Darwin’s Sacred Cause/Darwin’s Island
IT IS always a struggle to find a new angle on a well-worn theme; doubly so if you have already written what many regard as the definitive work on the matter.
But that is what Adrian Desmond and James Moore have managed to do.
Eighteen years after their original biography of the man, they have taken the thorny subject of Darwinism and race and turned it on its head.
They argue that, contrary to the racist use to which his evolutionary ideas were later put by some evil individuals, Darwin’s own perception of the unity and equality of mankind was one of the themes that underpinned his thinking.
Darwin was born 200 years ago on February 12 (one reason for the plethora of books about him that is now hitting the shelves). His mother was a member of the Wedgwood pottery family at a time when manufacturing capitalism of that sort was the most progressive and liberal force around.
Jones’s day job is as a geneticist and he shows how modern genetics confirm the tree-of-life idea root and branch, as it were.
Progressive liberals were, naturally, against slavery and Dr Desmond and Professor Moore show how the young Darwin was inculcated in this belief.
They also show how many racist attitudes were constructed around that time by slave-owners and traders who wished to dehumanise their human chattels.
Paradoxically, before the anti-slavery movement began few people would have denied the equal humanity of Africans and Europeans.
Both, after all, were descended from Adam and Eve but a subtle propaganda which started around the beginning of the 19th century began to suggest that, perhaps, the races had been separately created or (when evolutionary ideas began to appear), had descended from different species of monkey.
Darwin disagreed. His background and his circumnavigation on HMS Beagle, which exposed him to many different groups of people, persuaded him that despite their superficial differences humans were all twigs of the same branch of the tree of life.
Moreover, Desmond and Moore argue that this metaphor, extended to the whole tree, was what persuaded him of the unity of life and its descent from a common ancestor.
In Darwin’s Island, Steve Jones takes a completely different tack. He suggests that rather than the far-flung Galapagos and the other exotic places that he visited on his Beagle voyage being Darwin’s main inspiration for his theory, much of it was derived from observations and experiments he carried out in a larger and more homely island, Great Britain.
The point of departure of each chapter is one of Darwin’s lesser-known volumes, for he was a prolific author and wrote many books besides The Origin Of Species (whose 150th anniversary in November is the other reason for the Darwinian tidal wave).
Darwin’s Island is therefore an interesting exploration of the byways of natural history. Barnacles, a group of animals on which Darwin was at one time the world expert, are used to show how species actually do evolve. The role of earthworms on maintaining soil (another topic on which Darwin was the world’s expert), is also illuminating.
Nor does Professor Jones neglect mankind’s place in the scheme of things. Jones’s day job is as a geneticist and he shows how modern genetics confirm the tree-of-life idea root and branch, as it were.
The human races, as Darwin predicted, are just twigs on the tree of life. The modern racist will find no comfort in Darwin’s amazing evolutionary insight.
Darwin’s Sacred Cause
by Adrian Desmond and James Moore
Allen Lane, £25
Darwin’s Island
by Steve Jones
Little Brown, £20
