Desmond: Darwin's Sacred Cause
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Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause : How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's View on Human Evolution. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2010. 448 pages; includes bibliographic references and index.
Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln share a birthday, but they also share a tumultuous period in history. I've always been struck by the realization that Origin of Species was published just a few short years before the Civil War. After reading Darwin's Sacred Cause, I get the idea that it was not coincidental. Yes, Darwin sat on his big idea for 20 years, publishing travel journals, works on geology, and a four-volume monograph on barnacles. Why barnacles? First, to document the amount of variation present in species, which natural selection requires to operate; and second, to establish himself as a knowledgeable naturalist in the eyes of the Royal Society, and provide the credentials needed to discuss his theory. In addition, describing the complete lineage of these marine arthropods provided an example of common descent. Barnacles were a proxy for a much more controversial topic: human variation.
Human variation is what I study as a biological (or physical) anthropologist. Physical anthropology has its roots, at least in part according to the authors, in phrenology. That's the pseudo-science of determining temperament from the shape of the skull. Not surprisingly, given that phrenology developed in Europe, Europeans were said to have the most refined skulls, and phrenological findings were used to justify slavery, something Darwin's entire family was against. Darwin would not have been impressed with the physical anthropologists of his day, especially in America, where differences in skull morphology were seen as "proof" of a polygenic origin of humans. According to the polygenists, each human "race" had its own pair of progenitors and were separately created, an idea used to justify all sorts of atrocities, since non-Europeans were seen as less than human. Darwin held the monogenist view, and saw all peoples as descended from a common ancestor, meaning they we are all worthy of being treated with dignity and respect, and slavery was unjustified. Actually, he took it further than that, and saw a common ancestor for all living things.
The tension between these two worldviews played out in my hometown, before the Civil War even started. In 1856, Sheriff Samuel Jones led a pro-slavery posse into Lawrence, Kansas, which had been established by abolitionist settlers two years before, sacked the town, burned the Free State Hotel, smashed the presses, and killed an antislavery supporter.
Darwinâ's mentor and friend, geologist Charles Lyell, who encouraged him to publish his ideas on natural selection, was a Southern sympathizer. The Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, with three Confederate agents on the council, whose sole purpose was to push a pro-slavery agenda. That's what Darwin was up against. Not just other naturalists, but Victorian society. No wonder he waited two decades to publish.
-- Notes by GKY
