Slavery driven

Most historians and biologists have come to Darwin through his book, On the Origin of Species. They have been curious about his biological life before this ground-breaking book and how he developed his ideas. They have had rich pickings; Darwin was an affluent middle-class Englishman with powerful connections and he was an enthusiastic correspondent. Adrian Desmond and James Moore have published one of the most acclaimed biographies of Darwin’s biological roots, but in a new book they have sidestepped the natural history and looked at the social and political history Darwin found himself surrounded by as he grew up. Their work compiles new evidence that Darwin was passionately opposed to slavery, which was a major political issue at the time, and that this, they argue, provided a moral impetus behind his work. Private notes and letters described by the authors reveal that Darwin’s opinions on slavery were far stronger than previously appreciated, as they have now described in Darwin’s Sacred Cause. Notebooks from his voyage on HMS Beagle detail his revulsion at Feature