February 3, 2009

Exactly 200 years ago on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born, Abraham on a bed of poles and covered with corn husks, Charles in the lap of luxury. Abraham's father, Thomas, was a poor carpenter. Charles's father was Robert Darwin, a rich doctor and investment entrepreneur. Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to Abraham in the meanest of conditions, in a log cabin along Mike's Run at the base of New Creek Mountain in West Virginia. The cabin was far more primitive than the servants' quarters at The Mount, the estate of Robert and Susanna Wedgwood Darwin, located near Shrewsbury, Shropshire County, England.

On October 5, 1818 Abraham Lincoln's mother died from drinking the milk of a cow that had grazed on the poisonous white snakeroot plant. Susanna Darwin had died the previous year, on July 15. Both men were tall and skinny, Lincoln being six feet, four inches, and Darwin just under six feet. Both men loved animals and both loved children. Sadly, each lost three of his own children.

But most important, both hated slavery. In the years just before and after the publication of his famous Origin of Species, Darwin was fervently reading the daily news accounts of the slave issue in America. When the Civil War broke out, he threw himself into cheering for the North. "Great God how I should like to see that greatest curse on Earth, Slavery, abolished!" He wanted the North to "proclaim a crusade" against it. He was, in fact, morally outraged at what he thought were Lincoln's half-way policies.

Darwin was no first generation abolitionist. His two grandfathers, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, hated slavery. They joined forces with that greatest of all English abolitionists, William Wilberforce, to end the English slave trade. Charles' father and father-in-law hated slavery, all his cousins hated slavery, his wife hated slavery, and he brought up all his children to hate slavery. He considered it "the Great sin."

But here we meet with a great irony. Charles Darwin, the man who hated slavery with a passion, put forth a theory of man that completely supported it. For Darwin, natural selection had to explain everything—everything including human beings.  The problem in making man just another animal was that anything that was natural for an animal could be natural for man as well, including slavery.

He had originally thought that slavery was entirely unnatural, something that only human beings did. But then he witnessed the strange spectacle of the "rare Slave making ant," a large red ant than made slaves of small black ants. Darwin was both appalled and delighted. He crowed in a letter to his friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, that he had seen "the little black [slaves] in their master's nests" with his own eyes. A few months later, Darwin wrote to Hooker again, reporting jubilantly that he was having "fun…watching a slave-making ant."  The slave-making ant society seemed all too similar to the human slave trade. He watched amazed as large red ants raided the nests of smaller black ants, taking them home to their own nest to lives of servitude, and even moving the slaves to a new home, "a migration from one nest to another of the slave-makers, carrying their slaves (who are house & not field [slaves]) in their mouths!"

But if slavery is natural in ants, and we are all bound together on one evolutionary web, then isn't human slavery natural as well? The great Bishop Wilberforce, son of the abolitionist William Wilberforce, warned Darwin about these very implications. He believed that evolution, particularly as Darwin had defined it, would destroy the arguments of the abolitionists, and reverse the forward campaign to eradicate slavery entirely. After the Origin came out Wilberforce cautioned Darwin of the unavoidable conclusion of his own argument. If Darwin was right then "the tendency of the light-coloured races of mankind" to engage in "the Negro slave-trade" was only natural, an evolved instinct shared with the ants.

Darwin was pulled in two by contrary passions: his passionate hatred of slavery and his passionate desire to provide an entirely God-proof account of evolution where human society, culture, and morality could be explained entirely as effects of natural selection. In 1871, he published his Descent of Man where he spelled out the implications of his theory for man. Morality is the result of the struggle to survive; that is, what we call moral merely means those traits, whatever they are, that allow one individual, tribe, race, or nation, to conquer another in the continual struggle to survive. Since slavery was almost universal in human history, then one had to draw the conclusion that it was natural. If it were unnatural, then societies that practiced it would have doomed themselves to self-destruction, and the moral traits that supported slave-making would have disappeared along with other "unfit" qualities.

Darwin blinded himself to this conclusion. He could not accept—he would not admit— the fact that his cherished theory undermined his cherished social cause. Others had no such qualms, and Darwinism was soon used to give a firm scientific foundation to a racism so harsh that it even went beyond advocating slavery of the "lesser" races, to actively seeking their extinction. Darwin would be horrified, but Bishop Wilberforce had warned him.