Illustration by Diego Mallo While we cannot be certain that the implied double meaning in the title of Charles Darwin’s 1871 masterpiece, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex , was deliberate, it would be remarkable were this not the case. This rhetorical trickery, playing on the meaning of the word “descent” – in a manner that would have been immediately obvious to the Victorian reader – was intellectual and societal dynamite. Rather than being “ordained for some divine purpose”, humankind was the product of “blind chance”. Darwin’s book destroyed humankind’s metaphysical status and apparent dignity in an instant, toppling it from its hallowed pedestal and corrupting its “bodily frame” with the “indelible stamp” of its “lowly origin”. Humans, he argued, were the modified descendants of other species, having evolved by natural selection according to a shared set of general laws and causes.…