Charles Darwin on Racism, Slavery, and Eugenics
What did the legendary biologist believe — and why?
Nothing would surely be more easy, than for Charles Darwin — the very originator of a theory in which one superior species outperforms and outlives an inferior one — to have been the most ardent racist and eugenicist of his day.
Indeed, his 1859 magnum opus On the Origin of Species had only to get as far as Darwin’s own half-cousin, the polymath and trailblazing eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, in order to inspire the application of artificial selection to human breeding, in order to preserve ‘favourable’ traits and eliminate the rest.
Mid-19th Century society was no haven for racial equality, though it was some improvement on, say, a century before: the decades of the 1800’s brought with them marked social reform and a plethora of treaties abolishing, little by little, the slave trade.
So what were Charles Darwin’s thoughts on the matter?
Darwin’s experiences regarding slavery
In Chapter 2 of Darwin’s first book (and, he admitted, his favourite of all his works) The Voyage of the Beagle, he writes this account of his experience around Rio de Janeiro:
While staying at this estate, I was very nearly being…
