The New York Times today reviews a new book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, titled Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution.
Darwin’s power, according to Desmond and Moore, lay in his marshaling an argument for the unitary origin and hence “brotherhood” of all human beings, and this, they argue, is precisely what Darwin achieved in “The Origin of Species” and later in “The Descent of Man.” The case they make is rich and intricate, involving Darwin’s encounter with race-based phrenology at Edinburgh and a religiously based opposition to slavery at Cambridge. Even Darwin’s courtship of Emma, whom he winningly called the “most interesting specimen in the whole series of vertebrate animals,” is cleverly interwoven with his developing thoughts on “sexual selection,” the aesthetic preference for certain traits, like skin color in humans or plumage in peacocks, that over time leads to those super ficial variations we mistakenly think of as “racial.”
But what if Darwin’s evidence had led to conclusions that did not support his belief in the unitary origins of mankind? Would he have fudged the data? Desmond and Moore don’t really address the question. One is left with the impression that Darwin was amazingly lucky that his benevolent preconceptions turned out to fit the facts.
Well, maybe so, although a read of the Voyage of the Beagle doesn't leave one with warm feelings for the brotherhood of mankind. Here's a passage from pp. 580-581 of the Voyage (1839, emphasis mine):
Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we shall find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone, that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other; in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children. Every one has heard of the inexplicable reduction of the population in the beautiful and healthy island of Tahiti since the date of Captain Cook's voyages: although in that case we might have expected it would have been otherwise; for infanticide, which formerly prevailed to so extraordinary a degree, has ceased, and the murderous wars have become less frequent.
There are certain passages in Darwin's work that are difficult to explain, if you're a scholar committed to the idea that "social Darwinism" was an evil bastardization by Herbert Spencer. Darwin was not a saint; he was a product of his times. He depended upon his readers' common knowledge as a way to push his observations and hypotheses forward.
In fairness to Darwin, his mode of explaining the state of affairs for indigenous peoples in the Voyage was generally to point out that many of their problems were caused by whites. On page 533, he describes the fate of the Tasmanians:
All the aborigines have been removed to an island in Bass's Straits, so that Van Diemen's Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population. This most cruel step seems to have been quite unavoidable, as the only means of stopping a fearful succession of robberies, burnings, and murders, committed by the blacks; but which sooner or later must have ended in their utter destruction. I fear there is no doubt that this train of evil and its consequences, originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen. Thirty years is a short period, in which to have banished the last aboriginal from his native island,—and that island nearly as large as Ireland. I do not know a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilized over a savage people.
Mere equanimity would mark Darwin as a progressive compared to many of his contemporaries; he does much better than that with a generally sympathetic view of other peoples. But it would be a stretch to say his commitment to monogenism was unusual or courageous. Although there were many prominent polygenists (those who believed the human races had separate origins, accounting for their antiquity and diversity), monogenism was the default in the nineteenth century for both religious authorities and natural historians.
