Given his position as one of the presiding deities of the scientific mainstream, many are keen to absolve Darwin of responsibility for some of the uglier consequences of his creed. But as Dennis Sewell points out in this timely study, the issue is not Darwin himself – whose personal scruples may have softened what is an essentially amoral outlook – but the ideas he bequeathed. "The generation of biologists that came after Darwin," Sewell suggests, "created a demon… a supposedly utopian political project, and an affirmation of a philosophical system that threatens to subvert the ethical foundations of a free society even now."
Perhaps the seeds of tyranny were there all along. Thomas Malthus, whose theories regarding population growth Darwin acknowledged as a critical influence, envisaged societies as zones of divinely ordained competition in which the unsuccessful perished. From here it was but a short hop to the doctrine of natural selection, in which a profligate and pitiless Nature advances as much by elimination of the weak as by the "survival of the fittest".
Although Darwin thought Man's innate nobility would predispose him kindly towards the sick and poor – or perhaps those who think or look differently from ourselves – his successors tended to have no such scruples. The bulk of Sewell's book is taken up with the colourful history of the eugenics movement, which, by the early 20th century, had managed to gain the approval of Parliament. The Mental Deficiency Act 1913 classified people as "idiots", "imbeciles", "the feeble-minded" and "moral defectives" and led to at least 50 years of people being locked up or lobotomised on the flimsiest pretexts. The concurrent situation across the Atlantic was similar; countless low-income Americans were sterilised under largely false pretences.
But surely eugenics is a cranky, long-forgotten movement with no relevance today? Far from it. A clear-eyed look at history shows us that tyrannies tend to go underground or become bit by bit so institutionalised that they are eventually "hidden in plain sight". One of the central beliefs of the eugenics movement was the superiority of western civilisation, whose values would eventually eliminate "an endless number of the lower races" (Darwin's words). This is precisely the assumption behind the policies of the World Bank, whose loans restructure developing nations' cultures after capitalist, earth-plundering models. Whatever you may think of the gentle, doubting man, Darwin's cold-blooded ideas continue to wreak havoc in our world.