Luther College prof Robert F. Shedinger takes a critical look at Evolution News:
In 2009, noted Darwinian biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore published Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery, and the Quest for Human Origins. They argued the radical new thesis that Darwin’s species work was primarily motivated by an abolitionist desire to combat racist polygenist views of human origins and instead draw all humans together under the umbrella of common descent. This book has been both widely praised and widely criticized…
Shockingly, it turns out that these highly esteemed scholars play fast and loose with their sources and with basic tenets of historiographical research.
Therefore, I offer a series of posts here designed to lay out the evidence in detail. It is not merely that Desmond and Moore are selective in the sources they cite, filtering out only those which support their thesis. Many historians are selective. What I found in their historiography rises, instead, to a different level. – (March 16, 2023)
Note: The slave trade in Britain was abolished in 1807 and slavery through almost all the British empire in 1833 Charles Darwin’s life dates were 1809–1882, so he never knew a time when human beings were literally for sale in his own country. The biggest social issues of 19th century Britain revolved around wage slavery (including countless children) in the factories. It would be more interesting to know what he had to say about that than to hear his fashionable upper class Brit theories about the evils of chattel slavery elsewhere.