The Moral Arc

8: A MORAL SCIENCE OF ANIMAL RIGHTS

2. It is a myth that Darwin discovered evolution or its mechanism of natural selection while in the Galápagos. After Darwin returned home to England he began his notebooks outlining his ideas that would eventually develop into the full-blown theory, but that was a year after he visited the islands. The myth was debunked by Frank Sulloway, whose historical reconstruction of the development of Darwin’s evolutionary thinking can be found in a number of papers: Sulloway, Frank. 1982. “Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend.” Journal of the History of Biology, 15, 1–53; Sulloway, Frank. 1982. “Darwin’s Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and Its Aftermath.” Journal of the History of Biology, 15, 325–396; Sulloway, Frank. 1984. “Darwin and the Galápagos.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 21, 29–59.

6. The animal rights scholar and attorney Steven M. Wise makes a similar argument in his book Drawing the Line, in which he argues for four categories of animal rights: Category 1 includes species “who clearly possess sufficient autonomy for basic liberty rights,” including the great apes; Category 2 includes species that might qualify for basic legal rights, depending on what other criteria we might consider; Category 3 includes species for which we do not have enough knowledge to determine what rights they should have; and Category 4 includes those species that lack sufficient autonomy for basic liberty rights. Wise, S. M. 2002. Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights. Boston: Perseus Books, 241. See also Wise, S. M. 2000. Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals. Boston: Perseus.