Charles Darwin’s Sacred Cause
As creationists continue trying to connect Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to every evil thing they can imagine (including but not limited to the Third Reich), here’s a review of two new books showing conclusively that Darwin himself was vehemently opposed to slavery: ‘Darwin’s Sacred Cause’ and ‘Angels and Ages’.
Two arresting new books, timed to coincide with Darwin’s 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be understood in relation to events — involving neither tortoises nor finches — on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of “social Darwinism” (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the “survival of the fittest”), was no racist.
Adrian Desmond and James Moore published a highly regarded biography of Darwin in 1991. The argument of their new book, “Darwin’s Sacred Cause,” is bluntly stated in its subtitle: “How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution.” They set out to overturn the widespread view that Darwin was a “tough-minded scientist” who unflinchingly followed the trail of empirical research until it led to the stunning and unavoidable theory of evolution. This narrative, they claim, is precisely backward. “Darwin’s starting point,” they write, “was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a ‘common descent’ ” of all human beings.
“The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather,” Darwin wrote, but his human grandfathers are more central to the circumstantial case that Desmond and Moore assemble. The poet-physician Erasmus Darwin and the industrial potter Josiah Wedgwood were close friends among a circle of mechanical-minded Dissenters from the Anglican Church. Darwin and Wedgwood shared a hatred of the slave trade, contributing money and propaganda — in the form of anti-slavery verse and ceramic curios — to the “sacred cause” of abolition. Wedgwood’s cameo medallion of a chained slave, with the caption “Am I not a Man and a Brother?,” was “a must-have solidarity accessory.”
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
