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

So much for Darwin being a racist. He has a good record on the subject.

Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Burgeson (ASA member)" <hossradbourne@gmail.com>
To: "Alexanian, Moorad" <alexanian@uncw.edu>
Cc: "AmericanScientificAffiliation" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 3:43 PM
Subject: 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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Received on Mon Feb 2 10:52:35 2009