The STEM abolitionist project

Ron Eglash, RPI

What was the name of the ship that Charles Darwin traveled on in

his voyage that revealed evolution?

What was the name of the ship that Charles Darwin traveled on in

his voyage that revealed evolution?

 The Beagle

What was the position Charles Darwin took on the abolitionist

movement?

“The [white] slaver has debased his Nature & violates every best

instinctive feeling by making slave of his fellow black.”

Darwin’s mother died when he was 8; he was raised by his sisters, who were anti-slavery activists and members of the Unitarian fellowship. Other family connections:

Grandfather – funded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave TradeUncle -- entered parliament on abolitionist platform Aunt -- donated to anti-slavery societies

Darwin’s fave instructor -- John Edmonstone, a Black British citizen at Edinburgh teaching taxidermy.

Polygenesis

The “scientific” basis for racism was polygenesis: the theory that there were separate “acts of creation” resulting in animals with characters specific to each continent. Europe shows the noble wolf and noble whites; Asian shows suspiciously whiskered beasts and men, etc. (from Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind 1850).

1854: Frederick Douglass "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered"

"the debates in Congress on the Nebraska Bill during the past winter, will show how slaveholders have availed themselves of this doctrine [multiple creations] in support of slaveholding. There is no doubt that the Messrs. Nott, Glidden [sic], Morton, Smith and Agassiz were duly consulted by our slavery propagating statesmen" (p. 16).

U.S. Secretary of State John C. Calhoun: annexation of Texas as a slave state justified by Samuel George Morton’s Crania Americana (1839)

Darwin opposed the racist view that Africans, Native American etc. were “separate acts of creation”

The theory of evolution was a scientific basis for the abolitionist contention that there is ONE HUMAN SPECIES

There are dozens of high school biology textbooks. All of them mention

the name of Darwin’s ship.

None of them mention Darwin’s position on the abolitionist movement.

What do you call the social force that makes the name of Darwin’s

ship more important than his position on the abolitionist

movement?

How does alienation from evolution affect low-income communities today?

Disbelief in

evolution

Anti-intellectualism

Opposition to protected sex

Homophobia

Poor academic success

Unwanted pregnancy

HIV and other infections