Bully for Brontosaurus

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Farrar’s analysis of Huxley’s victory includes an interesting comment on Victorian sensibilities:

  The victory of your father, was not the ironical dexterity shown by him, but the fact that he had got a victory in respect of manners and good breeding. You must remember that the whole audience was made up of gentlefolk, who were not prepared to endorse anything vulgar.

  Finally, Farrar affirms the other major falsity of the official version by acknowledging the superiority of Hooker’s reply:

  The speech which really left its mark scientifically on the meeting, was the short one of Hooker…. I should say that to fair minds, the intellectual impression left by the discussion was that the Bishop had stated some facts about the perpetuity of species, but that no one had really contributed any valuable point to the opposite side except Hooker…but that your father had scored a victory over Bishop Wilberforce in the question of good manners.

  And so, in summary, we may conclude that the heroic legend of the official version fails badly in two crucial points—our ignorance of Wilberforce’s actual words and the near certainty that the forgotten Hooker made a better argument than Huxley. What, then, can we conclude, based on such poor evidence, about such a key event in the hagiography of science? Huxley did not debate Wilberforce at Oxford in 1860; rather, they both spoke, one after the other, in a prolonged discussion of Draper’s paper. They had one short and wonderful exchange of rhetorical barbs on a totally nonintellectual point prompted by a whimsical remark, perhaps even a taunt, that Wilberforce made about apes and ancestry, though no one remembered precisely what he said. Huxley made a sharp and effective retort. Everyone enjoyed the incident immensely and recalled it in a variety of versions. Some thought Huxley had won the exchange; others credit Wilberforce. Huxley hardly dealt with Wilberforce’s case against Darwin. Hooker, however, made an effective reply in Darwin’s behalf, and the meeting ended.

  All events before the codification of the official version support this ambiguous and unheroic account. In particular, Wilberforce seemed not a bit embarrassed by the incident. Disraeli spoke about it in his presence. Wilberforce reprinted his review of Darwin’s Origin, the basis of his remarks that fateful day, in an 1874 collection of his works. His son recounted the tale with credit in Wilberforce’s biography. Moreover, Darwin and Wilberforce remained on good terms. The ever genial Darwin wrote to Asa Gray that he found Wilberforce’s review “uncommonly clever, not worth anything scientifically, but quizzes me in splendid style. I chuckled with laughter at myself.” Wilberforce, told by the vicar of Downe about Darwin’s reaction, said: “I am glad he takes it in this way. He is such a capital fellow.”

  Moreover, though I don’t believe that self-justification provides much evidence for anything, we do have a short testimony from Wilberforce himself. He wrote to Sir Charles Anderson just three days after the event: “On Saturday Professor Henslow who presided over the Zoological Section called on me by name to address the Section on Darwin’s Theory. So I could not escape and had quite a long fight with Huxley. I think I thoroughly beat him.” This letter, now housed in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, escaped all notice until 1978, when Josef L. Altholz cited it in the Journal of the History of Medicine. I would not exaggerate the importance of this document because it smacks of insincerity at least once—so why not in its last line as well? We know that 700 people crammed the Museum’s largest room to witness the proceedings. They didn’t come to hear Dr. Draper on the intellectual development of Europe. Wilberforce was on the dais, and if he didn’t know that he would speak, how come everyone else did?

  Why then, and how, did the official version so color this event as a primal victory for evolution? The answer largely lies with Huxley himself, who successfully promoted, in retrospect, a version that suited his purposes (and had probably, by then, displaced the actual event in his memory). Huxley, though not antireligious, was uncompromisingly and pugnaciously anticlerical. Moreover, he despised Wilberforce and his mellifluous sophistries. When Wilberforce died in 1873, from head injuries sustained in a fall from his horse, Huxley remarked (as the story goes): “For once, reality and his brains came into contact and the result was fatal.”

  Janet Browne has traced the construction of the official version in Francis Darwin’s biography of his father. The story is told through an anonymous eyewitness, but Browne proves that Hooker himself wrote the account, volunteering for the task with direct purpose (writing to Francis): “Have you any account of the Oxford meeting? If not, I will, if you like, see what I can do towards vivifying it (and vivisecting the Bishop) for you.” Hooker dredged his memory with pain and uncertainty. He had forgotten his letter to Darwin and admitted, “It is impossible to be sure of what one heard, or of impressions formed, after nearly thirty years of active life.” And further, “I have been driven wild formulating it from memory.” Huxley then vetted Hooker’s account and the official story was set.

  The tale was then twice embellished—first, in 1892, when Francis published a shorter biography of Charles Darwin, and Huxley contributed a letter, now remembering for the first time (more than thirty years later) his sotto voce crack, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands” second, in 1900, when Leonard Huxley wrote the life of his father. Thus, dutiful sons presented the official version as constructed by a committee of two—the chief participants Huxley and Hooker—from memories colored by thirty years of battle. We can only agree with Sheridan Gilley, who writes:

  The standard account is a wholly one-sided effusion from the winning side, put together long after the event, uncritically copied from book to book, and shaped by the hagiographic conventions of the Victorian life and letters.

