Bully for Brontosaurus (40 page)

Perhaps they will now grant this paleontologist equal power of judgment over their next price increase.

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change. Whiston’s model of stability, punctuated now and then by changes of great magnitude that induce new steady states, did not possess the generality that he or Newton supposed. But neither does Lyellian gradualism explain the entire course of our planet’s history (and Lyell will have to eat his words about Whiston, just as the editors of the
Times
must now feast on theirs about the theory of mass extinction by extraterrestrial impact). Whiston’s general style of argument—change as an interruption of usual stability—is on the ascendancy again as a worthy alternative to a way of thinking that has become too familiar, too automatic.

On the wall of Preservation Hall in New Orleans hangs a tattered and greasy sign, but the most incisive I have ever seen. It gives a price scale for requests by the audience to the aged men of the band who play jazz in the old style:

Preservation Hall guards against too frequent repetition of the most familiar with the usual currency of our culture—currency itself. Scholars must seek other, more active tactics. We must have gadflies—and historical figures may do posthumous service—to remind us constantly that our usual preferences, channels, and biases are not inevitable modes of thought. I nominate William Whiston to the first rank of reminders as godfather to punctuational theories of change in geology.

Funny, isn’t it? Whiston longed “to be in that number, when the Saints go marching in” in fact, he wrote the
New Theory
largely to suggest that cometary impact would soon usher in this blessed millenium. Yet he is now a soul mate to those who wish to hear a different drummer.

I HAVE NOT THE SLIGHTEST
doubt that truth possesses inestimable moral value. In addition, as Mr. Nixon once found to his sorrow, truth represents the only way to keep a complex story straight, for no one can remember all the details of when he told what to whom unless his words have an anchor in actual occurrence.

Yet, for a scholar, there is nothing quite like falsehood. Lies are pinpoints—identifiable historical events that can be traced. Falsehoods also have motivations—points of departure for our ruminations on the human animal. Truth, on the other hand, simply happens. Its accurate report teaches us little beyond the event itself.

In this light, we should note with interest that the most famous story in all the hagiography of evolution is, if not false outright, at least grossly distorted by biased reconstruction long after the fact. I speak of Thomas Henry Huxley’s legendary encounter with the bishop of Oxford, “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, at the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in His Lordship’s own see.

Darwin had published the
Origin of Species
in November 1859. Thus, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science met at Oxford in the summer of 1860, this greatest of all debates received its first prominent public airing. On Saturday, June 30, more than 700 people wedged themselves into the largest room of Oxford’s Zoological Museum to hear what was, by all accounts, a perfectly dreadful hour-long peroration by an American scholar, Dr. Draper, on the “intellectual development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin.” Leonard Huxley wrote, in
Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley:

The throng, as Leonard Huxley notes, had not come to hear Dr. Draper drone on about Europe. Word had circulated widely that “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, the silver-tongued bishop of Oxford, would attend with the avowed purpose of smashing Mr. Darwin in the discussion to follow Draper’s paper.

The story of Wilberforce’s oration and Huxley’s rejoinder has been enshrined among the half-dozen greatest legends of science—surely equal to Newton beaned by an apple or Archimedes jumping from his bath and shouting “Eureka!” through the streets of Syracuse. We have read the tale from comic book to novel to scholarly tome. We have viewed the scene, courtesy of the BBC, in our living rooms. The story has an “official version” codified by Darwin’s son Francis, published in his
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin
, and expanded in Leonard Huxley’s biography of his father. This reconstruction has become canonical, copied from source to later source hundreds of times, and rarely altered even by jot or tittle. Consider just one of countless retellings, chosen as an average and faithful version (from Ruth Moore’s
Charles Darwin
, Hutchinson, 1957):

We may list as the key, rarely challenged features of this official version the following claims:

1. Wilberforce directly bearded and taunted Huxley by pointedly asking, in sarcastic ridicule, whether he claimed descent from an ape on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side.

2. Huxley, before rising to the challenge, mumbled his famous mock-ecclesiastical sarcasm about the Lord’s aid in his coming rhetorical victory.

