Charles Darwin, Abolitionist and Paradox
Today is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. Adrian Desmond writes that while we regard On the Origin of Species as a triumph of disinterested scientific reason, Darwin was influenced by his fervent belief in the anti-slavery movement. Ironically he also justified colonial eradication. “To celebrate historical figures we have first to understand them,” and Darwin was a paradoxical thinker.
Shackled legs, thumbscrews used to crush the fingers of errant female slaves, a six-year-old boy horse-whipped for handing out water in a dirty glass: these sound like scenes from a modern horror story, but all were seen by the young Charles Darwin on his travels with the Beagle around the slave-owning continent of South America. You will find no mention of them in the proudly reasoned, scientific pages of On the Origin of Species. Glance at Darwin’s journals, private notebooks and family background, however, and you will find a man immersed in the rhetoric and fervent belief of the anti-slavery movement. Was the public man of science influenced by these private passions?
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