On 30 June 1860, seven months after the publication of The Origin of the Species, a prominent New York scientist by the name of William Draper delivered a paper before the British Association’s annual meeting in Oxford.
The title was “On the Intellectual Development of Europe, considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin and others, that the progression of organisms is determined by law”.
For Draper, the topic for the night was whether Darwin’s thesis was a useful tool to discuss the development of human thought. The speed with which humans do this is no surprise; chaos theory is a recent example.
For the audience, the topic was much simpler… was Darwin right?
In one corner was Thomas Huxley, the scientist/agnostic who would later be known as Darwin’s bulldog.
Second was “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, son of the abolitionist, great orator in an age of orators, and for over two decades both bishop of Oxford and the nation’s vehement opponent of evolution.
One record has a guilt ridden Robert Fitzroy, meteorologist visiting Oxford for a paper on storms and 30 years before Darwin’s host and commander of the HMS Beagle on the great voyage, lifting a huge Bible over his head and imploring the audience to believe God and not man.
The event of the evening was when Wilberforce asked Huxley about his lineage and Huxley gave his retort. No transcript has survived and there has been controversy ever since about the exact question put by Wilberforce and the exact answer given by Huxley. The best I can evolve or create – yours is the choice – is a report just over a month later in the New York Daily Tribune.
