Tetsuro Matsuzawa

key members of the anti-slavery movement. The authors claim that Darwin partly chose to highlight the common descent of man from apes to show that all races were equal as a rebuttal to those who insisted black people were a different, and inferior, species from those with white skin. Desmond and Moore say Darwin attempted early on to show his theory of sexual selection, where traits seen as desirable but which give no competitive advantage to a species are passed down through generations, was responsible for differences in appearance between races of both animals and humans. But, they argue, Darwin shied away from these topics in On the Origin of Species because it was too controversial. Nonetheless, they argue that “human evolution wasn’t the last piece in the evolution jigsaw; it was the first.” “From the very outset Darwin concerned himself with the unity of humankind. This notion of ‘brotherhood’ grounded his evolutionary enterprise. It was there in the first musings in 1837,” they write. “Always retiring, often unwell, Darwin never threw himself into abolitionist rallies and petitions (as his relatives did). While activists proclaimed a ‘crusade’ against slavery, he subverted it with science. Where slave masters bestialized blacks, Darwin’s starting point was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a ‘common descent’.” “Rather than seeing ‘the facts’ force evolution on Darwin, we find a moral passion firing his evolutionary work. He was quite unlike the modern ‘disinterested’ scientist,” the authors say. “Reading the greatest one-origin-for-all-the-races work, by the anti-slavery advocate James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, Darwin scribbled, “How like my Book all this will be.”” Desmond and Moore believe they have uncovered the passion driving Darwin. “The real problem is that no one understands Darwin’s core project, the nucleus of his most inflammatory research. No one has appreciated the source of that moral fire that fuelled his strange, out-of-character obsession with human origins. Understand that and Darwin can be radically reassessed.” The discovery and recovery of Darwin’s letters is still something of a rolling revolution. “Even as we write new ones are turning up — not least, from the son of the most famous ‘immediatist’ abolitionist in the world, the American William Lloyd Garrison.” It confirms what we had come to suspect, they write, that Darwin was an admirer of the most uncompromising, non-violent Christian leader in the anti-slavery movement. Garrison was, in Darwin’s words, “a man to be for ever revered”. Darwin was overjoyed on hearing that the blistering anti-slavery passage in his Beagle journal had been read to the elderly Garrison, whose son reported to Darwin how it shed “a new and welcome light on your character as a philanthropist”, they write. To think, Darwin replied, that a man “whom I honour from the bottom of my soul, should have heard and approved of the few words which I wrote many years ago on Slavery”. Although the slave trade had been outlawed in Britain two years before Darwin’s birth, merchants and sea captains were willing to flout the law. And other countries — despite pressure from Britain and harrassment from its Navy — remained engaged. But the big desire in Darwin’s youth was the end of slavery itself. The West Indies cane fields were still worked by black slaves, even if planters could not import more. In the century to 1810, about 1.75 million people had been abducted from Africa and sold in the British colonies. Some 750,000 were alive when slavery was abolished in the 1830s. “These broken black bodies under the lash had been destined to serve the sugar tooth of the nation — until the nation, with its lobbies and activists, finally baulked,” they write. “Darwin’s young world, then, was buoyed by this huge humanitarian upswelling in the country — the whole family... were swept along.” The enormity of the crime in the eyes of the Darwins and the Wedgwood cousins was understandable: the African slave abductions had resulted in probably the largest forced migration of humans in history. And the newly emerging correspondence “shows how much there is still to be learned about Darwin”. Tetsuro Matsuzawa