I have not posted much lately, but couldn’t miss the occasion of Darwin’s birthday to briefly remind my readers of his main achievements and his racial views.

On this day, in 1809, Charles Darwin was born. His evolutionary theory of natural selection has been the cause of great controversy since its publication in his On the Origin of Species in 1859. Despite Darwin’s large body of evidence which is based on years of gathering data and analysing various species, his ideas were as hard for many to accept in Victorian times as they are ironically hard for many to accept today (it would be superfluous to even mention the recent US presidential campaign here and a similar argument could be easily drawn on Climate Change).

Darwin, by John Collier 1883

In spite of the apparent novelty of Darwin’s ideas at the time, Darwin’s findings were the culmination of accumulative research and a steady rise in atheism across Europe since the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, evolution was known outside Europe 600 years before Darwin’s publication. A Persian scientist called Nasir Tusi (1201-74), who was in the fashion of his day a Renaissance man even before the Renaissance, arrived at the same conclusion, acknowledging that Humans have evolved from superior primates in Africa, such as apes. Tusi’s evolutionary theories, revolutionary as they were, did not induce as much change as Darwin’s. The Mongol invasion of West Asia brought a halt to the scientific and cultural boom of his age, and vast quantities of manuscripts were destroyed and/or forgotten in the turmoil.

Between 1959 and the publication of The Descent of Man in 1971, Darwin embraced racist theories which claimed the racial superiority of White Europeans over the rest of Humankind. How ironic for a six-hundred-year-old late new-comer to the evolutionary debate!