Evolution: Library: Huxley: Darwin's Bulldog Backgrounder Huxley: Darwin's Bulldog: Just as the writer of a song may not be its best performer, Charles Darwin's genius lay more in developing the theory of natural selection than in forcefully promoting it in the world. For that, there was Thomas Henry Huxley , such an aggressive defender of evolution that he was known as "Darwin's bulldog." The early life of Huxley (1825-1895) was much different from the privileged existence of Darwin. He was one of eight children, growing up outside of London without much money. He left school early, trained to be a doctor, and educated himself in science, history, and philosophy, becoming one of the most broadly informed and influential figures in Victorian science. Like Darwin, Huxley studied natural history while traveling on a naval ship. Initially, Huxley did not accept evolution at all.

But Darwin converted him with the On the Origin of Species, and Huxley mused afterwards, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" Although he was much more than a defender of Darwin -- he led the movement toward the professionalization of science, for example -- Huxley is best known for his public exchange in 1860 with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. The bishop, a clever, witty debater, opened himself to attack by making a gentle joke about Huxley's ancestry. Huxley, furious, replied famously to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop. Huxley, the first of a family of important scientists, is also known for coining the term "agnostic" to distinguish skeptics like himself from atheists, who denied the existence of a god. To Huxley, agnosticism was an acceptance of the idea that the human mind could not go beyond certain limits, namely the ability to analyze actual experience. To the confusion of his religious opponents, however, Huxley was very much a moralist and intolerant of sin. This was a man who today would be called a "workaholic," who pushed himself so hard that his life was shortened.

When he died in 1895, his funeral was attended by "the greatest constellation of Victorian scientists ever to gather on one spot," says his biographer, Adrian Desmond. Thomas Henry Huxley Darwin's Bulldog Thomas Henry Huxley a biography of Darwin's Bulldog ï¿½ Charles Darwin had little appetite for involvement in the growing controversy which he, and Alfred Russel Wallace, had initiated by making their theories known to the public to the Linnaean Society in London in June 1858. Thomas Henry Huxley was however a man of a different mettle!!! He was known to be both intellectual brilliant and also to relish intense debate and was to become remarkable as the foremost supporter in England for the theory of Evolution. ï¿½ Charles Darwin published his "Origin of Species" in November 1859 and, within days, Huxley sent a letter to Darwin regarding this work.... ï¿½ I finished your book yesterday... Since I read Von Baer's Essays nine years ago no work on Natural History Science I have met with has made so great an impression on me & I do most heartily thank you for the great store of new views you have given me...

As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite... I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse & misrepresentation which unless I greatly mistake is in store for you... And as to the curs which will bark and yelp - you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often & justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead - I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness. ï¿½ Huxley's first defences of Darwin's, then generally shocking, theory appeared in December of that year, Time and Life: Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species" in Macmillan's Magazine and The Darwinian Hypothesis in The Times .

ï¿½ Huxley's subsequent activities in support of the theory of Evolution included a crushingly successful championship of a "scientific" and "rationalist" viewpoint over a viewpoint of "Religion", "Faith", and "Belief", as forwarded by a Bishop Wilberforce in a famous debate held under the auspices of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford on June 30th 1860. ï¿½ During the debate, Archbishop Wilberforce ridiculed evolution and asked Huxley whether he was descended from an ape on his grandmother's side or his grandfather's. Whilst accounts vary as to exactly what happened next it seems that after giving a brilliant intellectual defence of Darwin's theory, Huxley pointedly commented, "I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth." ï¿½ ï¿½ Huxley's lectures on organic evolution, which he gave to numerous lay and scientific audiences at various times and places from 1860 until his death, contributed greatly to the acceptance of the theory of Evolution by the scientific community and the wider public. He is even referred to by posterity as - Darwin's Bulldog.

This tag may stem from his own usage of the term to describe his championship of Darwin's views. ï¿½ In 1863 Huxley published a work of his own entitled Zoological Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature which was the first work to make the yet more controversial assertion that mankind should be viewed as being a product of evolutionary processes. ï¿½ Huxley's bulldog: The battles of E. Ray Lankester (1846–1929) - Milner - 1999 - The Anatomical Record - Wiley Online Library Huxley's bulldog: The battles of E. Ray Lankester (1846–1929) Authors Search for more papers by this author Mr. Milner is a senior editor of Natural History Magazine at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. An anthropologist and historian of science, he did his graduate work at UCLA and at the University of California, Berkeley. His special interests include the development of evolutionary theory, the history of natural history, and the lives of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

He is presently working on the third revised edition of his Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity's Search for its Origins, which first appeared in 1990. He has also authored a short biography, Charles Darwin: Evolution of a Naturalist (Facts on File, 1993), and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. First published: DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-0185(19990615)257:3<90::AID-AR5>3.0.CO;2-8 View/save citation Cited by: 3 articles Standard PDF (671.1 KB) Charles Darwin is remembered as a reclusive revolutionary who shook the world from his quiet hilltop in the Kentish countryside. When it came to debating bishops, or lecturing on the new evolutionary biology, Darwin preferred to send his “bulldog” and “General Agent” Thomas Henry Huxley into the fray.

Polemicist, surgeon (“too busy doing science” to ever practice medicine), zoologist, comparative anatomist, educator, and essayist, the bombastic Huxley enjoyed fighting for the new ideas. Huxley also struggled to establish scientific education and the democratization of colleges dominated by classical scholarship, theology, and class privilege. Huxley's protege, in turn, became England's most influential biologist. His name, all but forgotten today, was Edwin Ray Lankester (Fig. 1 ). (British naturalist John Ray was his namesake.) He, too, was a zoologist, comparative anatomist, essayist, and educator—and for a decade (1898–1908) served as director of London's Natural History Museum. This year marks the 70th anniversary of his death. Figure 1. E. Ray Lankester, in a 1920 photograph. Courtesy of the Natural History Magazine. 29 INSPIRED FROM YOUTH Lankester seemed destined for a career in biology. His father, Edwin Lankester, was well-known as a crusading public health doctor and founder of the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, which the son later edited.

Darwin and Huxley had been his father's friends, and were Ray's heroes since childhood. Huxley had been especially close to the family ever since he and Lankester senior had taught together at the Royal School of Mines. 3 Ray remembered being carried across a rocky beach by Huxley, 4 and recalled Darwin telling how he once rode a giant tortoise like a pony. 23 He was inspired by his father's other distinguished acquaintances, including the anatomist Sir Richard Owen, the botanist Sir Joseph Hooker, the marine biologist Philip Gosse, and the geologists Edward Forbes and Sir Charles Lyell, 23 but it was on Huxley that young Ray decided to pattern his life (Fig. 2 ). 26 From his teens onward, he was a dedicated evolutionist. While still a university student, he won praise from Darwin, who wrote that he would “some day become our first star in Natural History.” 1 As it turned out, the outspoken and cantankerous Lankester's star would flicker erratically, but it could shine with undeniable brilliance. Figure 2. Download Powerpoint slide A young Thomas Henry Huxley draws a gorilla skull for his comparative anatomy students.

Photograph courtesy of Michael Huxley. In his prime, Lankester was a large, corpulent, bearlike man. A charismatic, well-dressed lecturer, he projected confidence, power, and good humor. In 1871, soon after he returned from his studies in Germany and Italy, Huxley hired Lankester to be his demonstrator in comparative anatomy at the Royal School of Mines in South Kensington, London. Huxley's classes there set the standard for all future biology lab courses in Western universities. Lankester adopted not only Huxley's teaching techniques, but his evangelical zeal for spreading the gospel of science and evolutionary biology (Fig. 3 ). As Huxley put it: “Lankester...is helping me as Demonstrator in a course of instruction in Biology which I am giving to Schoolmasters—with a view of converting them into scientific missionaries to convert the Christian Heathen of these islands to the true faith.” 5 Figure 3. Download Powerpoint slide Caricature of E. Ray Lankester published by Vanity Fair on June 12, 1905, when he was director of the British Museum (Natural History).

The cartoon's legend states, “His religion is the worship of all sorts of winged and finny freaks.” According to his biographer, Joe Lester, Lankester “remained Huxley's most faithful disciple, carrying out not only the biological, but also what may be called the socio-political testament of his master.” 24 Yet “Darwin's bulldog” thought Ray should be kept on a short leash. Lankester's pugnacity towards the entrenched academic establishment “distressed even the combative Huxley, whose letters are long invocations to his pupil to ‘simmer down.’ ” 25 Despite interests as wide ranging as protozoology, epidemiology, paleontology, wilderness conservation, and economic biology, Lankester's grounding was in comparative anatomy. Following Huxley's lead at South Kensington, he carried forward the task of turning the bookish lectures at London's University College into lab classes that emphasized dissection, observation, and drawing–and not just for fledgling surgeons.

Huxley believed that such work taught a valuable moral discipline to any educated person: [Most people cannot imagine the effort of] trying to come to a comprehension of the meanest worm or weed—of its structure, its habits, its relation to the great scheme of nature...To describe its appearance with accuracy [requires] far more patience, perseverance and self-denial than they have easily at command;...preconceived notions interfere with their forming a truthful comprehension of objective fact. There is not one person in fifty whose habits of mind are sufficiently accurate to enable him to give a truthful description of the exterior of a rose! 6 Although Lankester followed Huxley's lead in developing standardized classroom dissection, he was well aware of its pitfalls. Students tended to see what their teachers expected them to see, even if the textbooks were wrong. Lankester was delighted when a student, Margery Mosely, found a hitherto unnoticed gill-plume in a red-footed crayfish (Astacis flubatilis). When the demonstrator in her biology class refused even to look at it, she sent her drawings to Lankester.

He praised her for discerning structures that had escaped the great Huxley's eyes, “as well as the eyes of tens of thousands of students and teachers (including myself) who have studied the red-foot crayfish year after year and missed the little gill.” 22 Filling in the details of anatomy on supposedly well-studied species was no routine matter: It is astonishing how many good observers it requires to dissect and draw and record over and over again the structure of an animal, before an approximately correct account is obtained. 14 —E. Ray Lankester He was aware, however, that trying to teach anatomy with an evolutionary perspective is no easy task. “At present students learn the anatomy of a mussel,” Lankester observed, “and never think of it as representing a large group, and don't care whether there are other things more or less like it than not.” 10 But the study of selected types is not enough. “Morphology is essentially comparative.

It becomes daily more obvious that the histology, morphology and physiology of the organism must be considered and treated without regard to the arbitrary separation of adult and embryonic conditions, and without the exclusiveness which the selection of types involves.” 10 POPULARIZER OF EVOLUTION For years, Lankester wrote an entertaining weekly newspaper column about natural history topics and evolutionary themes. The articles were collected in a series of books, including Science from an Easy Chair (1909), Diversions of a Naturalist (1915), and Great and Small Things (1923). 20 As director of the British Museum (Natural History), he helped to establish a dynamic Darwinian tradition in an institution formerly devoted to classification. Lankester's book Extinct Animals (1905) 18 became the standard popular introduction to dinosaurs and ancient animals. Intended for young readers, it was used by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the source for prehistoric creatures in his classic adventure novel, The Lost World (1912), the forerunner of all dinosaur tales. Among Doyle's illustrations are some of Lankester's dinosaur reconstructions, with members of fictional Professor Challenger's expedition drawn into the pictures.

In Doyle's novel, Challenger refers to “an excellent monograph by my gifted friend Ray Lankester.” 2 Lankester was also influential in the development of prehistoric archeology, coining many of the terms still used to describe stone tools. 30 NATURAL SELECTION, INHERITANCE, AND DEGENERATION Lankester did more than teach and popularize evolution: some historians of science credit him with helping to rescue the idea of natural selection from the limbo into which it had fallen in the early decades of the 20th century. Although evolution, or descent with modification, had been adopted by British biologists, they balked at accepting natural selection as its chief mechanism. Field naturalists Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir Joseph Hooker and Henry Walter Bates wrote brilliantly on natural selection, but not one experimental biologist in England had taken up the topic. 26 Lankester became interested in the German August Weismann's theory that inheritance was carried by a “germ plasm” that could not be directly modified by behavior or environment. When the opportunity arose, Lankester invited Weismann to Oxford, where he gave lectures about his genetic experiments.

In Ernst Mayr's view, Lankester's role in promoting Weismann among English scientists was “of decisive importance for subsequent developments in Britain.” 26 In attempting to combine non-Lamarckian inheritance with natural selection, Lankester's Oxford group—which eventually included E. S. Goodrich, Julian Huxley, G. de Beer, and E. B. Ford—laid the foundations for the modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution. According to Mayr, no one was pursuing these ideas at Cambridge or at University College, London, until years later, when R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane began to publish. 26 But evolution, to Lankester, was not necessarily synonymous with progress. Indeed, he believed that evolution could just as easily lead in the opposite direction, to decadence and degeneration. “Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained,” he wrote, “seem to lead as a rule to degeneration; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune.” Lankester did more than teach and popularize evolution.

Lankester rescued the idea of natural selection from the limbo into which it had fallen in the early decades of the 20th century. Fearing that England was becoming bloated by colonial wealth, he wrote: “Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organization in this way. Let the parasitic life once be secured, and away go legs, jaws, eyes, and ears; the active, highly-gifted crab, insect, or annelid may become a mere sac, absorbing nourishment and laying eggs.” 11 Apprehensive about the complacency of Victorian England, he warned his fellow members of the “English race” against allowing themselves to be overtaken in the struggle for existence through sheer laziness, which could lead to physical and moral degeneration. 12 , 15 Unlike Huxley, Lankester was a doctrinaire materialist who thought science would ultimately explain everything about nature and human nature. With massive government support, it could banish ignorance, replace religion, and provide the foundation for a prosperous, moral, and just society.

Only through obeying the laws of science, he wrote, could England hope to save her people from “degradation” and “degeneration.” 16 Huxley was much less sanguine. In his view, scientific materialism was only a useful working assumption, not an overriding explanatory principle. In 1878, he warned that what we arbitrarily label as “mind” and “matter” “are only two out of infinite varieties of existence which we are not competent to conceive—in the midst of which ... we might be set down, with no more notion of what was about us, than the worm in a flower-pot, on a London balcony has of the life of the great city.” Some scientists, he complained, “talk as if ... [accepting] matter as the ‘substance’ of all things cleared up all the mysteries of existence. In point of fact, it leaves them exactly where they were.” 8 A SCIENTIFIC “SKUNK-HUNTER” In 1876, while still a student, Lankester gained international attention when he prosecuted the celebrated American medium Henry Slade.

During the height of the Spiritualist movement, the dreamy, mustachioed psychic convinced many gullible Londoners that he could communicate with their dead relatives. Sitters would ask questions, and Slade importuned the departed “spirits” to write their answers on a small slate held under the table. Lankester and a friend attended a seance and ambushed Slade by snatching a slate from his hands in the darkened room. 9 As Lankester expected, it contained “spirit-writing” even before he had asked a question. The young biologist then hauled Slade into police court (Fig. 4 ) and prosecuted him as a “common rogue”—the first time a scientist had formally charged a psychic for conducting fraudulent experiments. 27 Figure 4. Download Powerpoint slide Young Lankester holds up the slates on which the professional “spirit-medium” Henry Slade (extreme left) caused mysterious chalked messages to appear. The evolutionary biologist's prosecution of Slade in 1876 was the first time a scientist had charged a psychic with criminal fraud. Illustration courtesy of author's collection. By so doing, Lankester knew that he would please Darwin and Huxley.

At Darwin's request, Huxley had attended seances attempting to catch mediums in fraud. Darwin detested them, for a pair of notorious spiritualist swindlers had recently tried to infiltrate his own family. The great naturalist sent Lankester 10 pounds towards the cost of prosecuting Slade, “as a public benefit.” 17 Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, was the star witness for the defense. A leading and sincere Spiritualist, he testified to Slade's integrity as an “inquirer after truth.” Thus, Britain's two leading naturalists, Darwin and Wallace, took opposing sides when the supernatural went on trial. 28 The result was anticlimactic; Slade was convicted but freed on a technicality, and then fled the country. While Lankester's exposure of Slade was admired by some, others thought a serious scientist should have better things to do than prosecute a relatively harmless fraud. “It is not true that science has nothing to fear from fraud,” Lankester replied.

“All humanity has much to fear from fraud, and to all human progress, fraud is, and has been, a deadly enemy.” 25 Lankester eventually tired of the game, but urged others to continue: “The spirit medium is a curious and unsavoury specimen of natural history, and if you wish to study him, you must take him unawares, as you would any other vermin.... To do this one must assume the garb of a believer ... [then introduce] a light, a blow from a fist or a firm grasp of the hand.... I have done my share of the skunk-hunting; let others follow.” 13 Thomas Huxley, on the other hand, really appreciated a good con—especially if it was brought off with style. Once he was present when a clever and attractive American woman mystified a select company with a fraudulent display of “psychic powers” and “thought-reading.” Though he saw easily through her game, Huxley was so charmed by the lady's finesse that he gallantly refrained from exposing her.

“Fraud is often genius out of place,” he mused, “and I confess that I have never been able to get over a certain sneaking admiration for [her].” 7 Lankester dismissed believers in Spiritualism and psychic phenomena as victims of “cerebral disease.” 19 Huxley was more sympathetic and respectful towards those who were hoodwinked. Even distinguished scientists, like Alfred Russel Wallace or the chemist William Crookes, had been vulnerable to skillful deceivers.

Few scientists were prepared to appreciate how “much more difficult [it is] to make such observations and interpretations in a room full of people, stirred by the expectation of the marvelous, than in the calm seclusion of a laboratory [a reference to Crookes] or the solitude of a tropical forest [a reference to Wallace].” Huxley opined that ordinary folk need not judge themselves too harshly for falling into the same traps: “And one who has not tried it cannot imagine the strain of the mind involved in sitting for an hour or two in a dark room, on the watch for the dodges of a wary ‘medium.’ A man may be an excellent naturalist or chemist; and yet make a very poor detective.” 7 In the end, although he considered himself immune to cooked-up “evidence” of the supernatural, Ray Lankester was vulnerable when the subject was human evolution.

In 1911, Lankester joined his bamboozled colleagues who considered the fraudulent Piltdown fossils to be those of “the earliest Englishman.” The famous stained and filed orangutan jaw, he came to believe, was “the most startling and significant fossil bone that has ever been brought to light.” 21 And he had no doubt that the flints found nearby were chipped and shaped by prehistoric man (Fig. 5 ). Figure 5. Download Powerpoint slide Sir Arthur Keith, center, measures the Piltdown cranium in this famous image of British scientists painted in 1915 by John Cooke. Charles Dawson, the probable hoaxer, stands behind Keith, partially blocking the hanging portrait of Charles Darwin. E. Ray Lankester, one of the supporters of the “ape-man's” authenticity, sits at the extreme right. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. Lankester's belief in his own carefully cultivated scientific objectivity had led him to scorn those who accepted shoddy evidence if it supported their beliefs in spirit communication. When his own cherished hopes and beliefs about human origins were at issue, however, the lifelong skeptic embraced a crude fake.

Forty years later, new testing methods revealed that the relic was a forgery, but Ray Lankester never knew that he, the nemesis of hoaxers, had finally been had. Biographical Information Mr. Milner is a senior editor of Natural History Magazine at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. An anthropologist and historian of science, he did his graduate work at UCLA and at the University of California, Berkeley. His special interests include the development of evolutionary theory, the history of natural history, and the lives of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. He is presently working on the third revised edition of his Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity's Search for its Origins, which first appeared in 1990. He has also authored a short biography, Charles Darwin: Evolution of a Naturalist (Facts on File, 1993), and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. Ancillary LITERATURE CITED 1 DarwinF and SewardAC, editors. 1903. More letters of Charles Darwin. CD to ERL, 15 April 1872. New York: D. Appleton; vol 2, p 336.

2 Doyle AC. 1912. The lost world. 1st ed. London: Hodder and Stoughton; p 52. 3 English M. 1990. Victorian values: the life and times of Dr. Edwin Lankester MD, FRS. Bristol: Biopress; p 124. 4 Ibid. p 56. 5 Huxley L. 1900. Life and letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. THH to Anton Dohrn, 7 July 1871. New York: Macmillan; vol 1, p 361. 6 Huxley TH. 1856. On natural history as knowledge, discipline, and power. Fullerian Lecture at Royal Inst., quoted in Richardson J, Dallas W, Cobbald TS, et al. c. 1870. The Museum of Natural History. London and Glasgow: Wm. MacKenzie; vol 1, p v. 7 Huxley TH 1 January 1889. Reflections on a philosopher's big toe. Pall Mall Gazette.

Huxley Papers at Imperial College London (HP 49, 130). 8 Huxley TH. 1894. Hume: with helps to the study of Berkeley. In Collected essays of Thomas Henry Huxley; London: Macmillan; vol 6, Appendix, Note A, p 286. Lankester ER 16 September 1876. Letter to The Times of London. 10 LesterJ and BowlerP, editors. 1995. E. Ray Lankester and the making of modern British biology. ERL to Hooker, 5 July 1879. British Society for the History of Science Monograph 9, p 67. 11 Lankester ER 13 January 1885. Letter, “The Spiritualistic Challenge,” to Pall Mall Gazette. 14 Lankester ER. 1888. Zoology. In: Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed. London; vol 24, p 800. Quoted in Lester J, 1995. p 81. 15 Lankester ER. 1890.

“Biology and the state.” In LankesterER, editor. The Advancement of Science. London: p 108–109. 16 Thomas Huxley Thomas Huxley QUESTION: Why was Thomas Huxley nicknamed "Darwin's Bulldog"? ANSWER: Of all of the proponents of evolution, Thomas Huxley's nickname helped him stand out above all the rest - "Darwin's Bulldog." Thomas Huxley was a scientist and philosopher of the 19th century. He was most famous for his vehement defense of evolution as the source of earth's diverse life forms. He once said that he "protected" Darwin, referring to himself as "his bull dog." The moniker stuck, despite the philosophical and historical differences between the two men. Huxley was famed for some of his other exploits. Among these, his debate with Archbishop Samuel Wilberforce, his "progressive" philosophical work, and his supposed coining of the term "agnostic." Huxley was initially reluctant to throw his full support behind evolution. This was common before Darwin published "The Origin of Species." Darwin did not invent evolution by any stretch of the imagination.

There were many scientists who preferred the concept of evolution to creation. Yet, there was no logical, plausible explanation for how evolution proceeded. Darwin's book suggested the mechanism of natural selection, and was embraced by a community eager for support of their preferred view. Thomas Huxley was one such supporter. He was thrilled by Darwin's work, and defended it to great publicity and effect. Huxley did not agree with the entirety of Darwin's theories, however. Huxley could see the problems with Darwin's slow-moving, gradual evolution. There was (and still is) a lack of fossil evidence to support transitional forms, and a great deal of evidence to suggest a sudden explosion of new species. Huxley believed in a much more rapid evolution - a notion that entirely different species could spring up in just a few generations. Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin argued endlessly about their differing views on evolution. Huxley also tangled with scientists for mixing his philosophical and scientific work. There are many instances in Huxley's work where he takes on an anti-religious message, somewhat off-topic. Thomas Huxley had a marked involvement with agnostic and atheistic philosophy.

He was unaffected by those who tried to discredit his scientific work on the basis of his religious beliefs. While his philosophy does not invalidate his science, it does help to shed some light on his dogged pursuit of evolutionary theory. Darwin's theory, according to Huxley, was the "best available explanation" for evolution. A point often lost is that Huxley admitted that Darwin's theory did not "prove evolution." Much as a witness in a court case can provide a plausible explanation for events, that explanation is nothing but theory until it has been proven beyond all doubt. The lack of direct evidence for Darwin's theory of natural selection was what kept Thomas Huxley, the skeptic, from throwing his full support behind it. Yet it was his desire to find naturalistic explanations for life that truly gave "Darwin's Bulldog" a reason to bare his teeth. (Thomas Huxley known as Darwins bulldog)- some prone to wild - RS - 151 View Full Document This is the end of the preview. Sign up to access the rest of the document. Unformatted text preview: (Thomas Huxley known as Darwins bulldog)- some prone to wild exaggeration in support of atheist interpretation of theory of evolution.

- British Christians not as impacted by a Christian evolution- Complexity of situation following Darwin didnt mean everyone became neutral- People who are comfortable w/ evolution (E.B. warfield Princeton theological seminary and was Calvinist)- In early 20 th century some who were involved in publication of The Fundamentals booklets, published by Fundamentalists . o Reacting against modernity and anti-supernaturalism. (3) development of the idea of the university (over time of modernity &amp; how Christianity has dealt with idea of university). - universities have been around for hundreds of years; very closely associated with church as most found in medieval time (even during reformation in 16 th century). Began as training clergymen. Seen with Luther at Wittenburg.- places like Harvard/yale founded as training schools for ministers aka seminaries. - colleges and universities later began to be founded simply as places where learning and intellect is pursued. Independently of religious conviction. - places that started as Christian began to show their independence from not only the churches but from institutional Christian faith.

