Charles Darwin: towards a bio-religious and colonial genealogy of evolutionary being

Abstract

ABSTRACT While studies have examined Charles Darwin's wide social and political impact, they have not adequately centred the combined influence of colonial systems of human differentiation and religion within them. To address this, I draw from Sylvia Wynter's critique concerning how religious and colonial discourses contribute to the shifting development of Man within the Western tradition. Specifically, I explore how Darwin focused his evolutionary gaze towards one of the unique foundations of what it meant to be human in his time: religion. Tracing the entangled religious and colonial filiations of Darwin's thought, I show that he established an evolutionary link between human and non-human animals by proposing both Indigenous peoples and dogs held superstitious beliefs. To illustrate this, I show that Darwin transposed Victorian anthropological conceptions of religion - as a quantifiable object of knowledge corresponding to the intellect and associated with phrenology, dream theory and the apparitional soul - into a bio-religious conception of evolution. Furthermore, I argue that Darwin's bio-evolutionism assumes Christianity is most closely associated with abstract reason. Finally, analyzing the role of race in Darwin's thought, I suggest that theology is not what was before modern scientific bio-evolutionary conceptions of race, but at its very core.