Darwin's "sacred cause"

Why did Charles Darwin – a rich and staunchly honest man – dedicate himself privately to developing a subversive theory of human evolution between 1837 and 1839? Why did he carry on tenaciously researching this subject for nearly three decades before publishing The Descent of Man in 1871? A thorough review of Darwin's achievements provides us with the answer. According to popular belief, Darwin was a heroic genius who had discovered some precious fragments of a reality beyond the view of simple mortals. He was a great scientist who continued to carry out the work of a scientist, not a Victorian naturalist consumed by a moral passion.

However, today we should examine the circumstances that enabled Darwin to elaborate his theory based on the cultural resources that were available to him. Behind his work on the origins of humanity lay his conviction that all races were from the same family, a belief that had its roots in the most important moral movement of his times: the abolition of slavery. In the opinion of the abolitionists, the human races were members of one and the same family with a common ancestry. Darwin extended the concept of "common origin" to the rest of the living creatures, in such a way that he linked together not only the human races, but all races. Darwin’s science had nothing in common with the dispassionate practices of textbook caricatures, but instead they were motivated by human needs and weaknesses. One of our best-known theories may even have been conceived out of humanitarian interest.

Dr. James R. Moore, Professor of the History of Science at the Open University of Britain will give two lectures in Barcelona on 15 and 16 March, thanks to a collaboration between the Institución Milà i Fontanals (IMF) of CSIC, the Residence for Researchers CSIC-Generalitat of Catalonia and the Catalan Society for the History of Science and Technology (SCHCT). It will be the first time that Moore – one of the most influential historians and a leading biographer of Darwin – has given a lecture in Spain. The first of these opens the series of lectures titled "Humanitarianism, science and medicine in peace and war", while the second will form part of the SCHCT Symposiums 2011-2012.

James R. Moore is the author – together with Adrian Desmond – of one of the most important biographies of Darwin, and they have also published together one of the most provocative (in the best sense of the word) books that the Darwinist industry has produced in recent years: Darwin's Sacred Cause. Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009). James Moore will be speaking on these and other subjects in the two lectures.

• The second lecture, “Darwin and the "sin" of slavery”, will take place on 16 March at 19:00h at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (Pi i Sunyer Hall - c/Carme, 48, Barcelona)