The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate

Summary

The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate is the name later given to an unscheduled exchange on Saturday, 30 June 1860, at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, seven months after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It was not a formal debate with set speeches and a motion, and no transcript was taken. It took place in a crowded room of the newly built Oxford University Museum, in the zoology and botany section, after the American chemist and historian John William Draper read a long paper on the intellectual development of Europe in relation to Darwin's views. The chairman was the Cambridge botanist John Stevens Henslow, Darwin's former teacher. Darwin himself was absent, taking a water cure for his chronic illness. Two days earlier, on Thursday 28 June, Thomas Henry Huxley had clashed with the anatomist Richard Owen over whether the human brain differed in structure from the gorilla's, and many expected a further confrontation. After several other speakers, Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, spoke for about half an hour. By most accounts he criticized Darwin's theory on scientific grounds, arguing that the evidence for the transmutation of species was insufficient and that the fixity of species was better supported by observation, and he ended with a humorous question to Huxley about whether his descent from an ape was on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side. Huxley replied that he had heard nothing new against Darwin's theory, defended it as the best explanation available, and turned the bishop's question back on him, saying, in substance, that he would not be ashamed of an ape for an ancestor but would be ashamed of a man who used great gifts to obscure a serious scientific question with ridicule. Joseph Dalton Hooker then gave a botanist's defence of the theory, and Robert FitzRoy, Darwin's former captain on the Beagle, spoke against it, holding up a Bible. The exact words of every speaker are disputed. Contemporary newspaper reports were brief; the fuller and more dramatic versions come from letters written days or months later and from recollections published decades afterward, and they disagree about what was said and who had the better of it. Wilberforce believed he had done well, Hooker thought his own speech decisive, and Huxley's friends later remembered his reply as a triumph. Wilberforce's long review of the Origin, published anonymously in the Quarterly Review in July 1860, gives his considered scientific objections, and Darwin called it uncommonly clever. Because the encounter survives only in conflicting accounts, the library offers no transcript or quotations.

Top Lessons

• History and legend

  No transcript of the exchange exists, and the best-known versions were written down years or decades later by people who wanted to remember it a certain way. The episode is a lesson in how to weigh witnesses, dates and motives before repeating a famous story.

• Scientific objection in its own terms

  Wilberforce's Quarterly Review essay argued on scientific grounds: the fixity of species in breeding, gaps in the fossil record and the limits of variation. Darwin took the review seriously and called it uncommonly clever, and some of its questions were ones the theory's defenders were still working to answer.

• Ridicule and reasoned answer

  Both principal speakers are remembered for a clever turn as much as for an argument. The bishop's jest and Huxley's reply show the power and the risk of wit in a public exchange about a serious question.

• Science and faith: conflict or conversation?

  The meeting was later used to illustrate an inevitable war between science and religion, notably after Draper's own History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874). Many historians now argue that the participants' relations were more varied: there were clergy who accepted evolution and scientists who rejected it, and Christians in the audience on both sides.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The debate touches the history of medicine indirectly. Huxley was a medically trained comparative anatomist who had served as a naval assistant surgeon, and the Thursday clash between Huxley and Owen concerned the comparative anatomy of the brain in apes and humans, specifically whether structures such as the hippocampus minor were unique to man. Darwin's absence was due to his long-standing illness, for which he was taking a hydropathic water cure; retrospective diagnoses of that illness are interpretive and disputed.

• Thursday 28 June 1860 (Section D)

  Owen and Huxley dispute the comparative anatomy of the gorilla and human brain, a question Huxley later pursued in print and in Man's Place in Nature (1863).

• Background (Darwin's absence)

  Darwin, ill, is away at a hydropathic establishment and learns of the meeting through letters from Hooker and others.