ABSTRACT
The fascination with wonderful difference that animates Darwin’s writing in The Voyage of the Beagle gradually gave way to a more constrained and ambivalent outlook. Where his earlier focus on the variety of life forms gave a kind of exuberance to the spirit of his enquiries, his later preoccupation with the theme of human descent loaded his reasoning with a heavy burden of social responsibility. This was compounded by a change in his status from that of a maverick speculator at the time of the first release of The Origin of Species to that of a figurehead, the authority behind an expanding range of evolutionary approaches to psychology, sociology, ethics and human physiology. Correspondingly, the mood of secondgeneration Darwinism was darker and more intense than that which surrounded the earlier reception of his ideas.
