Was Charles Darwin a racist?
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Post categories: Ethics, Northern Ireland
William Crawley | 07:04 UK time, Friday, 13 February 2009
darwin-1.jpgIt will come as a surprise to historians of science if it's shown that he was, since the great naturalist has recently been lauded as an abolitionist whose detestation of slavery is an under-acknowledged motivation for his scientific work. According to Henry McDonald's piece in yesterday's Guardian, an MLA has suggested that Darwin was a "racist".
Mervyn Storey argues that Darwin's language in The Descent of Man would earn disapproval today. This is undoubtedly the case. Darwin certainly referred to Aboriginal people as "savages". There is also the language of "favoured race" in Origin of Species. But that language would not have raised an eyebrow in the nineteenth century; as always with historically placed language, we must be careful about extending our contemporary sensitivites to the past. Some of the language of the Bible would appear deeply objectionable by our contemporary lights.
The more serious question we should ask is whether Darwin, judged by the standards of his day, would have been considered a racist -- or, quite the opposite, as a campaigner, in his own way, for the abolition of slavery based on the conviction that all human beings have a common biological parentage.
That said, even if it were to be demonstrated that Darwin was -- even by the conventions of his day -- a racist, this conclusion may have consequences for our moral evaluation of Darwin as a man; it would contibute nothing to our evaluation of his work as science.
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ni/2009/0..._a_racist.html
- https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...view-an-wilson