Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England; Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins

This chapter explores two books regarding Charles Darwin's theory of evolution — Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England (2009) by Steve Jones, and Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins (2009) by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. Darwin's Island takes the reader through the projects and experiments of those forty years Darwin spent exploring the biology and geology of Britain after his five-week stay in the Galápagos. What constantly astonishes is the homeliness of Darwin's methods. He had none of the expensive equipment modern science requires, just the simple aids available to any Victorian gentleman botanist. But his strengths were indefatigable curiosity and imaginative sympathy with the natural world. Meanwhile, Darwin's Sacred Cause, which came out at the same time as Darwin's Island, argues that Darwin was driven not simply by a zeal for scientific knowledge but by a moral passion. His motive was hatred of black slavery and the cruelties it sanctioned.