  So much for correcting a moment of history. But why should we care today? Does the heroic version do any harm? And does its rectification have any meaning beyond our general preference for accuracy? Stories do not become primary legends simply because they tell rip-roaring narratives; they must stand as exemplars, particular representations of something deeper and far more general. The official version of Huxley versus Wilberforce is an archetype for a common belief about the nature of science and its history. The fame and meaning of the official version lie in this wider context. Yet this common belief is not only wrong (or at least seriously oversimplified) but ultimately harmful to science. Thus, in debunking the official version of Huxley versus Wilberforce, we might make a helpful correction for science itself.

  Ruth Moore captured the general theme in her version of the standard account: “From that hour on, the quarrel over the elemental issue that the world believed was involved, science versus religion, was to rage unabated.” The story has archetypal power because Huxley and Wilberforce, in the official version, are not mere men but symbols, or synecdoches, for a primal struggle: religion versus science, reaction versus enlightenment, dogma versus truth, darkness versus light.

  All men have blind spots, however broad their vision. Thomas Henry Huxley was the most eloquent spokesman that evolution has ever known. But his extreme anticlericalism led him to an uncompromising view of organized religion as the enemy of science. Huxley could envision no allies among the official clergy. Conservatives like Wilberforce were enemies pure and simple; liberals lacked the guts to renounce what fact and logic had falsified, as they struggled to marry the irreconcilable findings of science with their supernatural vision. He wrote in 1887 of those “whose business seems to be to mix the black of dogma and the white of science into the neutral tint of what they call liberal theology.” Huxley did view his century as a battleground between science and organized religion—and he took great pride in the many notches on his own gun.

  This cardboard dichotomy seems favorable for science at first (and superficial) glance. It enshrines science as something pure and apart from the little quirks and dogmas of daily life. It exalts science as a disembodied method for discovering truth at all costs, while social institutions—religion in particular—hold fast to antiquated superstition.
Comfort and social stability resist truth, and science must therefore fight a lonely battle for enlightenment. Its heroes, in bad times, are true martyrs—Bruno at the stake, Galileo before the Inquisition—or, in better times, merely irritated, as Huxley was, by ecclesiastical stupidity.

  But no battle exists between science and religion—the two most separate spheres of human need. A titanic struggle occurs, always has, always will, between questioning and authority, free inquiry and frozen dogma—but the institutions representing these poles are not science and religion. These struggles occur within each field, not primarily across disciplines. The general ethic of science leads to greater openness, but we have our fossils, often in positions of great power. Organized religion, as an arm of state power so frequently in history, has tended to rigidity—but theologies have also spearheaded social revolution. Official religion has not opposed evolution as a monolith. Many prominent evolutionists have been devout, and many churchmen have placed evolution at the center of their personal theologies. Henry Ward Beecher, America’s premier pulpiteer during Darwin’s century, defended evolution as God’s way in a striking commercial metaphor: “Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail”—better, that is, to ordain general laws of change than to make each species by separate fiat.

  The struggle of free inquiry against authority is so central, so pervasive that we need all the help we can get from every side. Inquiring scientists must join hands with questioning theologians if we wish to preserve that most fragile of all reeds, liberty itself. If scientists lose their natural allies by casting entire institutions as enemies, and not seeking bonds with soul mates on other paths, then we only make a difficult struggle that much harder.

  Huxley had not planned to enter that famous Oxford meeting. He was still inexperienced in public debate, not yet Darwin’s bulldog. He wrote: “I did not mean to attend it—did not see the good of giving up peace and quietness to be episcopally pounded.” But his friends prevailed upon him, and Huxley, savoring victory, left the meeting with pleasure and resolution:

  Hooker and I walked away from the meeting together, and I remember saying to him that this experience had changed my opinion as to the practical value of the art of public speaking, and that from that time forth I should carefully cultivate it, and try to leave off hating it.

  So Huxley became the greatest popular spokesman for science in his century—as a direct result of his famous encounter with Wilberforce. He waded into the public arena and struggled for three decades to breach the boundaries between science and the daily life of ordinary people. And yet, ironically, his Manichean view of science and religion—abetted so strongly by the official version, his own construction in part, of the debate with Wilberforce—harmed his greatest hope by establishing boundaries to exclude natural allies and, ultimately, by encircling science as something apart from other human passions. We may, perhaps, read one last document of the great Oxford debate in a larger metaphorical context as a plea, above all, for solidarity among people of like minds and institutions of like purposes. Darwin to Hooker upon receiving his account of the debate: “Talk of fame, honor, pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection.”

  27 | Genesis and Geology

  HERBERT HOOVER produced a fine translation, still in use, of Agricola’s sixteenth-century Latin treatise on mining and geology. In the midst of his last presidential campaign, Teddy Roosevelt published a major monograph on the evolutionary significance of animal coloration (see Essay 14). Woodrow Wilson was no intellectual slouch, and John F. Kennedy did aptly remark to a group of Nobel laureates assembled at the White House that the building then contained more intellectual power than at any moment since the last time Thomas Jefferson dined there alone.