26 May 2014 Class in Celtic Hotel Influences: (1) John Wycliffe and the Lollardsreformation before the reformation: protestant thinkers who didnt make it to the actual Reformation.- rejected indulgences, doctrine of transubstantiation, emphasis on vernacular translations (all protestant ideas) - caused people to begin to think in protestant ideas- condemned in 1415 (2) Tyndales New Testamentpublished in 1525, a vernacular translation (3) Effects of the geographical separationmain decisions come from Rome so England is distanced and this geographical separation adds to the disconnect. (4) Protestant Reformation: ideas sweep through people: they are reading bible, know Wycliffe, havent seen pope in a while. Masses still in Latin which causes strong disconnect. (5) Henry VIII: 4 reigns in English reformation (henry viii, Edward vi, then mary, Elizabeth). Henry viii is the first to reign during this so important. a.

marriage affair: starts with Katharine of Aragonshe was married to Henry viii (18 yrs) and since she couldnt produce a male heir, just had Mary female child. So he wants to get a divorce. Rumors going around saying that levitical laws are the cause of no male heir (b/c he married his brothers widow), so he starts to cheat on Katharine and marries anne also. brothers widow), so he starts to cheat on Katharine and marries anne also.... Thursday, June 5RS/HIS 151 19th Century Missions 1. Edinburgh Missionary Conference o 19th Century Missions Notes Keyword: "darwin's bulldog" | ClipArt ETC Thomas H. Huxley British biologist who defended Darwin's theory of evolution. He is known as "Darwin's Bulldog." Huxley… Thomas Henry Huxley | British biologist | Britannica.com Thomas Henry Huxley Alternative Title: T. H.

Huxley Thomas Henry Huxley Henri Bergson Thomas Henry Huxley, (born May 4, 1825, Ealing , Middlesex , England —died June 29, 1895, Eastbourne , Sussex ), English biologist, educator, and advocate of agnosticism (he coined the word). Huxley’s vigorous public support of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism earned him the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog,” while his organizational efforts, public lectures, and writing helped elevate the place of science in modern society. T.H. Huxley, c. 1885. Hulton Archive/Getty Images Student life Thomas Henry Huxley, born above a butcher’s shop, was the youngest of the six surviving children of schoolmaster George Huxley and his wife, Rachel. Although Huxley received only two years (1833–35) of formal education at his father’s declining Ealing School, its evangelicalism later marked his scientific rhetoric . From 1835 his father tried managing a bank in his native Coventry, which left Huxley footloose in the ribbon-weaving city.

Huxley’s parents were Anglicans (members of the Church of England ), but the boy sympathized with the town’s Nonconformist (or Dissenting) weavers, who wanted religious equality and an end to the Anglicans’ control of public institutions. Fascinated by science and religion , he studied Unitarian works, whose cause-and-effect explanations and denial of the duality of spirit and matter challenged the socially conservative views dominant in natural history and natural theology. Thomas Carlyle ’s books taught Huxley that the religious feeling of awe was distinct from theology, which dealt with gods and miraculous events. The teenager speculated (as did radical Dissenters) that morality was a cultural product, which left it open to a scientific explanation. These were the seeds of Huxley’s agnosticism, scientific enthusiasm, and understanding of sectarian power play. The longhaired student was apprenticed (c. 1838–41) to his sister Ellen’s beer-swilling husband, John Charles Cooke, a medical materialist. Transferred to a London dockside practitioner early in 1841, Huxley was shaken by the lives of his pauper patients.

Even at the back-street anatomy school where Huxley took the botany prize in 1842—Sydenham College, off Gower Street in London—there was no escaping sectarian politics and science; Sydenham’s owner, Marshall Hall , was studying mechanistic reflex arcs while haranguing the Royal College of Physicians for excluding Dissenters from its fellowship. On a free scholarship (1842–45) to Charing Cross Hospital, London, Huxley won medals in physiology and organic chemistry. His own mechanistic bent showed as he sought to explain living processes by physicochemical laws, and his superb microscopy was revealed in his discovery in 1845 of a new membrane, now known as Huxley’s layer, in the human hair sheath. The Rattlesnake voyage EU Considers Rules For Robots To repay his debts, he entered the navy and served (1846–50) as assistant surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake surveying Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea .

With his microscope lashed to a table in the chart room, he studied the structure and growth of sea anemones , hydras, jellyfish, and sea nettles such as the Portuguese man-of-war , which decomposed too quickly to be studied anywhere except on the high seas. He grouped them together as Nematophora (named for their stinging cells), although they were later classified as the phylum Cnidaria (or Coelenterata). Demonstrating that they were all composed of two “foundation membranes” (shortly to be called endoderm and ectoderm ), he even suggested that these membranes were related to the two original cell layers in the vertebrate embryo. The aristocratic Captain Owen Stanley, commander of the Rattlesnake, posted Huxley’s papers to his father, the bishop of Norwich, for London publication; but such old-style patronage galled Huxley, who insisted that science no longer needed aristocratic sanction. A whirlwind romance in Sydney in 1847 left the sailor engaged to a brewer’s daughter, Henrietta (“Nettie”) Anne Heathorn.

By now Huxley considered it a moral duty to weigh the evidence before believing church dogmas , and his skepticism worried Nettie. He sailed to the Great Barrier Reef and southern coast of New Guinea, sketched Papuans, and suffered terrible mental collapses in the broiling heat of the Coral Sea as he worried about the worth of his scientific work. But he continued his pathbreaking observations, noting that the larval sea squirt has tail muscles like a tadpole’s. This, in later years, would be part of the proof that sea squirts, or ascidians, are the ancestors of the vertebrates. Biology Bonanza Huxley returned home in 1850, hoping to earn enough to bring Nettie to England. His success at the Royal Society of London testified to the meteoric rise of his scientific reputation: elected a fellow in 1851, he was its Royal Medal winner in 1852 and a councillor in 1853. But it was all praise and no pudding, he fumed.

Although the British Treasury put him on half pay to finish his research (which appeared in 1859 as The Oceanic Hydrozoa), Huxley could not find an academic post in science. Such jobs were rare when Britain’s Oxbridge-trained leaders studied classics and when the public (privately funded) schools considered science dehumanizing. This led Huxley to more crushing depressions and a desire to raise science to a paying profession. Huxley took sides on the controversial issues of the day. He insisted that sea nettles were individual organisms, not colonies. He denied that the skull was composed of vertebrae, as his rival, the comparative anatomist Richard Owen , believed. Following the geologist Sir Charles Lyell , Huxley challenged the view that fossils showed a progression through the rocks, and he went on to repudiate a Christian-based geology that made humans the culmination of Creation. Marian Evans (the novelist George Eliot ), writing alongside Huxley on the rationalist Westminster Review, an influential magazine at the cutting edge of 19th-century literary Britain, saw his brilliance as counterpoised by a love of provocation.

Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies After four increasingly difficult years, Huxley’s professional fortunes improved in 1854. He began teaching natural history and paleontology at the Government School of Mines in Piccadilly, central London. With a new professional ethos sweeping the country, Huxley trained schoolmasters in science and fostered a meritocratic, exam-based approach to education and professional advancement. He simultaneously occupied chairs at the Royal Institution and the Royal College of Surgeons, and he organized public lectures for workers, themselves looking for a new, liberating science. His situation stabilized, he brought Nettie to England, and their eight-year engagement ended with their marriage in 1855. “ Darwin’s bulldog” Charles Darwin , about to start writing his On the Origin of Species (1859), saw Huxley’s star rising.

