The time Charles Darwin spent at Edinburgh University was abrupt but formative. He arrived in 1825, aged 16, with a zeal,but medicine, the subject his father and brother also studied at the university, came to be a burden. He found the lectures tedious and his aversion to medicine was confirmed when he witnessed an operation on a child. Without chloroform, surgery had to be quick but the sawing, screaming and the buckets of blood appalled Darwin, who fled in terror.

His exasperated father sent him to Cambridge after two years, and his time in Edinburgh receives scant consideration in most studies of his work. Yet as the 200th anniversary of his birth approaches next month, a new analysis of his life and influences casts a different light on his experiences in the city. In fact his Edinburgh years shaped Darwin’s thinking and his path to the theory of evolution.

While living there, he befriended a neighbour, a black man called John Edmonstone, who taught him taxidermy. The relationship between a man of Darwin’s class and status and a former slave was unconventional. In their forthcoming book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond, an honorary research fellow at University College London, and James Moore, Professor of the History of Science at the Open University, say Darwin’s theories on natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, owe much to his friendship with Edmonstone. His consideration of white and black men as being equal was a starting point for his theories on evolution.

“Most biographers don’t spend long discussing Edinburgh, but it’s absolutely crucial,” says Desmond. “Many tend to dismiss it and focus on the Cambridge education he had after it, but I’ve always been of the persuasion that Edinburgh is more important. He met an evolutionist there, called Robert Edmond Grant, who took him under his wing, but even that wasn’t the really critical story. It was his sitting with John, and finding nothing demeaning in this, that is astonishing. You wouldn’t have expected a wealthy gentleman to sit down with a former slave on an equal footing.”

Darwin was an avowed abolitionist and came from a family of committed anti-slavery campaigners. These beliefs were affirmed by his relationship with Edmonstone, who he later described in his book, The Descent of Man, as a “full-blooded negro” and an “intimate friend” and who he paid a guinea for 40 tuition sessions.

Darwin considered him an intelligent, civilised friend, at a time when pro-slavery campaigners were arguing that white and black people were biologically different. Drawing similar impressions after meeting three former slaves from Tierra del Fuego, while sailing on board the HMS Beagle, added weight to his dismissal of theories of racial inferiority, and informed his work.

“In his evolution notebooks, the first thing he did was damn slavery, talking about slave holders wishing to make black slaves another species,” says Desmond. “The implication is that if black people are another species, they share no bloodline, but Darwin said the black person and the white person were related by common descent.”

Using letters Darwin wrote to family and friends, and access to family archives, Desmond and Moore believe they have uncovered the moral motivation behind Darwin’s science. His anti-slavery beliefs — as endorsed by his friendship with Edmonstone — were the ethical passion that drove his intellectual journey.

“Scientists who write Darwin biographies tend to idolise him, they consider that he plucked the truth out of thin air and one shouldn’t question how he arrived at his theory of evolution,” says Desmond.

“But we’re historians of context. So we wondered why Darwin had come to this theory, as many naval naturalists had seen the things that he saw and not shouted ‘eureka’. From our research, it was clear that it was because of his background in abolition. His meeting with John is the first we know of with a black person and to come out of it thinking of him as a friend must have been strongly reinforcing. Darwin, literally, made the races one blood.”

While Darwin was living in Edinburgh, the city was home to many black people, mostly former slaves who had accompanied their plantation managers to Scotland. Much of the higher echelons of British society at the time considered themselves superior to black people, but Darwin’s family had infused him with a different outlook.

“Darwin’s mother and wife were Wedgwoods — his grandfather was the founder of the chinaware dynasty that recently went into administration — and they were fanatically anti-slavery,” says Desmond.

“In Edinburgh, he meets a black person and everything his family has taught him suddenly makes sense.”

Little is known about Edmonstone, who lived eight doors down from Darwin in Lothian Street, other than that he used to live in Georgetown, in Guyana, that he accompanied his former owner to Glasgow in 1817 and that the last acknowledgement of him comes in a book from 1837. “We don’t know what became of him,” adds Desmond. “But Darwin’s life would have been very different if he had not gone to Edinburgh.”

Darwin’s Sacred Cause by Adrian Desmond and James Moore is published by Penguin on January 29


Taken from timesonline

Darwin was a fellow possessed by demonic spirits. This caused him to set forth deceiving hypothesis and theories to deceive people of depraved mined.

Daniel 11:32
With flattery he will corrupt those who have violated the covenant, but the people who know their God will firmly resist him .
NIV

All we know now is that Darwin is dead and we don't know what became of him, but our Jesus still lives and is at the right hand of God!

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