The author responds.

John Connelly misses the point of my article when he writes that I am merely contending "Darwin subscribed to the racism of his time." My argument, based on Darwin's own writing, is that far more than subscribing to prevailing prejudices--as both Stephen Jay Gould and Connelly would have it--Darwin played a powerful role in transforming prejudices into scientific certainties. (Don't take my word for it. Read the complete text of the second edition of The Descent of Man.)

Yes, as Connelly points out, Darwin's racial theories influenced the thinking of Catholics and other Christians on eugenics, but this only reinforces the strength and scope of his impact. Connelly might also have expended a bit of his own "critical energy" in noting that American eugenicists like Madison Grant regarded the Catholic Church as the main impediment to their plans for race cleansing and that the one dissenting vote in Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court's infamous 1927 decision upholding compulsory sterilization, was cast by Pierce Butler, a Catholic.

Edward Santella's statement that "Darwin was neither a teddy bear nor a preincarnation of Dick Cheney" is as clever as it is irrelevant. I never argued that Darwin fell "easily into the simple categories of saint or sinner." To the contrary, my entire article was driven by my disagreement with his modern-day hagiographers who refuse to give us the whole man--great in many ways but seriously flawed in others.

The fanciful notion of a "subtext" that holds that "had Darwin been a more faithful Christian he would have been a better scientist and human being" has no basis in what I wrote. But it does raise a question: Why must Darwin's defenders constantly resort to attacking straw men instead of confronting his crucial role in the formation of so-called scientific racism and eugenics?

I'm sorry if Rosemary Deen thinks I was invoking "Freudian authority" to dismiss every one of Darwin's long litany of physical aliments as "psychosomatic." Chagas disease may well have played a part in his chronic ill health. But you don't have to be a Freudian to recognize the connection in Darwin's life between emotional distress (which was often worsened, in his own admission, by Emma's absence) and the migraines, dizziness, and inertia that affected him.

My purpose was not to attempt a prescriptive reinterpretation of Darwin as a one-dimensional villain but to offer a corrective to attempts by some of his admirers to whitewash the more malignant aspects of his influential views on racial and ethnic superiority. While I'm heartened that some correspondents seem to have already been aware of Darwin's views on race and eugenics, I wonder why they left unchallenged the recent spate of articles and books that have excused or ignored his views and described Darwin as a secular "saint."