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Darwin, race and gender
Author(s) -
Rose Steven
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
embo reports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.584
H-Index - 184
eISSN - 1469-3178
pISSN - 1469-221X
DOI - 10.1038/embor.2009.40
Subject(s) - race (biology) , genetics , biology , evolutionary biology , botany
Given all the celebrations, conferences, special issues and TV programmes, everyone must know by now that it is 200 years since Charles Darwin was born and 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species (1859). Among the spate of books published on this occasion, one actually stands out in its novelty: the claim that Darwin's evolutionary theory was inspired by his hatred of slavery, as especially experienced during his epic Beagle voyage (Desmond & Moore, 2009). It is a nice try, but it does not convince me; Thomas Malthus and the Galapagos finches provide a much more plausible origin for the theory of evolution by natural selection.Darwin was, after all, a man of his time, class and society. True, he was committed to a monogenic, rather than the prevailing polygenic, view of human origins, but he still divided humanity into distinct races according to differences in skin, eye or hair colour. He was also convinced that evolution was progressive, and that the white races—especially the Europeans—were evolutionarily more advanced than the black races, thus establishing race differences and a racial hierarchy. …