Darwin Deleted

Peter Bowler (Queen's University, Belfast)

TUESDAY · 29 JULY · 11 AM ET / 8.30 PM IST

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By the end of the nineteenth century, the language of Darwinism had permeated culture and empire in Europe. Rather than being a descriptive enterprise—a model for understanding how species evolve and go extinct—Darwinism became for many a prescription to accelerate racial struggle: a warrant for one nation to dominate another less fit specimen of the human race.

Survival, under this lens, became a zero-sum game: someone had to die and make space for the master race. In the words of the eugenicist Francis Galton, ‘That which nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly . . . Humanity shall be represented by the fittest races.’

But what if Darwin had never published On the Origin of Species?

How responsible was he, and his prose, for the misinterpretations of evolution that took hold of the European imagination?  What would the history of science—and society—look like if Darwin had never returned from the Beagle voyage? Would science and religion have remained more aligned? Would evolution have avoided its pernicious uses and abuses?

The historian of science Peter Bowler will discuss these counterfactuals and more.