Adrian Desmond and James Moore are also concerned with restoring Darwin to his intellectual context. In this case, however, they have one particular aim in view. Their mission is to rescue Darwin from the misapprehension that he bequeathed "scientific racism" to the 20th century by fashioning a hierarchy in which Anglo-Saxons "naturally" outranked, in descending order, Celts, Jews, Asians and Africans. The fact that it was Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton who subsequently invented the science of "eugenics", with its proposals for forced sterilisation and euthanasia for "undesirables", only added to Darwin's guilt by association. Indeed, even now it is not uncommon for people to imply that, were it not for Darwin, ethnic cleansing, segregation and apartheid would all have been, quite literally, inconceivable.

Moore and Desmond, who published a magnificent biography of Darwin 17 years ago, maintain that, far from being a white supremacist, it was the young man's profound belief in the literal brotherhood of man that drove him to research the origin of species in the first place. To this end they remind us of his cultural connections to the abolitionist Clapham Sect, and detail the many ways in which members of his own extended clan led the battle against slavery on British soil in the first third of the 19th century.

His formidable sisters, cousins and aunts routinely boycotted West Indian sugar, presented petitions to parliament, and continued to campaign for racial equality even when, by 1833, it looked as if the main struggle was over. Moore and Desmond also point to an early friendship between the teenage Darwin and a highly skilled African taxidermist, whom the naturalist recalled towards the end of his life as "a very pleasant and intelligent man". This, they suggest, is hardly the language of an instinctive bigot.