With the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, Dr Wilmot James looks at Charles Darwin's early views on race and reflects on the modern molecular view more broadly of human variation at the next FREE Darwin lecture on September 2. He will illustrate the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the biology of human difference.

When Charles Darwin visited the Cape in 1836 as part of his circumnavigation of the world on the HMS Beagle, he and Captain Robert Fitzroy observed that the missionaries had done well to turn human beings living in a state of savagery to become social beings capable of civilization, which is why Fitzroy and Darwin felt the Cape Europeans’ antipathy to missionaries was sorrowful. The origin of the feeling was, of course, the missionaries’ support for the abolition of slavery – a cause with which Darwin, more than Fitzroy, happened to agree. The idea that the moral nature of people was not unalterably fixed was a forward-looking one at the time. Neither was the proposition racially defined, for Fitzroy and Darwin applied the notion of the ‘alterable savage’ to their own Saxon ancestors whom they referred to as ‘barbarians’.

Date :   Wednesday 2 September 2009
Time :    5:30pm for 6:00pm
Venue: New Learning Centre, Health Sciences Campus, UCT, Anzio  Road, Observatory

RSVP:   Linet at 021 557 0246
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