Customer Reviews

Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was looking forward to reading Ian Hesketh's new (and very short) book on the famous debate held at Oxford University on June 30, 1860 during the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. I had read, inter alia, Adrian Desmond's biography of T.H. Huxley, Janet Browne's and Gavin de Beer's biographies of Darwin, and Stephen Jay Gould's balanced discussion of the debate in his book, "Bully for Brontosaurus." Hesketh's book is a disappointment. The chief problems are that the work is unfocussed and poorly edited. Hesketh apparently cannot quite make up his mind what he really wants to say, or how to say it, but he is plainly ambivalent about Darwin, openly contemptuous of Huxley, and sympathetic to Bishop Wilberforce. His thesis, to the extent one exists, does not appear till the last sentence of the last chapter before the Epilogue, where he complains "Is it any wonder that Wilberforce perceived in Darwinian evolution a creed, a metaphysical system of beliefs masked by the so-called purity of science?" Hesketh attempts to cool things down in the Epilogue, but his book is too charged with indignation for this effort to succeed. While on the one hand he deplores the "tired image of science versus religion," he has to (and does)acknowledge that there is indeed a dichotomy between the religious opponents of evolution and its champions, and that conflict between them continues to this day. Still it is a mistake to assume the ongoing debate is entirely polarized. Moderate people of faith are entirely willing to accept evolution and most mainstream religions have adopted statements saying they accept evolution. Only months before the Oxford debate, moreover, some Anglican clergy representing the Broad Church Movement argued in "Essays and Reviews" that Christianity would benefit by casting off untenable beliefs and accepting the claims of modern science. Yet Hesketh seems openly sympathetic to Bishop Wilberforce, who, he reminds us, saw his faith under attack. While Wilberforce straddled the line between Evangelicals and Tractarians, he tried to bring heresy charges in ecclesiastical courts against the clerics whose arguments in "Essays and Reviews" went too far for him. It should be remembered that even as late as 1883, when Darwin was dead, people who openly espoused atheism were liable to be prosecuted as blasphemers and sent to jail for attacking the Anglican State. Huxley thoughtfully embraced agnosticism and, as a professional, was spared this indignity, which was more readily inflicted on members of the working class who had openly declared that they were atheists.

My initial impression of Hesketh's book was that it contains some regrettably mediocre writing. He wallows in cliches: the phrase "narrative arc" appears three times in the 111 pages of text. Debates "rage" at "fever pitch." He also writes, "a complex web of cultural debates that by that time was raging...." (And how, precisely, does a web rage?) In one of several non sequiturs, he remarks that "Darwin certainly had the means to support himself (his mother was a Wedgewood)," after all. So did Darwin really have the means to support himself, or was he dependent on his mother's family? And why then does Hesketh fail to mention Darwin's father, an affluent physician and money-lender?

While it may seem that these are quibbles, Hesketh's slips become more significantly problematic later on. For instance, Hesketh discusses some of the accounts of the Oxford debate, acknowledging that "Witnesses' accounts have typically sided with Huxley regarding what exactly was said, which underscores that Huxley sought to control what was written about what he had said."

Oh really? If the witnesses agreed with Huxley's account, it seems reasonable to infer that his account was probably accurate. But Hesketh is not interested in that inference. Instead, he tries to argue from the fact of the witnesses' agreement that Huxley "sought to control what was written about what he had said." This makes no sense. If the witnesses already agreed with Huxley's account, as Hesketh says, then why would Huxley need to control the discussion of what he had said?

Part of the problem is that Hesketh just does not like Huxley. He writes, "Because of Huxley's lower-middle-class background, nothing came easy for him, except perhaps learning."

"Perhaps"? Why such a grudging concession? Despite his lack of means, Huxley taught himself German, Latin, and Greek, not to mention anatomy. By the age of eighteen, he had an article published by the Royal Society. At twenty-six, he won the Royal Medal and was named to the Royal Society council - without ever having obtained a university degree. "Perhaps," indeed.

But Hesketh does not leave it at that. In another demeaning little swipe, he refers to the Oxford debate as Huxley's "coming out party." This sort of pettiness is not worthy of Hesketh and does nothing to advance his argument. Huxley, moreover, was not quite the two-dimensional polemicist that Hesketh tries to depict. He was a devoted family man who worked hard all his life, promoting science and public medical schools to alleviate the kind of human suffering he had witnessed in his youth. He was famously literate, and sensitive to cultural and artistic nuances. His writings are a delight to read, not only for his felicitous prose style but also for his wit and the clarity of his reasoning. Year after year, he took the time to lecture on science to delighted audiences of uncultivated workingmen. Before the Oxford debate, he was reticent about continuing to attend the conference and wrote to his wife that he went out in the rain "to look at some of the chapels which are very beautiful." It was none other than Robert Chambers, the author of "Vestiges" (whom Huxley had attacked earlier), who prevailed on the anatomist to attend the fateful session where Wilberforce held forth. And while the evidence discloses that Darwin himself was indisposed, retching, during the time of the meeting, Hesketh suggests he was somehow remiss in not attending - that Darwin had "backed out." On the other hand, he gives Richard Owen a pass, blandly noting that Owen "could not make the discussion." These are among a myriad of small but piquant details that give Hesketh's book a peculiarly unfair flavor.

One of Hesketh's main goals is to expose the myth that the debate was a crushing blow inflicted by young science on authoritarian religion. But that kind of demythologizing is unnecessary at this juncture. Stephen Jay Gould gave a short and balanced account of the Oxford debate in "Bully for Brontosaurus," published in 1992, where he took pains to shoot down the very myth of which Hesketh complains. Peter Bowler also debunked the myth in the 2003 edition of his sober and excellent study, "Evolution: The Study of an Idea," though Hesketh for some reason cites only the 1989 edition. (I have not read the 1989 edition; I do not know if it contains the same comments about the debate as the later version.) Janet Browne's account in the second volume of her biography of Darwin is also careful and judicious, as one would expect.

Hesketh does not want to stop at debunking what has already been debunked, however. Apart from claiming that the evolutionists somehow unfairly monopolized accounts of the debate (a point he cannot carry since evolutionists could hardly control the access their opponents had to pulpits, newspapers, and publishers), he wants to suggest there was something truly unsavory about the fact that Darwin, Hooker, and Huxley savored this moment. He accuses Huxley and Darwin of displaying "both humour and hubris" in their subsequent writings about the debate. Humour yes, but hubris? Hubris is a large and loaded word in this context. Apart from pride and arrogance, it also is associated anciently with violent arrogance, and came to refer to the transgression of proper limits and to impiety so serious as to warrant divine retribution. Hesketh simply cannot seem to let go of the security of a comforting faith, even though it be a creed outworn. Divine retribution having not been meted out to the evolutionists, Hesketh seems to want to punish them for overturning the ancient verities and having the effrontery to celebrate their handiwork. Thus, he resents their effusiveness after the confrontation and seems to want the reader to join him in contemning them for "hubris" because they rejoiced in the memory of the Oxford debate years or even decades after the fact. But of course, unlike Hesketh, Darwin and his colleagues could not know the script and thus could not anticipate how thoroughly evolution would be vindicated.

Hesketh does appear to appreciate that organized religion and British classism together exerted powerful control over many aspects of life in Victorian England. And Darwin's "Origin" did not merely present another version of transmutation: it suggested that the ancient "great chain of being" was nonsense and that a literal interpretation of Genesis on the origins of mankind was at variance with scientific knowledge. In other words, there was now a new method of determining truth. But besides that, Darwin was also attacking slavery and the scientific underpinnings for the lucrative and "peculiar institution" supplied by none other than the eminent Harvard zoologist, Louis Aggassiz. Darwin could not know then that 150 years later, his theory would be conclusively confirmed (and Aggasiz's decisively refuted), not only by a burgeoning fossil record but also by embryology and DNA. While Hesketh may cling to the notion, expressed in some newspaper accounts of the day, that religion and science could compromise and co-exist, and even that Darwin offered a "Christian" framework for his theory in "Origin," there was too much at stake at Oxford in June 1860, and ultimately all around the world, for anyone with a smattering of awareness to say "Can't we all just get along?"

I was really surprised to see that Hesketh actually tries to maintain that Darwin offered a "Christian" framework in "Origin." No less an authority than Janet Browne has discredited such a notion, observing in "The Power of Place" that "Natural selection was a phenomenon that could never be governed, or set into motion, by a Creator. [The Reverend Charles]Kingsley had misunderstood that the main point of Darwin's book ["On the Origin of Species"] was to remove the Creator from nature." Likewise, Ernst Mayr observed that in the "Origin," "Darwin no longer required God as an explanatory factor. Creation as described in the Bible was contradicted for Darwin by almost every aspect of the natural world." (Ernst Mayr, "One Long Argument.") Perhaps the best contemporary authority on Darwin's religious struggles, John Hedley Brooke, pointed out that Darwin wrote to Joseph Hooker that "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process." (John Hedley Brooke, "Darwin and Victorian Christianity," in "The Cambridge Companion to Darwin.") Noting this does not mean Darwin was admitting to being an atheist, Brooke nevertheless comments "But it is indisputable that he lost a specifically Christian faith." (Id.)

In trying to elucidate what he feels the Oxford debate really accomplished, Hesketh adds what he considers important context. This means the sort of comments about Huxley that reflect Hesketh's distaste for "Darwin's Bulldog"; ambivalent comments about Darwin that suggest he was inclined to exult in Huxley's and Hooker's supposed triumph but was far more indebted to his younger admirer, Joseph Hooker, than most people realize; and comments about "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce that are plainly intended to generate sympathy for the bishop. We are told, for instance, not only that Wilberforce's faith was under attack, but that he had lost numerous members of his family. There is nothing remarkable about either circumstance. Darwin and Huxley both endured the heartbreaking loss of beloved children. And Wilberforce was scarcely the only Victorian whose faith was tested when the old verities crumbled.

In fact, Wilberforce was not so bereft as we might be led to believe. He actually tried to prosecute clergy whose views he found odious. Evidently, he felt the English protection for freedom of speech, which at the time extended to the writings of Marx and Engels, did not reach what Wilberforce deemed heresy. He also did not feel his faith shattered by the death of loved ones, as Darwin did, but declared that he realized he was meant to overcome his earthly ambitions and "bow meekly to Christ's yoke." Thus, having been humiliated by Huxley at Oxford (humiliated is John Hedley Brooke's word), where he had the effrontery to jibe at Huxley's ancestry (so much for bowing meekly!), Wilberforce is meant to seem an object of sympathy. What Hesketh omits to mention, however, is that a jaunty Wilberforce left the debate early and then, "punning happily," as Adrian Desmond has it, wrote some satiric verse about the occasion:

"...now a learn'd Professor grave and wise,
Stoutly maintains what I supposed were lies;
And, while each listening sage in wonder gapes,
Claims a proud lineage of ancestral Apes.
Alas! cried I, if such the sage's dreams,
Save me, ye powers, from these unhallowed themes;
From degrading sciences keep me free,
And from the pride that apes humility."

(Quoted in Adrian Desmond, "Huxley: From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest," Addison-Wesley, 1994, 1997, p.280.) Wilberforce did not require much bucking up if this little verse is any indication. In fact, Darwin and Wilberforce themselves remained cordial afterward: Darwin wrote to Asa Gray how the bishop's review was "uncommonly clever," that he quizzed Darwin "in splendid style" and made Darwin chuckle at himself. Wilberforce was told of Darwin's reaction and responded, "I am glad he takes it in this way. He is such a capital fellow." It would seem the principals, despite the differences in their views, were at least civil, after all. Peevishly, Hesketh complains that it's not so certain that Wilberforce was defeated. In fact, however, even Adrian Desmond, Huxley's biographer, acknowledged that accounts of what was actually said that day vary so widely that it would be "ridiculous" to talk of a victor.

In short, Hesketh has published a screed that fails both as history and as polemic. He might better have attempted a more comprehensive discussion about the Oxford debate, providing more context and making more balanced judgments without the gratuitous little jabs at men who are no longer here to defend themselves. On the other hand, if Hesketh really wanted to join the ranters who claim that evolutionism is just another religion, then he should have openly avowed that purpose from the outset and let loose his diatribe. As it is, this book offers dubious conclusions and modest rewards, particularly for the amount it costs.