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How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
February 2010
On Sale: January 28, 2010
448 pages
ISBN: 0547055269
EAN: 9780547055268
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
An astonishing new portrait of a scientific
icon In this remarkable book, Adrian Desmond and
James Moore restore the missing moral core of Darwin’s
evolutionary universe, providing a completely new account of
how he came to his shattering theories about human
origins. There has always been a mystery surrounding
Darwin: How did this quiet, respectable gentleman, a pillar
of his parish, come to embrace one of the most radical ideas
in the history of human thought? It’s difficult to overstate
just what Darwin was risking in publishing his theory of
evolution. So it must have been something very powerful—a
moral fire, as Desmond and Moore put it—that propelled him.
And that moral fire, they argue, was a passionate hatred of
slavery. To make their case, they draw on a wealth of
fresh manuscripts, unpublished family correspondence,
notebooks, diaries, and even ships’ logs. They show how
Darwin’s abolitionism had deep roots in his mother’s family
and was reinforced by his voyage on the Beagle as
well as by events in America—from the rise of scientific
racism at Harvard through the dark days of the Civil
War. Leading apologists for slavery in Darwin’s time
argued that blacks and whites had originated as separate
species, with whites created superior. Darwin abhorred such
"arrogance." He believed that, far from being separate
species, the races belonged to the same human family.
Slavery was therefore a "sin," and abolishing it became
Darwin’s "sacred cause." His theory of evolution gave
all the races—blacks and whites, animals and
plants—an ancient common ancestor and freed them from
creationist shackles. Evolution meant emancipation. In
this rich and illuminating work, Desmond and Moore recover
Darwin’s lost humanitarianism. They argue that only by
acknowledging Darwin’s Christian abolitionist heritage can
we fully understand the development of his groundbreaking
ideas. Compulsively readable and utterly persuasive,
Darwin’s Sacred Cause will revolutionize our view of
the great naturalist.
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