Who was Thomas Huxley?

In 1860, not even 1-year after publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce arose at Oxford University during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to condemn the new theory. Ending, he turned to Thomas Huxley, a respected scientist, with a question: Was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?

Huxley’s reply is among the most famous texts in science:

“A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man of restless and versatile intellect — who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.”

We all know how that exchange would play today: It would be re-broadcast endlessly; Sean Hannity would scowl with heavy-browed fury; Greta Van Susteran would summon the Bishop to mourn piously the out-of-control, Armegeddon-intimating wickedness of it all; and Gloria Allred would be looking for some shattered bystander who needs to be put right with a big lawsuit.

So you know that in his day, when the British government was all but a department of the Church of England, Huxley’s response was an act of extraordinary courage.

It is said that genteel women fainted.

Thomas Huxley was born the 7^th son of a schoolteacher in 1825. He received little formal education, though, and was largely self-taught. In 1846 he was appointed assistant surgeon on the HMS Rattlesnake and, like Darwin before him, the experience shaped the remainder of his life, stimulating interests in all the natural sciences. Over the course of his career he served as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society, and the Ethnological Society. He published incessantly.

He came to be known eventually as “Darwin’s bulldog,” in no small part for his rebuke of Wilberforce — a confrontation that followed him all his life. In 1893, thinking to set the record straight regarding his own beliefs and to address the objection that morality requires an objective standard external to man, he compiled a collection of his essays and letters into Evolution and Ethics. It has never gone out of print.