Philosophy Department, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico, Mexico.
C R Biol. 2010 Feb;333(2):166-73. doi: 10.1016/j.crvi.2009.12.004. Epub 2010 Mar 1.
Since his visit to Tierra del Fuego in the 1830s, Darwin had been fascinated by the "savages" that succeeded in surviving on such a "broken beach", and because they were certainly similar in behaviour to our ancestors. However, he was also fascinated by baboons' behaviour, according to Brehm's accounts: hamadryas baboons showed a strong altruism to the point of risking their own lives in order to save their infants from attack by dogs. In 1871, he mentions he would rather have descended from brave baboons than from "savages", considered egoistic. We study the two sources of these ideas and try to show how Darwin's comparative reflections on apes and "savages" made him the first evolutionist anthropologist.
自 19 世纪 30 年代访问火地岛以来，达尔文一直对在这样一个“破碎的海滩”上成功生存的“野蛮人”着迷，因为他们的行为肯定与我们的祖先相似。然而，根据布雷姆的描述，达尔文也对狒狒的行为着迷：山魈表现出强烈的利他主义，甚至不惜冒着生命危险从狗的攻击中拯救自己的婴儿。1871 年，他提到自己宁愿从勇敢的狒狒而不是从“野蛮人”那里繁衍后代，因为野蛮人被认为是自私的。我们研究了这两种观点的来源，并试图展示达尔文对猿类和“野蛮人”的比较反思如何使他成为第一个进化人类学家。
