On the Very Border of Civilization: Evolutionary Theory Meets Genocide

The extrascientific factors in Darwin’s discovery of natural selection have often been sought in his relationship with political economy, particularly the works of Malthus. This chapter explores a possible alternative track: the relationship between the direct experience of colonial atrocities that Darwin witnessed in his journey through the Southern Hemisphere, and the making of his “long argument” about natural selection, preservation of favourite races, and recognition that, “no fact in the history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants” (1845, p. 174). Expanding on existing literature on Darwinism and genocide, I analyse the uses of the lemma exterminat- in Darwin’s letters, manuscripts, and published work, from his Beagle voyage to the last years of his life and claim the centrality of this term for the making of evolutionary theory. While extinction is a metaphor heavily analysed by cultural theorists and evolutionary biologists alike, extermination, as a deliberate action of utter annihilation and depopulation, is less central to evolutionary debates. I argue that extermination appears in three features across Darwin’s writings: first, it entered Darwin’s language vis-à-vis the genocide of native populations in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania. Second, it became a general principle of life but was no longer applied explicitly to human society. Third, the idea of human extermination returned in private correspondence, mimicking or possibly anticipating an emerging eugenic language that he applies to himself or his own family.