Rocky Road: Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley

From Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos

"How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" was Thomas Henry Huxley's reaction to Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Huxley's confidence and candor earned him the reputation as "Darwin's bulldog," boldly debating where Darwin (perhaps wisely) feared to tread. In 1860, before a crowd of about 1,000 onlookers, Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, challenged Huxley to decide whether he preferred to be descended from a monkey through his grandmother or his grandfather. Huxley replied that he would prefer to be the grandson of an ape than related to a man who misused his intellect on matters of such importance. (True to Victorian etiquette, one of the ladies in the crowd fainted at Huxley's statement.)

Years later, when Wilberforce died of a head injury after falling from a horse, Huxley described the incident as the first time the bishop's brains came into contact with reality. With equal candor, Huxley remarked of Darwin's book, "Old ladies, of both sexes, consider it a decidedly dangerous book." Although Huxley is often described as the winner of the debate, Wilberforce's supporters swore he won the day.

Despite his nickname, Huxley was shrewd enough to engage in behavior quite unlike that of a bulldog when the occasion called for it. In December 1859, he authored an anonymous review of Darwin's new work in the London Times. Instead of effusing about the work, Huxley exercised restraint, even sounding skeptical of natural selection. But he continued with the observation that Darwin "abhors mere speculation as nature abhors a vacuum." Huxley continued that Darwin's ideas could be subjected to observation and experimentation. The review likely helped the book's sales.

Nineteenth-century society found evolution a little more palatable when it was presented as progress, so that's how Huxley presented it. Darwin didn't completely agree, but didn't contradict his staunch supporter, either. Likewise, Huxley disagreed with Darwin's theory of gradual change and suspected that organisms changed through abrupt leaps. Probably more than Darwin, Huxley realized how much paleontology could offer in understanding life on earth: "The primary and direct evidence in favor of evolution can be furnished only by paleontology. . . . if evolution has taken place, there will its mark be left; if it has not taken place, there will lie its refutation." After the first Archaeopteryx skeleton was found, Huxley recognized its reptilian and avian qualities, as well as the bird-like characteristics of the bipedal dinosaur Compsognathus. In 1868, he publicly refuted Richard Owen's interpretation of Archaeopteryx as "unequivocally a bird" and published a paper titled "On the Animals which are Most Nearly Intermediate between Birds and Reptiles." Yet Huxley's insights on resemblances between birds and dinosaurs did not enjoy widespread, lasting approval for nearly a century.

Darwin danced around human evolution in On the Origin of Species in 1859, not addressing the topic until 1871 in The Descent of Man. Yet Huxley wrote about human and primate paleontology in Man's Place in Nature in 1863. He examined the similarities between humans and apes and noted that greater anatomical differences separate gorillas and chimpanzees from the lower apes than separate gorillas from people. He also mused, "Is [the philosopher or poet] bound to howl and grovel on all fours because . . . he was once an egg, which no ordinary power of discrimination could distinguish from that of a Dog? . . . Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it?"

From Man's Place in Nature by Thomas H. Huxley

Huxley observed few significant differences between Neanderthal fossils and modern humans, then asked, "Do the fossilized remains of an Ape more anthropoid, or a Man more pithecoid, than any yet known await the researches of some unborn paleontologist?" (In fact, the future paleontologist was five by the time Huxley wondered — he was Eugène Dubois.)

Unlike Darwin, Huxley was no comfortable country gentleman. He was born in a butcher shop and became a doctor's apprentice at the tender age of 13. Like Darwin, he managed to take a life-changing sea voyage, on the Rattlesnake, but only by serving as the ship's doctor. Throughout his life, this workaholic labored to support himself and his family, but he was plagued by chronic debt. Sympathizing with working types all his life, he developed a reputation for delivering controversial lectures to working-class audiences.

Huxley maintained a complex relationship with religion. Though not religious himself, he lectured on the topic, exhibiting a sound understanding of both Eastern and Western religions. He also coined a new term: "I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins . . . is for a man to presume to go about unlabelled . . . I could find no label that would suit me, so, in my desire to range myself and be respectable, I invented one . . . I called myself an Agnostic." And despite his own lack of religious sentiment, Huxley campaigned vigorously to ensure Charles Darwin was honored by his country and laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.

As Darwin's theory of natural selection gained credibility, some of Huxley's contemporaries began to champion efforts at "improvement" of human society through careful selection. Huxley dryly observed:

I sometimes wonder whether people, who talk so freely about extirpating the unfit, ever dispassionately consider their own history. Surely, one must be very "fit," indeed, not to know of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one's life, when it would have been only too easy to quality for a place among the "unfit."

For more information:
Man's Place in Nature by Thomas H. Huxley
Evolution and Ethics, Science and Morals by Thomas H. Huxley
Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place by Janet Browne
Great Feuds in Science by Hal Hellman
Darwin and the Science of Evolution by Patrick Tort
Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer
Making Modern Science by Bowler and Morus
Taking Wing by Pat Shipman
Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos
A Bedside Nature edited by Walter Gratzer
The Dinosaur Papers edited by Weishampel and White
Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik
Victorian Sensation by James A. Secord
Evolution by Edward J. Larson
The Meaning of Fossils by Martin J.S. Rudwick
The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould
Evolution by Linda Gamlin
Nature's Treasurehouse by John Thackray and Bob Press
To See the Fellows Fight by John Thackray