Social scientists recently claimed Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) is a racist text; that Darwin’s racism blinded him, impacting his science. Biologists and philosophers countered that Darwin’s work should be championed because it undercut slavery-justifying polygenism (independent origins for human races). Others extol Darwin for his emotional condemnation of slavery when he first encountered it on the Beagle voyage. This essay systematically explores Darwin’s views on human race expressed in Descent and then digs through a half-century of Darwin’s correspondence with prominent scientists to answer the question: what were Darwin’s views not just on the human torture involved in the enslavement process but on human race more broadly?

Chapter eight pays attention to some crucial questions concerning the encounter between biological and theological anthropogenesis, which have inspired very emotional reactions to evolutionary theory and posed a considerable challenge to several fundamental presuppositions of systematic and philosophical theology. A presentation and defense of the contemporary Thomistic approach to the question of the origin of our species is followed by an account of the complexity of the debate concerning the mono- versus polygenetic character of human speciation.