, was the portrayal of the hips as being wide, just as d’Acronville portrayed them, to accommodate childbirth. Joseph Wenzel also stressed the importance of emphasizing hip wideness in sketches of female skeletons. His claim is that he has, “always observed that the female body which is the most beautiful and womanly in all its parts, is one in which the pelvis is the largest in relation to the rest of the body.”[22] It is here, with the portrayal of the hips as well as the ribs, where we might start to question why such distortions were tolerated. Certainly in an age of scientific advancement it ought to have been obvious that an anatomical sketch, that is anatomically incorrect, is not scientific.
The simple response is that science was not the major purpose of these sketches. As discussed above, when one begins with a conclusion, and then manipulates data to support the conclusion, one has left the realm of science and embarked on an artistic endeavor. Far from encouraging verisimilitude in sketching, the leaders in the academy encouraged an aesthetic emphasis. William Cheselden, for example, used as his model of the female skeleton, “the same proportion as the Venus de Medici.”[23] Soemmering, Albinus, and d’Arconville all used the Venus de Medici to adjust their sketches in order to comply with proportions in that work of art. Albinus in particular is instructive as a case study Albinus claimed as his intention the portrayal of an ideal and universal type, not a strictly accurate recreation. “I am of the opinion,” he shared, “that what Nature, the arch workman . . . has fashioned must be sifted with care and judgment, and that from the endless variety of Nature the best elements must be selected.”[24] There is a way of looking at that in a forgiving way. It is not outside of the realm of science to be both accurate and conscious of the aesthetic value of the artistic depiction. If one must use an explanatory filter in the artistic process, why not allow beauty to be one’s control? Really there is nothing wrong with that, except that “beauty” is a subjective and relative term. There is no scientific answer to the age old question of what constitutes beauty. Thus the endeavor to use aesthetic pleasantness as the measure when deciding where to place emphases, and where not to, Albinus, and the other osteologists of the day, were really using gender norms as their measure. Wenzel again demonstrates this tendency when he admits that, “the great variation among individual men and women produces continuity between the sexes.”[25]
Wenzel identifies here what he sees as a problem, namely: a diverse spectrum of female and male skeletons exist, and if we choose a female and male specimen from specific stages along these spectra, it will be impossible to tell the difference between them. Thus, in order to make sexual difference intelligible in their sketches, the osteologists would need to choose specimens quintessentially female, and quintessentially male. Quintessential, again, for whom? Why, for the male observer of course. We have seen already how Wenzel prefers his female specimen to have disproportionately large pelvic bones, but Soemmering offers perhaps the best example of this culturally biased preference in specimens. In selecting his model, Soemmering stresses that he, “was anxious to provide for myself the body of a woman that was suitable not only because of her youth and aptitude for procreation,[26] but also because of the harmony of her limbs, beauty, and elegance, of the kind that the ancients used to ascribe to Venus.”[27] Here one may easily see a total departure from the scientific endeavor. Soemmering did not use statistical averages, or representative sampling in his method. He did not use double blind tests and randomizing selectors. His criteria were “youth” “beauty” “elegance” “aptitude for procreation” “harmony of her limbs.” Soemmering might as well have been shopping for his model in a Playboy magazine.
In nothing did these early osteological differences most depart from scientific inquiry, however, than in the presentation, and interpretation of the female skull. With Genevieve-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville’s early sketches the norm of portraying the female skull as smaller in comparison to the male skull was established. According to Schiebinger, “The depiction of a smaller female skull was used to prove that women’s intellectual capabilities were inferior to men’s.”[28] Further analysis and measurements later, however, demonstrated that female skulls are actually heavier if one uses the ratio of skull weight to overall skeleton weight as her or his datum point. This sparked an intense debate in the osteological academy about the relative size of the female skull, and the relevance of that size. Schiebinger instructs us that, “the assumption fueling the debate over skull size was the intelligence, like sexual identity, is innate and not dependent on educational opportunities.”[29] Schiebinger’s point is well taken. What did the skull size matter? If this were truly a scientific inquiry, a test about the relative intelligence of women that factors in social and educational opportunities ought to have been devised, otherwise scholars were unjustified in ascribing intellectual capabilities to skull size.
This undermines, however, what we have seen was the goal of these Victorian scholars. New discoveries in medicine were not used to question social norms, especially not gender norms. The endeavor was to seek evidence that would legitimize the claims of European patriarchal culture. Thus no simple test was devised along Schiebinger’s lines to settle the debate. To settle the controversy, scholars conceded to the research of John Barclay. Barclay acknowledged that “the female skull occupies a greater proportion of total body weight,” but contended that this did not indicate a greater intellectual capacity in women. He pointed out that the greater skull proportion in the female skeleton was even “more obviously discernible in the fetal skeleton.”[30] Far from being evidence for mental advancement, the proportionally large female skull was evidence, for Barclay, of the “qualities of children and primitives” who also had proportionally large skulls.
It is with Barclay that we not only leave the final word on skull size, but the most egregious skeletal image from the period. Barclay utilized, and distorted, the plates of d’Arconville’s female skeleton, as well as the male skeleton, and inserted a child skeleton of his own.[31] Here is the quintessentially gracile rib cage and the staggeringly wide pelvis exhibiting an “aptitude in procreation.” Particularly noticeable is the terribly distorted child’s skull in proportion to its body. In the child also are displayed the gracile rib cage and wider hips. The message is clear. Where Darwin sought to demonstrate the higher evolution of males, the osteologists sought to demonstrate the higher maturity of males.
