Geoscientist Online

In a crowded field that brings to mind Darwin’s metaphor for the grassy bank, it takes two scholars of Desmond and Moore’s calibre to spot a gap and hammer home a new wedge with such bravura.

In amazing and vivid detail, the authors trace the origin of the Origin to the anti-slavery movement, in which the Darwins and the Wedgwoods were so long active participants. Darwin’s unshakable conviction that the human family was one species, with one origin, underpinned the view of life that emerged in 1859, carrying its light into a hothouse political climate. In that murky world, race generated the heat, stoked by creationist science.

The timeliness of the book is more than just the sesquicentenary of the Origin and the bicentenary of the man. The squalid maunderings of creationists continue to tar Darwin with the brush of “materialism” - with the often explicit implication that organic evolution lies the root of social disintegration alongside atheism, Marxism and terrorism. This book sets the record straight. Darwin’s science was on the side of the angels (in all matters except their pectoral arrangements).

Desmond and Moore also show in passing that the politicisation of science, so often decried by science commentators (see Editorial, this issue) is not new. The last bastion of slavery on Earth - the southern states of America, land of the free – Defended itself with the weapons of creationist science put in their hands by such luminaries as Louis Agassiz, who found the sight of black people made him physically ill. Many of those same states (which still of course have difficulty with evolution) now deny climate change science for just the same sort of self-interested reasons, reminding us that plus ça change, plus c’est la mème chose.

My only reservation about Darwin’s Sacred Cause is its occasionally overblown style. For a book that should be “popular” it needlessly uses learned Latin tags - ex cathedra, casus belli etc - for no real reason, and its long sentences are made no easier to negotiate by over-extended and frequently mixed metaphors. “In his hands the Prichardian sword was to become double-edged, tempered as it was by the brimstone-free fires of his Unitarian upbringing, and lent iridescent lustre by his unimpeachable taxonomic credentials, and he lay it across the threshold of the Anglican Church’s comfortable bourgeois Eden…”

Don’t worry – that is a parody not a quotation. Yet by half way through the book I was annoyed enough to write one, and that says something.

However – do not let this put you off. It may not be a light read, but it is definitely worth the effort. It hammers home the point that the Victorians’ big mistake was to think of human morality as divinely inspired. Therefore if God also created Nature, all nature was a morality tale for our instruction. Darwin’s great liberating favour to us all was to purge nature of this twaddle, so that never more could the behaviour of ants be used to justify the inhuman deeds of man.

Ted Nield