God.’
‘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 who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric.’
ONE VERSION OF T.H. HUXLEY’S LEGENDARY REJOINDER TO BISHOP WILBERFORCE, 30 JUNE 1860.
Monkey business
Just two weeks later, on Saturday, 30 June, Wilberforce was scheduled to give a paper at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) at Oxford. Here was a chance for Darwinists to challenge him in public. Darwin, stricken with the chronic illness that plagued him for life and reticent of public battles, declined to attend. Huxley was urged to go in his place, and so he took up the gauntlet. Hundreds flocked to witness the showdown, with many more turned away at the door.
Wilberforce, coached by the anti-Darwinian biologist Richard Owen (coiner of the term ‘dinosaur’), delivered a fluent paper outlining many stinging criticisms of Darwin’s theory. It was at the end of this speech, according to accounts, that he upped the stakes with a thinly veiled insult to Huxley. No precise transcript of the meeting exists, but one particularly popular account was that of Isabel Sidgwick, presented in MacMillan’s Magazine nearly 40 years later: ‘turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?’ This was rough stuff for a Victorian audience, but the crowd was reportedly already raucous, with undergraduates chanting ‘Monkey! Monkey!’ provocatively.
HOPEFUL MONSTERS: THE PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM DEBATE
There have been – and are – ongoing significant debates within the science of evolutionary biology. One of the most high profile has been the clash between the traditional view that evolution is a gradual, constant phenomenon, with species engaged in a slow but continuous process of evolution, and alternative models, of which ‘punctuated equilibrium’ is the best known. Briefly stated, this model suggests that speciation (the evolution of new species) occurs in rapid bursts lasting just a few millennia, making them almost invisible in geological terms, punctuating long periods when species are well adapted to their environments and change little if at all (i.e. in a state of ‘equilibrium’).
Huxley was among the first to propose a form of this theory, writing to Darwin just before the publication of Origin to warn: ‘You have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum [Nature does not make leaps] so unreservedly.’ In 1940, émigré biologist Richard Goldschmidt proposed in his book The Material Basis of Evolution that most mutants thrown up by evolution would not survive, but that once in a while an extreme mutation would occur that would cause a ‘leap’ in adaptive fitness. Perhaps unwisely he labelled these leaps ‘hopeful monsters’.
Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould described how Goldschmidt’s theory was regarded as ‘anathema’, while Goldschmidt himself ‘became the whipping boy of [modern Darwinism]’. Together with the American palaeontologist Niles Eldredge, Gould revived the ideas of both Huxley and Goldschmidt in modified form, proposing the punctuated equilibrium model, partly in response to the troubling absence in the fossil record of the ‘transitional forms’ that had worried Darwin. Instead Gould had discovered fossil evidence of very rapid ‘explosions’ of speciation.
The debate between Gould and some of his opponents, most notably evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, has been portrayed as a latter-day continuation of the 19th-century geological debate between catastrophists and uniformitarians, but Dawkins himself argues that this is simply a crude misrepresentation of the arguments. He has dismissed Gould’s theory as ‘a minor gloss on Darwinism’, which ‘does not deserve a particularly large measure of publicity ... the theory has been ... oversold by some journalists.’ Dawkins claims that in fact there is no opposition between punctuated equilibrium and Darwin’s gradualism, and that ‘The theory of punctuated equilibrium will come to be seen in proportion, as an interesting but minor wrinkle on the surface of neo-Darwinian theory.’
Comparative anatomy. To bolster his argument that humans and apes had a common ancestor, Huxley compared human skeletons to those of other apes, as shown here in the frontispiece from his book, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.
Sidgwick’s account of his response was clearly intended to portray Huxley in a heroic light: ‘On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words – words which no one seems sure of now, nor I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out: I, for one, jumped out of my seat; and when in the evening we met at Dr Daubeney’s, every one was eager to congratulate the hero of the day.’
Huxley’s retort seems mild by today’s standards, but the audience clearly inferred that he was saying he would rather be an ape than a bishop. Is this what really happened? According to Ronald Clark, a biographer of the Huxley dynasty, ‘The details of what Huxley said differ as much as do those of Wilberforce’s speech.’ Huxley himself seems to have offered at least three different versions, and according to many accounts his immediate reaction to Wilberforce’s sally was to mutter to a companion, ‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.’ He knew that Soapy Sam had overstepped the mark, and went for the jugular in his response. Contemporary accounts of the meeting record nothing of either Wilberforce’s ‘grandmother’ comment or Huxley’s loaded response.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN AND CREATIONISM
Creationists are those who believe in the truth of the biblical account of Creation. There are many different stripes of Creationist: Day-Age Creationists, for instance, believe that the six days of Creation mentioned in Genesis correspond to six ages or epochs of geological time; Young Earth Creationists believe that it took literally six days for God to create the Earth. Such an extreme belief is clearly at odds with Darwinian (or most other forms of) evolutionary theory, and fundamentalist Christians who advocate such beliefs try to challenge Darwinism on several fronts.
In America, where the Creationist lobby is powerful and vocal, there have been various attempts to limit the teaching of evolution in schools, such as the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925; or to ensure that some form of Creationism is taught alongside evolution. These attempts have mostly failed because the courts have deemed them to be attempts to teach religious beliefs in state-funded schools, which contravene the constitutional separation of Church and State in the United States.
In the late 1980s, a new movement arose propounding a theory known as Intelligent Design (ID), which is ostensibly a non-religious critique of Darwinian evolution that builds on the ‘watch on the heath’ argument proposed by William Paley in his 1802 book Natural Theology. Briefly stated, Paley’s argument was that if you were out walking on a heath and came across a watch, you would assume that its intricate construction could not be the result of accident but that there must have been a watchmaker. This is a version of the teleological argument for the existence of God, which says that if there is some form of design or purpose to life/the universe, there must be a designer. Modern ID seeks to show gaps in Darwinism’s account of the
