The origin of the theory

In 1858, on the brink of publishing his theory of evolution, which I discussed here three weeks ago, Charles Darwin took a hydropathic rest cure at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey. While walking on the sandy heath, he caught a glimpse of ‘the rare Slave-making Ant & saw the little black niggers in their Master’s nests’. A certain species of red ant kidnaps the young of a smaller black ant and rears them as unwitting slave workers in the service of the red queen. Darwin had heard about this phenomenon but had not till then seen it.

Darwin’s upbringing had been steeped in the anti-slavery movement. One grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had thundered poetically:

Hear, oh, BRITANNIA! potent Queen of
isles,
On whom fair Art and meek Religion smiles,
Now AFRIC’S coasts thy craftier sons invade
With murder, rapine, theft — and call it
Trade!
The SLAVE, in chains, on supplicating knee,
Spreads his wide arms, and lifts his eyes to
Thee;
With hunger pale, with wounds and toil
oppress’d,
‘ARE WE NOT BRETHREN?’ Sorrow choaks the rest.

The other grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, had bankrolled much of the fight against the slave trade and had minted the famous medallion of a shackled slave saying ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’. Now their grandson was on the brink of proving that black and white people were indeed brethren, not separately created races, let alone one destined to serve the other. And here he was staring at a slave-trading insect.

It is an extraordinary moment, captured in Adrian Desmond’s and James Moore’s new biography, and one made more potent by the fact that the very same month Darwin had cheered Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s tirade in the House of Lords against the Spanish slave trade to Cuba. Darwin and Wilberforce had been on the same side of the great moral issue of the day since birth — indeed it had been a family business for both — and they still were: the Bible asserted the common descent of mankind while American scientists asserted separately created black and white races. Yet within two years Wilberforce would lead the church’s condemnation of Darwin’s heresy.

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