Conclusion
There we have it. Medical science may have undone the Galenic nonsense of hysterical humors in women, requiring them to be the sedentary sex. Out have gone the blood lettings, the leechings, and the gangrene, but the sedentary sex has staid. What science proves, and what scientists teach, are clearly quite distinct issues. It is not out of a disdain for scientific inquiry that Schiebinger wrote her review of the early developments of skeleton sketching. Nor is it disdain that motivates my review of the period. It is a respect for actual science which can be overlooked if scientists do not see the assumptions they bring to an inquiry. So often it has been the case that, “those who possessed the tools of science took themselves as the standard of excellence.”[32] Darwin’s sexual dimorphism and the issues of early osteology as raised by Schiebinger have been taken as representative precisely because of the power evolutionary history and anatomy can have when pursued unscientifically. “If sex difference could be found in the skeleton, then sexual identity would no longer be a matter of sex organs appended to neutral human body . . . but would penetrate every muscle, vein, and organ attached to and molded by the skeleton.”[33] Here, then, is the skeleton agreed upon at the onset of modern medicine. The effect has been the universalized woman from her calcified and corseted bones to her made up and manipulated coiffeur.
Bibliography
Darwin, Charles. "On the Origin of Species (1859)." In A Norton Critical Edition: Darwin, edited by Philip Appleman, 95-174. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2001.
Darwin, Charles. "The Descent of Man (1871)." In A Norton Critical Edition: Darwin, edited by Philip Appleman, 175-254. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2001.
Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Second. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Film. Directed by Werner Herzog. Produced by MPI Home Video. Performed by Werner Herzog, & Jean Clottes. 2011.
Lamarch, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet. "Zoological Philosophy (1809)." In A Norton Critical Edition: Darwin, edited by Phillip Appleman, 41-44. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2001.
Schiebinger, Londa. "Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy." Representations 14, no. Spring (1986): 42-82.
Shermer, Michael. Why People Believe Weird Things Pseudoscience, Superstition, and other Confusions of Our Time. Second. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2002.
Steele, Valerie. "Art and Nature: Corset Controversies of the Nineteenth Century." In The Corset: A Cultural History, by Valerie Steele, 35-65. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001.
Unknown. "Brunel Chamber Wall of Dominos Hindquarters of an Animal." Ministère de la culture et de la communication. The Cave of Chauvey Pont-d-Arc. Pont-d-Arc, 30000-32000 BP.
[1] Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (MPI Home Video, 2011).
[2] Unknown Artist, Brunel Chamber Wall of Dominos Hindquarters of an Animal (Ministère de la culture et de la communication, ca. 30000-32000 BP).
[3] A specimen may indeed be male and not have a penis, especially in the vegetable kingdom or as a mutation, and a female may have a penis as with Hyena packs who lack a dominant male. These are not rules unto themselves, however, but are exceptions to the larger modal rule which may be calibrated to accommodate them.
[4] Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), (In A Norton Critical Edition: Darwin, Edited by Phillip Appleman, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc 2001).
[5] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), (In A Norton Critical Edition: Darwin, Edited by Phillip Appleman, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc 2001), 175.
[6] Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, (Simon and Schuster, 2009), 83.
[7] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), (In A Norton Critical Edition: Darwin, Edited by Phillip Appleman, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc 2001), 232
[8] This is the taxonomic classification that identifies Humans, the second Sapiens is to distinguish humans from Homo-sapiens-Neanderthalensis or Neanderthals. Hereafter we shall simply use the word “human” to represent the species Homo-sapiens-Sapiens.
[9] This is the supposition, proven wrong by Mendelian genetics, that an initially differentiated trait is eventually balanced, or swamped, by the fact that father traits and mother traits are mixed in offspring, thus normalizing salient features.
[10] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), (In A Norton Critical Edition: Darwin, Edited by Phillip Appleman, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc 2001), 236.
[11] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), (In A Norton Critical Edition: Darwin, Edited by Phillip Appleman, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc 2001), 233.
[12] Ibid., 234
[13] Ibid., 232
[14] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), (In A Norton Critical Edition: Darwin, Edited by Phillip Appleman, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc 2001), 235
[15] Lamarck accepted that evolution occurred, and accounted for the diversity of species, but he thought that the mechanism was inherited behavior, not natural selection. He stated that, “great alterations in the environment of animals lead to great alterations in their needs, and these alterations in their needs necessarily lead to others in their activities. Now if the new needs become permanent, the animals then adopt new habits which last as long as the needs that evoked them.” Thus the primeval ancestor of the giraffe lacked food on the ground, and thus stretched its neck to be able to reach food in the trees. This strengthened muscles in the neck, and made it longer until it was sufficiently long to eat the leaves off of high branches. These acquired characteristics would be passed as inheritance to progeny.
[16] Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” from The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986), 42
[17] Ibid., 43
[18] Ibid., 72
[19] Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” from The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986), 59
[20] Valerie Steele, “Art and Nature: Corset Controversies in the Nineteenth Century,” from The Corset: A Cultural History (Yale University Press, 20010, 45
[21] Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” from The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986), 59
[22] Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” from The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986), 62
[23] Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” from The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986), 58
[24] Ibid., 61
[25] Ibid., 62
[26] Read: stone cold foxedness
[27] Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” from The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986), 62
[28] Ibid., 43
[29] Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” from The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986), 64
[30] Qtd. in Ibid., 65
[31] Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” from The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986), 63
[32] Ibid., 55
[33] Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” from The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986), 53
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