Re: [asa] Darwin's twin track: 'Evolution and emancipation'

Almost every day I learn something new.

Thank you, Moorad. This is a "keeper."

On 1/31/09, Alexanian, Moorad <alexanian@uncw.edu> wrote:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7856157.stm
>
> Darwin's twin track: 'Evolution and emancipation'
>
> What drove Charles Darwin to his extraordinary ideas on evolution and human
> origins? Adrian Desmond, with co-author James Moore, argue in a new book
> that the great scientist had a "sacred cause": the abolition of slavery.
>
> "It makes one's blood boil," said Charles Darwin.
>
> Not much outraged the gentle recluse, but the horrors of slavery could cost
> him a night's sleep.
>
> He was thinking of the whipped house boy and the thumbscrews used by old
> ladies in South America, atrocities he had witnessed on the Beagle voyage.
>
> The screams stayed with him for life, but how much did they influence his
> life's work?
>
> Today you can still read of Darwin's "eureka" moment when he saw the
> Galapagos finches.
>
> Alas, his conversion to evolution wasn't so simple, but it was much more
> interesting. It didn't occur in the Galapagos, but probably on his arrival
> home.
>
> And new evidence suggests that Darwin's unique approach to evolution -
> relating all races and species by "common descent" - could have been
> fostered by his anti-slavery beliefs.
>
> Family feelings
>
> After circumnavigating the globe (1831-6), Darwin settled in London. Here in
> 1838 he formulated his theory of "natural selection", after which he became
> increasingly reclusive, particularly following his move to Down village in
> Kent.
>
> He refrained from publishing a word on evolution until 1858 - not even a
> brief, priority-grabbing paper, as was his way with other projects. His
> hesitance is understandable. Evolution was execrable to his Cambridge
> friends.
>
> One naturalist called it "abominable trash vomited" out by revolutionaries;
> and radicals did, indeed, deploy a self-sustaining evolution to undermine
> the creationist miracles on which Anglican power rested.
>
> Darwin's gouty Cambridge professor, Adam Sedgwick, used "contempt, scorn,
> and ridicule" to trash one "filthy" evolution book in 1844. Darwin,
> sensitive about his reputation, wisely laid low.
>
> So why devise such a beastly theory in the first place, if it threatened
> ignominy? Was there some integral moral gain?
>
> Consider another question. Why was Darwin's evolution uniquely defined by
> common descent, the joining of races and species through shared ancestry?
> Darwin's common descent image is so obvious today that we forget to question
> where it came from.
>
> 'Man and brother'
>
> Common descent in Darwin's younger day was ubiquitous in anti-slavery
> tracts. Consider the words of the famous cameo, depicting a kneeling slave
> asking "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" That cameo was in fact the brainchild
> of the pottery-dynasty founder, Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin's grandfather.
>
> New evidence shows how indebted Darwin was to this anti-slavery heritage.
>
> Darwin's uncle Jos Wedgwood sold the firm's London showroom, and ploughed
> the proceeds into an anti-slavery society, and in the 1850s (with American
> slavery still flourishing) the Wedgwoods continued using labels showing the
> slave under Britannia's banner, which read "God Hath Made of One Blood All
> Nations of Men".
>
> The anti-slavery agitator Thomas Clarkson - the man who rode 35,000 miles
> collecting statistics in the sea ports on the evil trade - was another
> bankrolled by Josiah Wedgwood.
>
> With a Wedgwood wife and mother, Darwin saw abolition as a "sacred cause"
> too, and in his culminating work, the Descent of Man (1871), he placed
> Clarkson at the moral apex of humanity and called slavery a "great sin".
>
> Such family feelings explain why, as a 16-year-old at Edinburgh University
> in 1826 (in a period often dismissed by historians), Darwin could spend 40
> extra-curricular hours with a freed slave from Guyana studying taxidermy and
> become his "intimate" friend.
>
> And this when many visiting Americans saw any black/white friendship as
> "revolting".
>
> Torture accounts
>
> Darwin witnessed slavery everywhere in South America. The Beagle's own
> supply ship on her previous trip had originally been a slaver, and, once
> sold, it reverted to slaving. While Darwin was on the continent, it was
> again disgorging chained Africans.
>
> Darwin's journal of the voyage (1845) gives a damning account of the
> tortures he saw or heard of; but of all the "heart-sickening atrocities",
> the worst for him were the stories of masters threatening to sell the
> children of disobedient slaves.
>
> As an outsider, he was "powerless as a child even to remonstrate". But
> within weeks of the Beagle's return, he developed a science which undercut
> the slave-master's notions.
>
> Many plantation owners considered slaves a separate species, an animal to be
> exploited as such. Blacks and whites shared no joint ancestry.
>
> Yet the Darwin-Wedgwood maxim made the slave a "Man and a Brother". Darwin
> opened his first evolution notebook in 1837, damned slave-holders for their
> separate species view, then pushed common parentage to the zoological limit.
>
> Since species were only extended races, they too must share an ancestry. He
> moved from talking of the common "father" of mankind to an "opossum"-like
> fossil as the father of all mammals.
>
> Human genealogy became the model for his famous "tree of life".
>
> Fossil evidence
>
> None of this minimizes the importance of Darwin's Galapagos and Pampas
> observations. The giant tortoises, mockingbirds and finches varied from
> island to island, and this became clearer to Darwin after London Zoo's bird
> expert John Gould analysed his finches in January 1837.
>
> Then Richard Owen (the man shortly to give the world the "dinosaurs")
> diagnosed Darwin's fossils. Darwin thought that some were "rhinos" (Old
> World mammals), yet Owen showed that they were indigenous giant armadillos,
> sloths and anteaters.
>
> So extinct animals were being succeeded by related living types. This
> evidence remains crucial, but it was the way Darwin marshalled it that
> concerns us. Assuming the tacit truth of racial "brotherhood" allowed him to
> join the bloodlines into a common descent configuration.
>
> And he did so in 1837-8, just as the West Indies slaves were being released
> (technically freed in 1833, they were forced to serve an "apprenticeship"
> which effectively kept them in bondage till 1838).
>
> This freedom filled Darwin with a sense of pride and he declared that "we...
> have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our
> sin". He certainly had.
>
> All too clear
>
> His common descent imagery was unknown elsewhere in natural history, beyond
> racially unifying works such as James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the
> Physical History of Mankind. That book traced animal races to common
> ancestors in order to prove that all humans could have descended from Adam.
>
> Darwin, preparing to write the Origin of Species, scribbled inside his copy
> of Prichard: "How like my Book all this will be". It wasn't so. He remained
> a worried man and in the later 1850s dropped humans from his publishing
> plans because the subject was "so surrounded with prejudices".
>
> But even though the Origin of Species (1859) skirted people, no one doubted
> that they remained at its core.
>
> Darwin's "bulldog" T.H. Huxley, who took over the fight for human evolution,
> said that when it came to uniting black and white ancestries, he "was
> pleased to be able to show that Mr Darwin was for once on the side of
> orthodoxy".
>
> Darwin could have wished for no more.
>
> Adrian Desmond is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Biology Department at
> University College London. He is co-author with James Moore of Darwin's
> Sacred Cause (Allen Lane)
>
> Story from BBC NEWS:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7856157.stm
>
> Published: 2009/01/29 09:42:28 GMT
>
> (c) BBC MMIX
>
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-- 
Burgy
www.burgy.50megs.com
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