Jan

28

An anecdote which gave me a lot of pleasure: Darwin wrote the origin in 1868 and in 1869 there was tremendous fervor and a meeting of 1000 people at the British Museum was called. Huxley as a defender of the evolutionists cause was persuaded to attend. Bishop Wilberforce was there. Professor Henslow was the chairman. The then Admiral Fitz-Roy, still and ardent fundamentalist was there. Darwin was absent. The Bishop spoke for half an hour and ridiculed Darwin and Huxley "but all in such dulcet tones, so persuasive a manner, and in such well-turned periods." However, the bishop showed himself to be quite ignorant of the details of Darwin's book and said, "I should like to ask Prof Huxley, who is sitting by me and is about to tear me to pieces when I have sat down, as to his belief in being descended from an ape. It is on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in?"

The bishop concluded with the point that Darwin's ideas ran counter to the revelations of god in the scriptures. Huxley was reluctant to reply but eventually he said, "I am here only in the interest of science and I have not heard anything which can prejudice the case of my august client." He then demonstrated the bishop's poor understanding of Darwin's thesis and concluded with a reference to his descent from a monkey. "I asserted and I repeat that 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 be a man, 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 for the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."

The Bishop's remarks remind of chronic bear of the stock market and other useful idiots that I have not refrained from quoting.

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