Darwin's Sacred Cause : Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, by Adrian Desmond.
Celebrated for his famous theory of evolution tracing all of life back to a common ancestor, Charles Darwin held an overlooked passion that fired his belief in life’s unity.
The thesis of this book is that Darwin's commitment to the abolition of slavery – his “sacred cause” – led him from a recognition of the shared racial roots of black and white people to the ‘common descent’ of all organisms. This belief in the brotherhood of races – whether animals, plants or people – was the seed that grew into his revolutionary theory.
Darwin's five-year voyage aboard the HMS Beagle not only fired his scientific curiosity, but also stoked a moral fervor in "a squeamish, humanitarian young gentleman from Cambridge." The prevalence of slavery in the ports they visited, and Darwin's exposure to it on the Beagle has been underestimated., the authors contend. He concluded the voyage "world-weary and wiser," having seen slavery for what it was - "a global empire of evil requiring a global remedy."