page_title: 1860 Oxford evolution debate
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: 1860 Oxford evolution debate / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: The plaque outside the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, commemorating the debate on evolution which occurred there in 1860 between Thomas Henry Huxley, Samuel Wilberforce and others. Parts of Angela Palmer's "Ghost Forest" installation are visible in the background.
context_page_description: The 1860 Oxford evolution debate took place at the Oxford University Museum in Oxford, England, on 30 June 1860, seven months after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Several prominent British scientists and philosophers participated, including Thomas Henry Huxley, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, Benjamin Brodie, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Robert FitzRoy.
  The debate is best remembered today for a heated exchange in which Wilberforce supposedly asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey. Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.
context_section_description: Summary reports of the debate were published in The Manchester Guardian, The Athenaeum and Jackson's Oxford Journal. A more detailed report was published by the Oxford Chronicle. Both sides immediately claimed victory, but the majority opinion has always been that the debate represented a major victory for the Darwinians.
  Though the debate is frequently depicted as a clash between religion and science, the British Association at the time had a number of clergymen occupying high positions (including Presidents of two of its seven sections) In his speech to open the annual event, the President of the Association (Lord Wrottesley) concluded his talk by saying "Let us ever apply ourselves to the task, feeling assured that the more we thus exercise, and by exercising improve our intellectual faculties, the more worthy shall we be, the better shall we be fitted to come nearer to our God." Therefore, a case could be made for saying that for the many clerics in the audience, the underlying conflict was between traditional Anglicanism (Wilberforce) and liberal Anglicanism (Essays and Reviews). On the other hand, Oxford academic Dr Diane Purkiss says the debate "was really the first time Christianity had ever been asked to square off against science in a public forum in the whole of its history".
  Many of the opponents of Darwin's theory were respected men of science: Owen was one of the most influential British biologists of his generation; Adam Sedgwick was a leading geologist; Wilberforce was a Fellow of the Royal Society (though at that time about half of the Fellows were well-placed amateurs). While Darwin himself was a gentleman scholar of independent financial means, key disciples like Huxley and Hooker were professionals, and they concentrated on the advance of scientific knowledge, and were determined not to be baulked by religious authority. Their kind of science was to grow and flourish, and ultimately to become autonomous from religious tradition.
  The debate has been called "one of the great stories of the history of science" and it is often regarded as a key moment in the acceptance of evolution. However, at the time it received only a few passing references in newspapers, and Brooke argues that "the event almost completely disappeared from public awareness until it was resurrected in the 1890s as an appropriate tribute to a recently deceased hero of scientific education". The contemporary accounts of the participants were largely replaced by a somewhat embellished version (see the much later insertion of Huxley's remark to Brodie, for example). The great popularity of the anecdote in the 20th century was largely due to shifting attitudes towards evolution and anachronistic re-interpretation of the actual events.
  The debate marked the beginning of a bitter three-year dispute between Owen and Huxley over human origins, satirised by Charles Kingsley as the "Great Hippocampus Question", which concluded with the defeat of Owen and his backers. The debate was the inspiration for, and is referenced in, the play Darwin in Malibu by Crispin Whittell. A commemorative pillar marks the 150th anniversary of the debate.
caption: A stone pillar erected in 2010 outside the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to mark the 150th anniversary of the event
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