Throughout “Are Humans One Race or Many?”, Alfred Russell Wallace asserts that human races, despite initially sharing an ancestry line, diversified due to the unique environments each group resided in. Wallace’s thesis postulates that the environment’s “physical peculiarities” (Wallace 218) and specific “climate, food, and habitat” (Wallace 219) are the underlying influences behind the growth of each race. Wallace believes that as human races fostered physical strength and higher thinking, humanity bypassed natural order and established superiority between human races.
To begin with, Wallace elaborates on why humans are immune to the effects of natural selection. While animals suffer from “individual isolation,” (Wallace 219) humans are “social and sympathetic.” (Wallace 219) Wallace gives the example that although animals
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In fact, the aboriginals were dehumanized to the status of savages, brutes, and objects. For instance, Marlow deemed his boat’s helmsman a machine and Kurtz’s African mistress a mere statute. The apparent superiority of Western civilization is further evidenced as Marlow journeys to the inner station: “what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly.” Despite having not personally witnessed the natives, Marlow consciously classifies the aboriginals as primitive. This sense of racial dominance offers insight into the Western justification of their brutal treatment of natives –ruling through violence and intimidation rather than diplomacy. Moreover, as native Africans are degraded in the background, the wicked imperialistic operations of European companies lowered the moral standards for arbitrating the evil and madness of their