  Still, when we seek a political past of intellectual eminence in the midst of current emptiness, we cannot do better than the helm of Victorian Britain. High ability may not have prevailed generally, as the wise Private Willis, guard to the House of Commons, reminds us in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe:

  When in that House M.P.’s divide,

  If they’ve a brain and cerebellum, too,

  They’ve got to leave that brain outside,

  And vote just as their leaders tell ’em to.

  But then the prospect of a lot

  Of dull M.P.’s in close proximity

  All thinking for themselves is what

  No man can face with equanimity.

  But the men at the top—the Tory leader Benjamin Disraeli and his Liberal counterpart W. E. Gladstone—were formidable in many various ways. Disraeli maintained an active career as a respected romantic novelist, publishing the three-volume Endymion in 1880, at the height of his prestige and just a year before his death. Gladstone, a distinguished Greek scholar, wrote his three-volume Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858) while temporarily out of office.

  In 1885, following a series of setbacks including the death of General Gordon at Khartoum, Gladstone’s government fell, and he resigned as prime minister. He did not immediately proceed to unwind with his generation’s rum swizzle on a Caribbean beach (Chivas Regal on the links of Saint Andrews, perhaps). Instead, he occupied his enforced leisure by writing an article on the scientific truth of the book of Genesis—“Dawn of Creation and of Worship,” published in The Nineteenth Century, in November 1885. Thomas Henry Huxley, who invented the word agnostic to describe his own feelings, read Gladstone’s effort with disgust and wrote a response to initiate one of the most raucous, if forgotten, free-for-alls of late nineteenth century rhetoric. (Huxley disliked Gladstone and once described him as suffering from “severely copious chronic glossorrhoea.”)

  But why bring up a forgotten and musty argument, even if the protagonists were two of the most colorful and brilliant men of the nineteenth century? I do so because current events have brought their old subject—the correlation of Genesis with geology—to renewed attention.

  Our legislative victory over “creation science” (Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard, June 1987) ended an important chapter in American social history, one that stretched back to the Scopes trial of 1925. (Biblical literalism will never go away, so long as cash flows and unreason retains its popularity, but the legislative strategy of passing off dogma as creation science and forcing its instruction in classrooms has been defeated.) In this happy light, we are now free to ask the right question once again: In what helpful ways may science and religion coexist?

  Ever since the Edwards decision, I have received a rash of well-meaning letters suggesting a resolution very much like Gladstone’s. These letters begin by professing pleasure at the defeat of fundamentalism. Obviously, six days of creation and circa 6,000 years of biblical chronology will not encompass the earth’s history. But, they continue, once we get past the nonsense of literalism, are we not now free to read Genesis 1 as factual in a more general sense? Of course the days of creation can’t be twenty-four hours long. Of course the origin of light three days before the creation of the sun poses problems. But aren’t the general order and story consistent with modern science, from the big bang to Darwinian theory? After all, plants come first in Genesis, then creatures of the sea, then land animals, and finally humans. Well, isn’t this right? And, if so, then isn’t Genesis true in the broad sense? And if true, especially since the scribes of Genesis could not have understood the geological evidence, must not the words be divinely inspired? This sequence of claims forms the core of Gladstone’s article. Huxley’s words therefore deserve a resurrection.

  Huxley’s rebuttal follows the argument that most intellectuals—scientists and theologians alike—make today. First, while the broadest brush of the Genesis sequence might be correct—plants first, people last—many details are dead wrong by the testimony of geological evidence from the fossil record. Second, this lack of correlation does not compromise the power and purpose of religion or its relationship with the sciences. Genesis is not a treatise on natural history.

  Gladstone wrote hi
s original article as a response to a book by Professor Alfred Réville of the Collège de France—Prolegomena to the History of Religions (1884). Gladstone fancied himself an expert on Homer, and he had labored for thirty years to show that common themes of the Bible and the most ancient Greek texts could be harmonized to expose the divine plan revealed by the earliest historical records of different cultures. Gladstone was most offended by Réville’s dismissal of his Homeric claims, but his article focuses on the veracity of Genesis.

  Gladstone did not advocate the literal truth of Genesis; science had foreclosed this possibility to any Victorian intellectual. He accepted, for example, the standard argument that the “days” of creation are metaphors for periods of undetermined length separating the major acts of a coherent sequence. But Gladstone then insisted that these major acts conform precisely to the order best specified by modern science—the cosmological events of the first four days (Genesis 1:1–19) to Laplace’s “nebular hypothesis” for the origin of the sun and planets, and the biological events of “days” five and six (Genesis 1:20–31) to the geological record of fossils and Darwin’s theory of evolution. He placed special emphasis on a fourfold sequence in the appearance of animals: the “water population” followed by the “air population” on the fifth day, and the “land population” and its “consummation in man” on the sixth day: