Darwin evolves into anti-slavery advocate
by Philip Ball
The New Zealand Herald (New Zealand), p. A21.
January 28, 2009
It sounds glib to say every age moulds Charles Darwin to its own preoccupations but the temptation is hard to resist.
To the Victorians he was an atheistic agitator undermining humankind’s privileged moral status.
In the early 20th century he became a prophet of social engineering and the free market.
With sociobiology in the 1970s Darwinism became a behavioural theory, while neoDarwinist genetics prompted a bleak view of humanity as gene machines driven by the selfish imperatives of our DNA.