A visit to Darwin’s Down House in 1856 laid the foundation for a long relationship between the two men and their families (Nettie recuperated at Down after the death of her firstborn, Noel, in 1860; she and Emma Darwin shared concerns over their husbands’ scientific theorizing and its theological consequences; and the Darwins stood as godparents to two of the Huxleys’ eight children). Charles Darwin and Huxley, meanwhile, complemented each other perfectly. The reclusive Darwin needed a public champion and defender. Huxley had initial difficulty with natural selection itself and opted for an internal source of variation that could produce new species at a stroke. Nonetheless, he saw Darwin’s naturalistic (i.e., nonmiraculous) approach as a valuable aid in his campaign to build an independent scientific elite unfettered by the constraints of the old order.

Therefore, rather than shy away from the controversial aspects of evolutionary theory, Huxley played them up, using Darwin’s Origin of Species as a “Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.” Unlike some contemporaries (such as Saint George Jackson Mivart ) who sought a reconciliation between science and theology, he framed the debate over Creation and evolution in black-and-white, either/or terms and was unforgiving of colleagues who straddled the fence. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest A defining moment in this professional campaign came early, in an exchange with the conservative bishop of Oxford , Samuel Wilberforce , at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1860. Wilberforce apparently asked whether the apes were on his grandmother’s or grandfather’s line (a tasteless joke by Victorian standards), to which Huxley—exuding Puritan virtue—replied that he would rather have an ape as an ancestor than a wealthy bishop who prostituted his gifts. Although Darwinian propagandists, in continually recounting this episode, helped to put the men of science on an intellectual par with the powerful clergy, the reality was more complicated.

At Oxford, Huxley was supported by some liberal Anglican clergy who disliked the hard-line bishop, and Wilberforce himself subsequently worked alongside Huxley at the Zoological Society. Nor did Huxley shy away from appropriating religious authority when it suited his purposes; he spoke of developing a “church scientific” and arranged for Darwin to be buried at Westminster Abbey . Huxley carried the standard of scientific naturalism and evolution on a number of battlefields. He challenged the notion of supernatural creation, informing his democratic artisans that humans had risen from animals—a lowly-ancestor-bright-future image that appealed to the downtrodden—and that Darwin’s Nature was a book open for all to read, rather than the prerogative of priests. He plunged headlong into the inflammatory issue of human ancestry; Darwin avoided it, but Huxley made it his specialty. In 1861 he denied that human and ape brains differ significantly, sparking a raging dispute with Richard Owen that brought human evolution to public attention. He discussed ape ancestry and the new fossil Neanderthal man in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863).

Huxley also turned to fossils, working first on crossopterygians (Devonian lobe-fin fishes, the ancestors of amphibians) and the crocodile-shaped amphibians disinterred in Britain’s coal pits. But his coup came in 1867–68, as he achieved a better understanding of phylogeny , or life’s fossil pathway, when after reclassifying birds according to their palate bones, he proceeded to show that all birds were descended from small carnivorous dinosaurs. Power and “Pope Huxley” Lady Flora Hastings Huxley’s controversial positions in the 1860s and ’70s won the support of an increasing number of his contemporaries, while his research established him as one of the leading scientists of his era. As a scientific popularizer he was without peer, and he was an energetic organizer and political infighter. These qualities gave Huxley the levers necessary to elevate the position of science in British society, and he helped to build a social order in which science and professionalism replaced classics and patronage. He did not fight alone.

With the Kew Gardens botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker , the philosopher Herbert Spencer , the physicist John Tyndall , and other former outsiders, Huxley formed the X-Club in 1864 to advance science. Within a decade they were parceling out Royal Society posts. Their mouthpiece was the Reader—in which Huxley, answering Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli’s criticism of Darwinism , notoriously claimed that science would achieve “domination over the whole realm of the intellect”—and Nature (founded in 1869 by Huxley’s team). Huxley also served as president of the Geological Society (1869–71), the Ethnological Society (1868–71), the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1870), the Marine Biological Association (1884–90), and the Royal Society (1883–85). With seats on 10 Royal Commissions, deliberating on everything from fisheries to diseases to vivisection , he had clearly penetrated the labyrinthine corridors of power. Those corridors shuddered at the growing strength of the rival industrial powers Germany and the United States .

Huxley and his circle argued that better scientific education and support for scientific research would produce the workers and innovations necessary to maintain British supremacy. Huxley spent much of the 1860s and ’70s immersed in educational reform and institution building. He joined the Eton College governing board and the London School Board (1870–72), devising a modern curriculum suitable for both the sons of privilege and the capital’s “street arabs.” He likewise served as rector (1872–74) of the ancient University of Aberdeen and principal (1868–80) of the new Working Men’s College in south London. As a member (1870–75) of the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction, he recommended the fusion of his Government School of Mines with the Royal College of Chemistry; they were moved to South Kensington and renamed the Normal School of Science (ultimately the Imperial College of Science and Technology, now part of the University of London ). He advised on the founding of a vocational Central Institution for Technical Education (opened in London in 1884), for which he was made a freeman of the City of London in 1883.

To fill the demand for science teachers (driven in part by the Education Act of 1870), he taught courses at South Kensington for schoolmasters and mistresses (the latter did so well that he was inspired to fight for the admission of women to universities), and he set the Department of Science and Art’s public exams. His exam invigilators were Royal Engineers (the construction workers at South Kensington), which gave his “warfare” image of science with theology its deeper military aura. Not for nothing did the students nickname him “the General.” His popularity grew with his political influence. Huxley’s talks were headline grabbers. The provocation and the handsome looks drew enormous crowds; once, in 1866, as he gave a talk on blind faith as the ultimate sin, the evangelist of science saw 2,000 people turned away from the crammed hall.

A bequest of £1,000 from a Quaker supporter financed Huxley’s American tour in 1876, on which he gave talks about the birds’ dinosaur ancestry, made the succession of fossil horses in America the “Demonstrative Evidence of Evolution,” and was dubbed “Huxley Eikonoklastes” by a New York City paper. (Huxley’s whistle-stop tours led his children to call him “the lodger” at home.) No less popular were his writings. He took readers through time tunnels to experience exotic past worlds. An essay on protoplasm as the substrate of life sent the Fortnightly Review into seven editions in 1869. His numerous introductory textbooks were well received. Such prodigious activity on so many fronts led to continual breakdowns and recuperations in Egypt, Germany, Italy, and France. In addition, his pay never quite sufficed , as he financed the children of his broken-down brother James and drunken sister Ellen. And the more he upheld family values and denied that skepticism and evolutionism led to debauchery , the more he worried about scandals breaking around his ne’er-do-well relations.

In 1869 he coined the word agnostic , meaning that one could know nothing of ultimate reality, whether spiritual or material. For him morality rested not in reciting creeds but in weighing evidence for events; it was a consecration of doubt that vested his new professionals with the priests’ old power. (For such messianic pronouncements he was nicknamed “Pope Huxley.”) His research, meanwhile, became increasingly influenced by evolution . He used the fishlike lancelet (amphioxus) to plumb the origin of all vertebrates, tackled crayfish evolution, showed that Mesozoic crocodiles progressively developed a secondary palate (which allowed them to drown newly evolved mammalian prey), and wrote the section on evolution in biology in the article “Evolution” for the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (published 1878).

Finally, in creating a package that the teachers could take to their hometowns, Huxley forged the discipline of biology—based on structural (rather than evolutionary) anatomy, stripped down to a few exemplary animal and plant “types.” The old lion With a radical home secretary making Huxley an inspector of fisheries in 1881, his pay was finally augmented. But so was the strain. The final blow came as his talented daughter Marian went mad after 1882 (she died in Paris, under the care of the renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot , in 1887). A distraught , overworked Huxley resigned his professorship at the Normal School of Science (the future novelist H.G. Wells sat his last course) and the presidency of the Royal Society in 1885. He was awarded a state pension of £1,200 a year by the Liberal prime minister William Ewart Gladstone , even though Huxley—ever the polemicist—struck out against Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule policy, dissected his scriptural literalism, and refuted his attempt to reconcile the fossil evidence with the order of Creation listed in the book of Genesis .

Grieving for his daughter, Huxley in “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society” (1887) adopted a bitter social Darwinism —a term that would itself be introduced about 1890. Accepting Darwin’s Malthusian belief that overpopulation was the rule, Huxley maintained that the inevitable struggle and death undermined any possibility of socialist cooperation, which was back in contention after the socialist revival of 1886. He was answered by the anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin in Mutual Aid (1902). Huxley also nationalized the Darwinian struggle; he saw the industrial powers competing, making workforce training obligatory to win the economic “battle.” His last major talk was on “Evolution and Ethics” at the University of Oxford in 1893. Mellower now, six years after Marian’s death, Huxley used the occasion to detach benign human ethics from natural competition. Darwin’s “war”—between animals or industrial nations—had no place in our personal lives, he said. Society grows as we curb these “anti-social” animal instincts—it advances through the selection of individuals who are ethically the best, rather than physically the fittest.

Huxley suffered from pleurisy and heart disease in London’s smog, and the family moved to Eastbourne, on the Sussex coast, in 1890. Huxley was now an elder statesman of science, his once-radical ideas the foundations of the new Establishment. Agnosticism was equated with nonsectarianism; a lord chief justice in 1883 declared that Christianity was no longer the law of the land in England, with the caveat that while Huxley’s reverent questioning was now legal, vulgar working-class attacks on Christian beliefs were still indictable. Huxley’s brand of national Darwinism turned science against socialism and made naturalism synonymous with patriotism. The professions, including those in science, were accumulating power. He was also patriarch of an expanding intellectual dynasty . His son Leonard was a prominent editor, and three grandchildren would earn their own fame: Julian and Andrew as biologists and Aldous as a writer. It was this Huxley, as much a Unionist and nationalist as a brilliant propagandist for science, who was appointed to the Privy Council by the Conservative prime minister Robert Cecil, 3rd marquis of Salisbury, in 1892.

And so it was the Right Honourable Huxley who died of a heart attack on June 29, 1895—typically, midway through a defense of agnosticism. Huxley was buried on July 4, 1895, next to his tiny son Noel in St. Marylebone Cemetery, in Finchley, north London, his funeral being attended by a constellation of the greatest Victorian scientists. Thomas Huxley Known as Darwins bulldog Compares anatomy of - AR - 100 View Full Document 16. Thomas Huxley • Known as Darwin’s bulldog. • Compares anatomy of humans and apes and asserts we are related. • Used the fossil record to support his claims. • Posits that the newly discovered Neanderthal skull from Germany is evidence for human evolution . 17. Artifact • Objects of human manufacture that can be collected and removed from a site 18. Ecofact, • Natural materials used or altered by humans such as plant and animal remains • Zooarchaeologists study faunal remains to reconstruct environmental conditions, diet and economy.

• Paleoethnobotanists use a technique called flotation to separate charred plant remains, especially seeds, from archaeological soils. • They reconstruct ancient environmental conditions, economy, and diet. 19. Feature • Things that are built by humans that are not removable from the ground (ovens, trenches, etc.). 20. Structure • Standing remains, and the traces of standing remains, such as houses, granaries, and pyramids . 21. Matrix • The physical medium that surrounds, supports or holds archaeological data This preview has intentionally blurred sections. Sign up to view the full version. View Full Document 22. Provenience • The three dimensional location of archaeological data when found (e.g., northing, easting, depth or X, Y, Z). • Provenience is determined by applying two fundamental archaeological principles- Principle of Association and Principle of Superposition 23. Association • Archaeological data occurring stratigraphically adjacent to one another and in or on the same matrix. 24. Context • Characteristics of archaeological data, resulting from combined behavioral processes (human agents) and transformational processes (natural agents). • These processes are evaluated by means of recorded association, matrix and provenience . 25.

Archaeological Survey • Systematic attempt to locate, identify, and record the distribution of archaeological sites on the ground and in terms of the natural environment. 26. Archaeological Excavation • Excavation is the technique that archaeologists used to uncover buried materials from the past • In excavations, accurate information can be observed on the arrangement and relationships of structures, artifacts, plant and animal remains me other remains 27. Geophysical Survey • Employs techniques for locating and mapping archaeological deposits also called electronic subsurface detection 28. Remote Sensing • Remote Sensing complements Archaeological Surveys. • Uses data drawn from the analysis of satellite images and aerial photographs . 29. Relative Age Determination • Technique used to estimate the antiquity of archaeological materials • It is based on association with materials of known age or simple to say that one item is younger or older than another 30. Absolute Age Determination • Relative age determination is limited • It is often necessary to know the ages of archaeological materials more precisely in calendar years to answer most questions about the past • There are many methods for absolute age determination • Most rely on properties of radioactive decay in certain elements This is the end of the preview.

