T. H. Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was an English writer who earned himself the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog" as a result of his vigorous support of the Theory of Evolution. Perhaps the most famous example of this was the debate in 1860 between Huxley and the conservative Bishop of Oxford (in the Anglican Church), Samuel Wilberforce. During the course of the debate, Wilberforce sarcastically asked Huxley if he claimed descent from apes on his mother's or his father's side. Huxley replied that he would rather be descended from an ape than a wealthy bishop who misused his gifts. Although this exchange has passed into the popular imagination as a trouncing of the creationist position, the truth is less clear. Both sides claimed victory following the debate, and Huxley himself had doubts about the mechanism of natural selection, although he championed Darwin tirelessly. Many of the more liberal members of the clergy disliked the hardline Wilberforce and supported Huxley.
In 1869, Huxley coined the term "agnostic" (from the Greek agnostos or unknowable) as a description of the doctrine that mankind cannot know of the existence of anything outside its own experience. The term would come to mean those who are uncertain if there is a God.
Huxley was the father of the writer Leonard Huxley and the grandfather of the author Aldous Huxley, the Nobel Laureate Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley, the biologist Hugh Esmor Huxley, and the philosopher and biologist Sir Julian Huxley.
Four Musketeers of Darwinism
Huxley together with Hooker, Lyell, and the American Asa Gray were called the "Four Musketeers" in defense of Darwin -- though Gray, a devout Presbyterian, eventually created a theistically-flavored view of evolution that the others were not entirely comfortable with.[1] Initially, Huxley remained reserved concerning some of the Darwin's views presented in the book Origin of species and demanded that in order to provide evidence for the evolution by natural selection it would be necessary by means of breeding experiments to create new, reproductively isolated species. Yet as materialist, who felt antipathy against the doctrine of creation and dismissed it on the grounds that in his view it owes its existence and plausibility entirely to "Hebrew cosmogony", he decided with an amount of combativeness to "sharpen up his claws and beak" in readiness towards the Darwin's opposition.[2][3]
References
- ↑ Janet Browne (Feb 23, 2010). Charles Darwin Volume 2: The Power at Place. Random House, 608. ISBN 9781407053233.
- ↑ Edward J.Larson (2004). Evolution -The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory. USA: Random House Publishing Group, 368. ISBN 0812968492.
- ↑ Carl S. Dowries:Selections from Huxley. The University of California. “It is not clear to me why, if continual physical 5 conditions are of so little moment as you suppose, variation should occur at all. However, I must read the book two or three times more before I presume to begin picking holes. ... And as to the curs which will bark and yelp, you must recollect that some of 15 your friends, at any rate, are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often and justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead. I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness. [To John Tyndall. Naples, March 31, 1872. On 25 Mount Vesuvius.]”
