Lesson 104: Darwin, Part 4
Reading assignment: Chapters 6-8
Important person: Thomas Huxley. From Wikipedia.
Huxley was originally not persuaded of ‘development theory’ as evolution was once called. We can see that in his savage review of Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a book which contained some quite pertinent arguments in favour of evolution. Huxley had also rejected Lamarck’s theory of transmutation, on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to support it. All this scepticism was brought together in a lecture to the Royal Institution, which made Darwin anxious enough to set about an effort to change young Huxley’s mind. It was the kind of thing Darwin did with his closest scientific friends, but he must have had some particular intuition about Huxley, who was from all accounts a most impressive person even as a young man.Huxley was therefore one of the small group who knew about Darwin’s ideas before they were published (the group included Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Lyell). The first publication by Darwin of his ideas came when Wallace sent Darwin his famous paper on natural selection, which was presented by Lyell and Hooker to the Linnean Society in 1858 alongside excerpts from Darwin’s notebook and a Darwin letter to Asa Gray. Huxley’s famous response to the idea of natural selection was “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” However, the correctness of natural selection as the main mechanism for evolution was to lie permanently in Huxley’s mental pending tray. He never conclusively made up his mind about it, though he did admit it was a hypothesis which was a good working basis.
Logically speaking, the prior question was whether evolution had taken place at all. It is to this question that much of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was devoted. Its publication in 1859 completely convinced Huxley of evolution and it was this and no doubt his admiration of Darwin’s way of amassing and using evidence that formed the basis of his support for Darwin in the debates that followed the book’s publication.
The video lesson is longer today. The reading assignment is longer than usual, but most of it can safely be skimmed, except for the information on writing the On Origin of Species and the sections on his illnesses.