June 30, 1860: Darwin’s ideas debated at Oxford

On this day in 1860, some of the leading thinkers of the day met at Oxford University to debate the merits of On the Origin of Species, the tome that laid out Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Many in the scientific community were, understandably, skeptical of Darwin’s idea that man descended from apes; perhaps chief among them was Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who was one of the great orators of the time.

His main quarry was Thomas Henry Huxley, known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his defense of evolutionary thought. (Huxley would later coin the term agnosticism to describe his belief that whether God existed was unknowable.)

Although the two gentlemen weren’t the only speakers, the panel came to be known as the Huxley-Wilberforce debates, and have become remembered mainly for a question posed by Wilberforce: whether Huxley thought he had descended from a monkey through his grandmother or his grandfather.

Here’s a video from 1978 recreating the debate:

J.R. Lucas, a member of the Philosophy faculty at Oxford, also wrote about the discussion.

Image: caricature of Charles Darwin by André Gill, La Lune Rousse, 1878. via Wikimedia Commons