Blushing Races. The role of Darwin’s antislavery ideology in his views of human evolution

GINNOBILI, SANTIAGO

Lisboa

Conferencia; Seminário permanente de filosofia das ciencias; 2024

Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa

Demond and Moore showed how Darwin's antislavery ideals made it possible to explain both the origin and the content of many of Darwin's ideas. In this paper, I will attempt to link Darwinian explanations of the origin of the expressions of emotion to such ideals, trying to show that there are deeper connections than the mere defense of monogenism. For Darwin's explanation of the evolutionary origin of blushing implies that all races and their common ancestry have similar mental capacities. Moreover, accepting Darwinian explanations of the origin of expressions provides a contingent image of evolution that implies the dissolution of the explanatory frameworks to which racist and slavery literature appealed, where there were absolute standards of perfection and beauty that made it possible to order the different races in a chain of being.