ADRIAN DESMOND

This book, by Darwin''s most celebrated modern biographers, gives a completely new explanation of how he came to his shattering theories about human origins. Until now, Desmond and Moore argue, the source of the moral fire which gives such intensity and urgency to Darwin''s ideas has gone unnoticed. By examining minutely Darwin''s manuscripts and correspondence (published and unpublished) and covert notebooks, where many of the clues lie, they show that the key to unlocking the mystery of how such an ostensibly conservative man could hold views which his contemporaries considered both radical and bestial, lay in his utter detestation of slavery. "Darwin''s Sacred Cause" will be one of the major contributions to the worldwide Darwin anniversary celebrations in 2009.

In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-mans institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the Devils Chaplain Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanitys ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saulls pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.