Darwin's Sacred Cause

Mining untapped sources, the authors of an acclaimed biography of Darwin offer an astonishing new portrait of the scientific icon.
In Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore restore the missing moral core of Darwin’s evolutionary universe, providing a completely new account of how he came to his shattering theories about human origins.
Desmond and Moore’s biography of Darwin was described by Stephen Jay Gould as "unquestionably the finest . . . ever written” about him. In their new book, timed to coincide with the worldwide Darwin bicentenary celebrations,Desmond and Moore provide a major reexamination of Darwin’s life and work.Drawing on a wealth of fresh manuscripts, unpublished letters, notebooks, diaries, and ships’ logs, they argue that the driving force behind Darwin’s theory of evolution was not simply his love of truth or personal ambition--it was his fierce hatred of slavery.Darwin’s abolitionism had deep roots in his mother’s family, and it was reinforced by his voyage on the Beagle as well as by events in America--from the CivilWar to the arrival of scientific racism at Harvard. Compulsively readable and utterly persuasive,Darwin’s Sacred Cause will revolutionize our view of the great scientist.