The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [19]
The debaters were Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford—who had been instrumental in preventing Darwin’s knighthood—and T. H. Huxley, physician and scientific scholar. This was the same Huxley who would coin the word agnostic to describe himself and his belief that God, or the ultimate reality, is unknowable.
The bishop decided to tackle evolution on scientific rather than theological grounds. He argued that species were ever fixed, permanent in their shape, “a fact confirmed by all observation” of early man and his domestic animals, such as could be found in the tombs and pyramids of the ancient Egyptians. “The line between man and the lower animals was distinct,” the bishop continued. “There was no tendency on the part of lower animals to become the self-conscious, intelligent being, man, or in man to degenerate” in the direction of lesser species. He then, according to published accounts, asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey.
By nineteenth-century standards of debate, this was an outrageous display of rudeness. It elevated the exchange to a level of near mythological proportions, told and retold. As recounted in Macmillan’s Magazine, “On this remark, Mr. Huxley slowly and deliberately arose.” Huxley stood there, thin and pale, quiet and very grave, the magazine reported, and replied: “He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.”
The debate helped make Huxley almost as well-known as Darwin, and he took advantage of it in further debates. His ferocity and tenacity in defense of evolutionary theory earned him the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog.” Many thought science had triumphed, at least in this instance, over religion. For many others in England and America, however, the painful conflict only intensified a resolve to cling to deeply held beliefs that naturalists with their compiled data—and their clever comebacks—could never hope to explain.
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE returned to England in 1862 and strode without hesitation into this fray. He lacked Huxley’s ability to turn a wicked phrase but he brought his own gifts: energy, enthusiasm, and sincerity.
Wallace traveled the country in support of Darwin and natural selection. He fearlessly affirmed that humans shared common ancestry with other animals, that our species was as easily explained by adaptation, by the selection of survival traits, as any other. Wallace had lived among the tribes along the Malay Archipelago. He assured his audiences—playing to their Victorian sense of self-superiority—that primitive societies represented humans in an earlier stage of development, less evolved than technologically advanced westerners.
While Wallace camped in a simple hut, foraging for food in the tropical forests, modern society had continued its industrial advances. The mass-produced paper bag, the photographic slide, the safety elevator, and the machine gun were all recent inventions. The blazing, impossible speed of light had been measured, emphasizing that even the golden aura of a late afternoon was a matter of physics, a calculation to be mastered by man.
But as he traversed England, Wallace gradually perceived dark spots in this polished progress. It seemed to him that the moral evolution of Western society did not match its intellectual development. He could easily enumerate examples. The slums of London stank with raw sewage; brothels catered to the deviant (some specialized in “birching,” or whipping their customers); uneducated children stole for fun as well as for need. After more than a decade away, Wallace found his homeland version of civilization more violent, less compassionate, less decent, than that of supposedly “less evolved” tribal societies. “The mass of our populations have not advanced beyond the savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it,” he complained to a friend. It was possible, Wallace