Do we like Charles Darwin?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Kind to a struggling friend at real effort, with one contested book that carries the era's prejudices.
Nothing new on him lately in the way of scandal, but he keeps making the news. Two of his notebooks, including the 1837 “Tree of Life” sketch, vanished from Cambridge University Library in 2001. They were reported stolen in 2020, then turned up in March 2022 outside the librarian’s office with a note reading “Librarian Happy Easter X.”
The harm check is where it gets awkward. In a 2021 editorial in Science, Princeton anthropologist Augustin Fuentes called Descent of Man a “racist and sexist view of humanity”. He said Darwin baselessly asserted evolutionary differences between races and portrayed Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia as less capable than Europeans.
Fuentes also argued that Darwin’s ideas were later used to condone colonialism, imperialism and genocide. That is a charge about how the ideas were used, not only about Darwin himself. His own verdict is balanced: it is “a text from which to learn, but not to venerate”.
Honest gap: we couldn’t open a page on Darwin’s anti-slavery record or the scholarly defence of him, and the debate over how far his views on race and sex were typical of his time is real. So the harm test gets an asterisk rather than a clean pass. There is no modern-style campaigning, grift or conspiracy slide to weigh, which is the pattern this page looks for.
So: would we support him? Yes, on balance. He gave us the science that underpins modern biology and looked after a mate when it counted, but his most famous book comes with a flagged warning about race and women. Learn from it, don’t venerate it.