Science Literature

Authors Adrian Desmond and James Moore are very clear in their view that social context is crucial for understanding anyone, whether they lived in generations past, or whether they are alive today. They have applied this thinking to Charles Darwin. They are aware that not all share their approach or enthusiasm:

"Many scientists and philosophers think that explaining genius and its insights as we do saps the power of science and, given the challenge of creationism, is an act of treachery. The reluctance to dig beneath the surface of Darwin's books into the social and cultural resources of his times is as dogged as ever."

These two have been working on a sequel to their 1991 biography of Darwin and their publisher is claiming they have come up with a "revolutionary thesis". The book is said to be "astonishing". They suggest that Darwin's abhorrence of slavery was a major driver for his evolutionary theorising.

"One such resource in Darwin's world was anti-slavery, the greatest moral movement of his age. Our thesis is that the anti-slavery values instilled in him from youth became the moral premise of his work on evolution."
and
"We are not trying to explain away all of Darwin's work as being due to his passion for emancipation, but our argument is that his passion for racial unity is what drove him to touch this untouchable and treacherous subject."

The new book (source here)

Although the book is not yet published, Desmond and Moore did provide an extended abstract of their thinking in the Introduction of a new edition of The Descent of Man, published in 2004. This attracted some critical analysis in the pages of The British Journal for the History of Science. It is worth highlighting some of the points in that review, because it sets an agenda for evaluating the significance of the new book, when it appears. The reviewer, Robert J. Richards, finds the thesis implausible on several counts. First, he finds that their case is built on inference rather than direct evidence:

"This account of Darwin's motivation for his theory of human evolution does suffer the inconvenience of being unsupported by any evidence. Darwin certainly was a foe of slavery. His abolitionist sentiments were nurtured in the enlightened Whig household of his father and voluble sisters, and his hatred of slavery became incandescent as the result of poignant experiences in South America. But there is no indication in the Descent - or elsewhere - that he formulated his conception of human evolution in order to undermine the peculiar institution."

Secondly, Darwin did exhibit a tendency to racialism. Rather than take opportunities to stress the equality of the various human races, he drew attention to their differences and linked this with the demise of some.

"Despite Moore and Desmond's suggestions to the contrary, in his book Darwin described the races as forming an obvious hierarchy of intelligence and moral capacity, from savage to civilized, with the 'intellectual and social faculties' of the lower races comparable to those that must have characterized ancient man (p. 209). Accordingly, he ventured that 'the grade of their civilisation seems to be a most important element in the success of competing nations' (p. 212), which explained for him the extermination of the Tasmanians and the severe decline in population of the Australians, Hawaiians and Maoris. Those groups succumbed in struggle with more advanced peoples (pp. 211-22). In this respect Darwin was no different from Haeckel, whose conception of 'human genealogy' the Englishman emphatically endorsed in the introduction to his book (p. 19)."

The trail divides sharply when these authors consider how sexual selection was addressed by Darwin. First, Desmond and Moore's analysis:

"The pair claim in a new book that Darwin partly chose to highlight the common descent of man from apes to show that all races were equal, as a rebuttal to those who insisted black people were a different, and inferior, species from those with white skin. They say Darwin attempted to show that his theory of sexual selection, where traits seen as desirable but which give no competitive advantage to a species are passed down through generations, was responsible for differences in appearance between races of both animals and humans."

By contrast, this is from Robert Richards:

"In the late 1860s Darwin and Wallace had a protracted disagreement about how sexual selection operated in birds and other organisms - hence Darwin's cascading discussions in the second volume of his book (almost four hundred pages) of sexual selection in beetles, butterflies, birds and bucks. But an even more significant dispute with Wallace arose because of his friend's conversion to spiritualism. Wallace had come to argue that the distinctive features of human beings - naked skin, aesthetic sense, moral character and large intellect - could not be explained by natural selection because such traits conferred little or no survival advantage. Only higher spiritual powers could have produced them. Darwin accepted Wallace's analysis that these traits could not be explained by natural selection, but he did not fall prey to Wallace's new faith. Rather, he proposed other powerful but natural forces to account for the distinctive traits characterizing human societies, namely the forces of sexual selection and group selection - elegant solutions to a vexing conceptual problem."

These issues were highlighted two years ago and the advance blurb of the book does little to raise confidence that they have been addressed. We do not doubt that Darwin was shocked by slavery. We do not doubt that he had relatives and friends who were active abolitionists. The question being raised is: Was Darwin motivated by these convictions in developing his ideas in The Descent of Man? Alternatively, was he motivated by a grand vision of all life as the unfolding of a naturalistic evolutionary process? These issues will no doubt be explored further during this Bicentennial year. But to conclude this blog, here is something on which we agree with Desmond and Morris (and which goes against much of the rhetoric about the "pure" science associated with Darwinism:

Question: What lessons does this book contain for the relationship between religion and science?
"That 'the relationship between religion and science' never existed; that religion in science was the norm in Darwin's day, and he never escaped its aura; that biological theorizing about human nature inevitably poses moral questions, and in so far as these questions have religious answers, to that extent 'religion and science' are inseparable."

Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution
by Adrian Desmond and James Moore
Allen Lane, Publication date: 29 Jan 2009

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. [snip]

Review of new edition of The Descent of Man
Robert J. Richards
The British Journal for the History of Science (December 2006), 39:4:615-617 | doi:10.1017/S0007087406409055

1st para: James Moore and Adrian Desmond have brought out a new paperback edition of Darwin's Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. They chose the final printing (1879) of the second edition (1874) as the text, which for scholars will serve as a handy companion to the first edition (1871), readily available from Princeton University Press. For teaching purposes, the Penguin version may even be preferred to the first edition because of the inclusion of a chronology of Darwin's life, an appendix containing thumbnail sketches of individuals named in the text and, most especially, Moore and Desmond's provocative fifty-page introduction - an introduction admirable in its social detail and implausible in its deflationary thesis.

See also:

Gray, R. Charles Darwin's research to prove evolution was motivated by his desire to end slavery, Telegraph Online, 24 Jan 2009.

A Conversation with Adrian Desmond and James Moore.

Flannery, M. Darwin's "Sacred" Cause: How Opposing Slavery Could Still Enslave, Uncommon Descent (16 February 2009)