Huxley versus Wilberforce: some facts

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895),
photographed at the meeting of the British Association, 1860 (Wiki)

Portrait of Samuel Wilberforce (1805–1873),
Bishop of Oxford, by George Richmond, 1868 (Wiki)

     Most modern-day accounts of the debate [at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in the Oxford University Museum library before an audience of over 700 on June 30, 1860, just seven months after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species] include a story that Wilberforce supposedly asked Huxley whether he was related to an ape on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side. To which Huxley is alleged to have replied that he would prefer an ape for a grandfather to a man who employed his faculties and influence for the purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific debate.

. . .

[W]e suggest that the following scenario best fits all the data:
1. Wilberforce did not ask Huxley the ape question in his speech at the debate.
2. Huxley, in his speech at the debate, asked himself the ape question in the first person. “If the question is put to me … [etc.].”
3. Thirty-eight years later a Mrs Sidgwick (not Sedgwick) either mistakenly or maliciously put the words of the question into the mouth of Bishop Wilberforce in her article in Macmillan’s Magazine of 1898.
4. Since then the story has generated a life of its own.
5. Despite the biased and mutated accounts of this meeting, or perhaps because of them, history has come to regard this event as something of a turning point in the public acceptance of the theory of evolution.

Read full article:

What did Wilberforce really say to "Darwin's Bulldog"?

See also:

Huxley, morality and the Bible

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