ABSTRACT
Charles Robert Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, hit upon his mechanism of evolution through natural selection somewhere towards the end of September 1838 (Ruse 1979c; Ospovat 1981). At once, he started to think of its possible applications to our own species. Indeed, the very first explicit writings on selection that we have in Darwin's private notebooks, occurring around the end of October 1838, consider possible implications of the mechanism for human thought processes. However, when Darwin finally published his evolutionary speculations in On the Origin of Species in 1859, he said little about our own species, simply noting that his general views would have specific applications for Homo sapiens.
