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  • Until Darwin, Science, Human Variety and the Origins of Race by B. Ricardo Brown, and: The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences by Edward Beasley
  • Mark Francis (bio)
Until Darwin, Science, Human Variety and the Origins of Race, by B. Ricardo Brown; pp. ix + 199. London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2010, £60.00, $99.00.
The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences, by Edward Beasley; pp. 247. New York and London: Routledge, 2010, $135.00, $54.95 paper, £95.00, £30.00 paper.

In Until Darwin, Science, Human Variety and the Origins of Race, B. Ricardo Brown sees early nineteenth-century racism as the consequence of secularly minded scientists overthrowing the Christian view of the unity of mankind and replacing it with a polygenetic theory of origins that divided the human species into biologically distinct races. According to Brown, this racially loaded form of science—which could be used to support the institution of slavery—met its demise when Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories became dominant after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. While Darwin’s ideas were secular, they were like earlier religious ideas in that they upheld the belief in a monogenetic origin for human beings which mitigated the harshness of the more racist polygenetic theory. Monogenesis was compatible with the idea of the unity of mankind, pushing aside the notion that some supposed “races” were naturally slaves. Brown quotes a key passage in Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) to the effect that: [End Page 333]

Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race … The diversity of judgement does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shows that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them.”

(qtd. in Brown 101–02)

Brown takes this passage to mean that Darwin’s view of classification did not rely upon fixed species, but posited provisional arrangements for the forms of life. Darwin’s nonracist science went hand-in-hand with his non-racist politics, as typified by his participation in the attempt to impeach Edward John Eyre, the governor of Jamaica who, in a panic, had ordered the extra-judicial killing of black rioters after their insurgency had ended.

Edward Beasley’s account of Darwin in The Victorian Reinvention of Race is more hostile than Brown’s. Beasley’s basic position is that there is no such thing as species. Like races, any historical accounts of species were either bad science, or, worse, mischievous attempts to suborn science in such a way as to reinforce prejudices against groups of people whose color and/or economic position had made them vulnerable. Beasley is aware that Darwin’s defenders have absolved him from the charge of racism by pointing to his defense of the North during the American Civil War. It is a pity that, at this point, he was not able to critique Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause (2009), the best known recent defense of Darwin on such matters: if Beasley had been able to do this then his prosecution of Darwin for racism might have been more persuasive. However, Beasley insists that such excuses apply only to the 1860s, and that, soon afterward, when Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871, he was a racist, and since this text was Darwin’s chief work on human evolution, this seriously undermines his scientific credibility. Beasley wants to put Darwin on trial for racism, and adopts a prosecutorial tone. He cites the same passage from the Descent as Brown does, but with a different interpretation: instead of accepting Darwin’s explicit denial of race at face value, Beasley places it alongside racially offensive asides from other chapters in the Descent. Beasley’s approach to Darwin is typified by his insinuations that “to some degree [Darwin] must have known what...

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