London Blog

Book Review: Darwin’s Sacred Cause

A guest post by Paul Cox

In this year of anniversaries — birth and publication alike — it might seem as though everything that could be said about Charles Darwin has been said many times over. The man on the ten pound note has been scrutinised as much as any figure since Shakespeare, and would seem to have much less to hide. Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore, however, have chosen the occasion as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean, from their own 1991 tome Darwin as much as any other, and tell a very different story of the conception and birth of natural selection. In doing so they remind us that the impartial, empirical Darwin of legend is more a reflection of our ideal of the Scientist, and that no man of the age of abolition was a moral island.

The exhaustive mass of evidence in the new book ensures that Darwin’s anti-slavery agenda cannot be overlooked by future scholars. Readers hoping for a brief addendum to the full 1991 biography will find, instead, a complete alternate history, one so fully fleshed out that it seems improbable to have overlooked it for a century and a half. Nor was it in the beginning, Desmond and Moore argue; given the volatile climate in which the Origin of Species and Descent of Man were published, with common descent facing off against a slavery-supporting scientific racism promoting separate origins for Africans and Anglo-Saxons, few contemporaries failed to read between the lines.

While the work is triumphant in establishing a new, crusading, deeply moral Darwin touched by early encounters with people of other races — a Darwin for the multicultural future — it proves conspicuous that the authors only briefly address their own motivations. Enemies of Darwinism continue to see the Origin of Species itself as the 19th and 20th centuries’ great engine of racism and oppression, loading its legacy with everything from colonial excess to Nazi eugenics, most often by way of Herbert Spencer and his misattributed ‘survival of the fittest.’ In presenting a Darwin who stood firmly on the side of brotherhood among men, the authors aim to bring the theorist back on the side of humanity. It is a convincing reminder that Darwin did not invent the ideas of racial separation or superiority, and in fact dedicated his great works to fighting them. His foes, however, will hardly be impressed by good intentions.

Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins is published by Allen Lane.


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