Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin. 1880

Much has been made recently of the fact that Lincoln and Darwin share a birth­day. Two hun­dred years ago, this past Thursday. A new book talks about another thing they share. Their hatred of slav­ery. It sounds like a great read. Here’s a short excerpt:

 


Darwin’s Sacred Cause
How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution
By Adrian Desmond & James Moore
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 448 pp. $30
Feb. 15, 2008
Introduction

Unshackling Creation

Global brands don’t come much big­ger than Charles Darwin. He is the griz­zled grand­fa­ther peer­ing from book jack­ets and bill­boards, from text­books and TV — the sage on greet­ing cards, postage stamps and com­mem­o­ra­tive coins. Darwin’s head on British £10 notes radi­ates imper­turba­bil­ity, mock­ing those who would doubt his sci­ence. Hallow him or hoot at him, Darwin can­not be ignored. Atheists trum­pet his ‘athe­ism’, lib­er­als his ‘lib­er­al­ism’, sci­en­tists his Darwinism, and fun­da­men­tal­ists expend great energy denounc­ing the lot. All agree, how­ever, that for bet­ter or worse Darwin’s epoch-​​making book On the Origin of Species trans­formed the way we see our­selves on the planet.

How did a mod­est mem­ber of Victorian England’s minor gen­try become a twenty-​​first-​​century icon? Celebrities today are famous for being famous, but Darwin’s defend­ers have a dif­fer­ent explanation.

To them Darwin changed the world because he was a tough-​​minded sci­en­tist doing good empir­i­cal sci­ence. As a young man, he exploited a great research oppor­tu­nity aboard HMS Beagle. He was shrewd beyond his years, dri­ven by a love of truth. Sailing around the world, he col­lected exotic facts and spec­i­mens — most notably on the Galapagos islands — and fol­lowed the evi­dence to its con­clu­sion, to evo­lu­tion. With infi­nite patience, through grave ill­ness hero­ically borne, he came up with ‘the sin­gle best idea any­one has ever had’ and pub­lished it in 1859 in the Origin of Species. This was a ‘dan­ger­ous idea’ — evolution by ‘nat­ural selection’ — an idea fatal to God and cre­ation­ism equally, even if Darwin had candy-​​coated this evo­lu­tion­ary pill with creation-​​talk to make it more palat­able. Evolution anni­hi­lated Adam; it put apes in our fam­ily tree, as Darwin explained in 1871 when he at last applied evo­lu­tion to humans in The Descent of Man. Secluded on his coun­try estate, pub­lish­ing book after ground-​​breaking book, Darwin cut the fig­ure of a detached, objec­tive researcher, the model of the suc­cess­ful sci­en­tist. And so he won his crown.

The most that can be said for this car­i­ca­ture is the num­ber of peo­ple who credit it. Not only evo­lu­tion­ists and sec­u­lar­ists, but many cre­ation­ists and fun­da­men­tal­ists see Darwin’s claim to fame — or infamy — in his single-​​minded pur­suit of sci­ence. Doggedly, some say obsti­nately, he devoted his life to evo­lu­tion. A zeal for sci­en­tific knowl­edge con­sumed him, keep­ing him on tar­get to over­throw God and bes­tial­ize human­ity. Brilliantly, or wickedly, Darwin glob­al­ized him­self. By fol­low­ing sci­ence and renounc­ing reli­gion, he launched the mod­ern sec­u­lar world.

This isn’t just sim­plis­tic; most of it is plain wrong. Human evo­lu­tion wasn’t his last piece in the evo­lu­tion jig­saw; it was the first. From the very out­set Darwin con­cerned him­self with the unity of humankind. This notion of ‘broth­er­hood’ grounded his evo­lu­tion­ary enter­prise. It was there in his first mus­ings on evo­lu­tion in 1837.



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