Sign up to access the rest of the document. TERM Archaeology 100 Study Guide Exam 2 BU AR 100 Study Guide 2 TUTANKHAMUNS TOMB 1. Pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) Who? Why u Archaeology 100 Study Guide Exam 2 The Scientists: Charles Darwin. "In October 1838, that is fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus' Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence [a phrase used by Malthus] which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be a new species. Here then I had at last got hold of a theory by which to work." 4 Darwin, directly on account of his early adventures (with his evidence and his conclusions: zoological, botanical, geological and paleontological), thinking individuals could no longer subscribe to the teachings of Genesis, viz., that every species had been created whole and have come through the ages unchanged.

5 All the evidence supports (and none exists that disproves) the proposition that life on earth has evolved; life started out slow and small, and our current state of existence is as a result of some process working upon natural materials throughout a period that consists of millions and millions of years. The question for Darwin is what is this process, a question which, for twenty years, Darwin worked on. He considered his own personal experiences which were considerable and the data that he had gathered. He read and read widely; he abstracted the learned journals; he talked to breeders of domesticated animals. And only after years of work did Darwin feel himself ready to express himself. More years were to pass, during which he gathered more and more evidence, when, in 1859, Darwin came out with his scholarly presentation, The Origin of Species In 1859, Darwin's shattering work, The Origin of Species , came out ("a sell out in one day"); it is now recognized as a leading work in natural philosophy and in the history of mankind.

Simply stated, Darwin's theory is that things, and, in particular, life, evolves by a process which Darwin called "natural selection." "Currently we accept the general idea that biological development can be explained by mutations in combination with natural selection. In its essential parts, therefore, Darwin's theory of development has been accepted. In Darwin's time mutations were not known about; their discovery has led to extensive modifications of his theory, but it has also eliminated the most important objections to it. ... We are beginning to see that the awesome wonder of the evolution from amoeba to man - for it is without a doubt an awesome wonder - was not the result of a mighty word from a creator, but of a combination of small, apparently insignificant processes. The structural change occurring in a molecule within a chromosome, the result of a struggle over food between two animals, the reproduction and feeding of young - such are the simple elements that together, in the course of millions of years, created the great wonder. This is nothing separate from ordinary life.

The wonder is in our everyday world, if only we have the ability to see it." 7 (Alfv&#233n's Atom, Man, and the Universe .) "is the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth. It helps us understand our origins ... We are part of a total process, made of the same matter and operating by the same energy as the rest of the cosmos, maintaining and reproducing by the same type of mechanism as the rest of life ..." 8 ( Sir Julian Huxley .) The theory of evolution is no longer just a theory; an overwhelming amount evidence has accumulated since Darwin. Darwin's theory has never been successfully refuted. Darwin discovered a law just as surely as Copernicus , Galileo and Newton discovered laws: natural laws. Just as the earth is in orbit and has come to be and is depended on the force of gravity, a natural law; so life has come into being and exists and is depended on the force of natural selection. One need not necessarily understand the why or the how of it, but a natural law such as gravitation or selection nonetheless exists, whether a particular puny human being, or group of them believe it or not.

The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist: Darwin , op. cit., p. 101. 3 This proposition, that it was his reading of Adam Smith which led to Darwin's theories in evolutionary biology, has provoked more than one of my readers to write and question me. First, one has to understand the theories of Smith; they are evolutionary. (That Darwin read Adam Smith, there can be little doubt.) "The study of spontaneous orders has long been the peculiar task of economic theory, although, of course, biology has from its beginning been concerned with that special kind of spontaneous order which we call an organism. Only recently [1973] has there arisen within the physical sciences under the name of cybernetics a special discipline which is also concerned with what are called self-organizing or self-generating systems." [ Hayek , Law, Legislation and Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 36-7. Hayek (a Nobel Prize winner) cites, in a footnote, work done by H. von Foerster & Zopf and more particularly, in regards to the anticipation of the main conceptions of cybernetics by Adam Smith.] Further, at p.

23, ibid., Hayek wrote: "It was in the discussion of such social formations as language and morals, law and money, that in the eighteenth century the twin conceptions of evolution and the spontaneous formation of an order were at last clearly formulated, and provided the intellectual tools which Darwin and his eighteenth-century moral philosophers and the historical schools of law and language might well be described, as some of the theorists of language of the nineteenth century indeed described themselves, as Darwinians before Darwin." In support, Hayek cites, in his footnote, numerous studies, and interestingly, for me as a lawyer, the eminent jurist, Sir Frederick Pollock who in turn makes reference to Edmund Burke and Montesquieu as being 'Darwinians before Darwin'." 4 There is no question that Darwin relied very much on Malthus' theories.

In Darwin's introduction to The Origin of Species he refers to Malthus, "This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms." And again in Chapter 3, "It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms." 5 Of course, Darwin's theory, at first blush, is at odds with the whole notion that there exists a Supreme Being which brought into existence all things. As to the Primary Cause and more generally the existence of a God: "I [Darwin] cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic." 6 It was entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life . For a variety of diverse reasons, even in 1859, Darwin felt little ready to express his theory; but he was spurred on by a fellow scientist, Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913).

Darwin received a letter from Wallace in the early 1840s, which contained, to Darwin's amazement, the theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace's theory came about as a result of the same inspiration which Darwin had, a reading of Malthus. Wallace, however, had little evidence for his theory: Darwin did. Darwin and Wallace jointly presented their theories to a learned society in London on July 1st, 1858 and both papers were published by the society shortly thereafter. Towards the end of 1859, Darwin came out with his book (he considered it a mere abstract). The publisher was John Murray in London and the first run of 1,200 copies were sold out in the first day. 7 Hannes Alfv&#233n is a professor of Plasma Physics at the University of Stockhol (San Francisco: Freeman, 1969). 8 This quote of Julian Huxley's comes from his work, Evolutionary Humanism (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1992.) Julian Huxley was the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895). Thomas H.

Huxley was an English biologist, teacher, and a defender of Darwin. Darwin was not a conversationalist and he only very rarely appeared in public to defend his theories himself; he was fully represented by Thomas H. Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog." It is interesting to note what Thomas H. Huxley said about his topic when confronted with the opposition in the form of Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford. Both Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce were on the same stage when during a conference which had as its theme, Darwinism. The Bishop, in a sarcastic manner called out: "I would like to ask Professor Huxley whether it was on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in." Darwin after whispering to his dinner companion, "The lord hath delivered him into my hands," took the podium: "A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.

If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice." 9 Chapter 4 - "Natural Selection." Darwin, incidently, wrote an autobiography. Custom Search

Question: Which biologist was known as "Darwin's Bulldog"?
Answer: Thomas Huxley