Product Description

In this remarkable book Adrian Desmond and James Moore, world authorities on Darwin, give a completely new explanation of how Darwin came to his famous view of evolution, which traced all life to an ancient common ancestor. Darwin was committed to the abolition of slavery, in part because of his family’s deeply held beliefs. It was his ‘Sacred Cause’ and at its core lay a belief in human racial unity. Desmond and Moore show how he extended to all life the idea of human brotherhood held by those who fought to abolish slavery, so developing our modern view of evolution. Desmond and Moore argue that only by understanding Darwin’s Christian abolitionist inheritance can we shed new light on the perplexing mix of personal drive, public hesitancy and scientific radicalism that led him finally in 1871 to publish The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. The result is an epoch-making study of this eminent Victorian.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #414722 in Books
• Published on: 2010-01-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

About the Author
Adrian Desmond has written seven other books on evolution and Victorian science, including an acclaimed biography, Huxley. An Honorary Research Fellow in the Biology Department at University College London, he is editing (with Angela Darwin) The T. H. Huxley Family Correspondence. James Moore’s books include The Post-Darwinian Controversies and The Darwin Legend. He is Professor of the History of Science at the Open University and currently researching the life of Alfred Russel Wallace.

Customer Reviews

Political context of the Origin
I agree with the previous reviewer that this book was hard to get into. It was about page 150 before it really got going. However, the idea of the book is a very good one: to provide some contemporary context for the development of Darwin's theory regarding the origins of man. In the end, I found this quite convincing. We often forget that his books were written against a background of politics and the abolition of slavery certainly dominated Darwin's times. I recommend reading the book for that reason but don't feel guilty if you skim the first half.

The best Darwin book ever?
I was surprised by previous reviewers that judged this book a worthwhile read but difficult to get into. I found the whole drama of the war against the slave trade and Darwin's role in it to be a page turner right from the start. It is peppered with moments of high drama such as the flaming row about slavery between Darwin and Captain FitzRoy over dinner on The Beagle. Darwin was banished from the captain's table for about a week for daring to disagree with FitzRoy who believed the plantation slaves they had met that day were genuine when they said, in front of their master, that they did not want their freedom. I had not realised before that "Origin of Species" was not only triggered by Alfred Russel Wallace's communication of 1858. There was also an urgent need to discredit the false science of Professor Louis Agassiz at Harvard. His creation science maintained that Negroes were separately created as an inferior and separate species. He was therefore the darling of USA slavers and planters and at the time of publication of "Origin of Species" Agassiz was celebrated as the upholder of modern science whereas the anti-slavery movement and the science associated with it were generally considered to be old fashioned. Desmond and Moore describe how and why Darwin's little book succeeded, Agassiz was utterly discredited and the rest is history.

Darwin's sacred cause
Very heavy going but quite interesting eventually if you get past halfway. It's not written in a very accessible style though and there are so many different names that it's impossible to remember who everyone is. The book could have been half the length and more entertainingly written in my opinion!