3. Huxley than responded to Wilberforce’s arguments in loud, clear, and forceful tones.

4. Huxley ended his speech with a devastatingly effective parry to the bishop’s taunt.

5. Although Huxley said only that he would prefer an ape to a man who used skills of oratory to obfuscate rather than to seek truth, many took him to mean (and some thought he had said) that he would prefer an ape to a bishop as an ancestor. (Huxley, late in life, disavowed this stronger version about apes and bishops. When Wilberforce’s son included it in a biography of his father, Huxley protested and secured a revision.)

6. Huxley’s riposte inspired an uproar. The meeting ended forthwith and in tumult.

7. Although Moore, to her credit, does not make this claim, we are usually told that Huxley had scored an unambiguous and decisive victory—a key incident in Darwin’s triumph.

8. This debate focused the world’s attention on the real and deep issue of Darwin’s century—science versus religion. Huxley’s victory was a pivotal moment in the battle for science and reason against superstition and dogma.

I have had a strong interest in this story ever since, as an assistant professor on sabbatical leave at Oxford in 1970, I occupied a dingy office in the back rooms of the Zoological Museum, now crammed with cabinets of fossils and subdivided into cubicles, but then the large and open room where Huxley and Wilberforce fell to blows. For six months, I sat next to a small brass plaque announcing that the great event had occurred on my very spot. I also felt strong discomfort about the official tale for two definite reasons. First, it is all too pat—the victor and the vanquished, good triumphing over evil, reason over superstition. So few heroic tales in the simplistic mode turn out to be true. Huxley was a brilliant orator, but why should Wilberforce have failed so miserably? Much as I dislike the man, he was no fool. He was as gifted an orator as Huxley and a dominant intellectual force among conservative Anglicans.

Second, I knew from preliminary browsings that the official tale was a reconstruction, made by Darwin’s champions some quarter century after the fact. Amazingly enough (for all its later fame), no one bothered to record the event in any detail at the time itself. No stenographer was present. The two men exchanged words to be sure, but no one knows what they actually said, and the few sketchy reports of journalists and letter writers contain important gaps and contradictions. Ironically, the official version has been so widely accepted and unchallenged not because we know its truth by copious documentation, but rather because so little data exist for a potential challenge.

For years, this topic has been about number fifty in my list of one hundred or so potential essays (sorry folks, but, the Lord and editors willing, you may have me to kick around for some time to come). Yet for want of new data about my suspicions, it remained well back in my line of processing, until I received a letter from my friend and distinguished Darwin scholar Sam Schweber of Brandeis University. Schweber wrote: “I came across a letter from Balfour Stewart to David Forbes commenting on the BAAS meeting he just attended at which he witnessed the Huxley-Wilberforce debate. It is probably the most accurate statement of what transpired.” I read Stewart’s letter and sat bolt upright with attention and smiles. Stewart wrote, describing the scene along the usual lines, thus vouching for the basic outline:

Colorful, though nothing new so far. But I put an ellipsis early in the quotation, and I should now like to restore the missing words. Stewart wrote: “I think the Bishop had the best of it.” Score one big point for my long-held suspicions. Balfour Stewart was no benighted cleric, but a distinguished scientist, Fellow of the Royal Society, and director of the Kew Observatory. Balfour Stewart also thought that Wilberforce had won the debate!

This personal discovery sent me to the books (I thank my research assistant, Ned Young, for tracking down all the sources, no mean job for so many obscure bits and pieces). We gathered all the eyewitness accounts (damned few) and found a half dozen or so modern articles, mostly by literary scholars, on aspects of the debate. (See Janet Browne, 1978; Sheridan Gilley, 1981; J. R. Lucas, 1979. I especially commend Browne’s detective work on Francis Darwin’s construction of the official version, and Gilley’s incisive and well-written account of the debate.) I confess disappointment in finding that Stewart’s letter was no new discovery. Yet I remain surprised that its key value—the claim by an important scientist that Wilberforce had won—has received so little attention. So far as I know, Stewart’s letter has never been quoted
in extenso
, and no reference gives it more than a passing sentence. But I was delighted to find that the falsity of the official version is common knowledge among a small group of scholars. All the more puzzling, then, that the standard, heroic account continues to hold sway.

What is so wrong with the official tale, as epitomized in my eight points above? We should begin by analyzing the very few eyewitness accounts recorded right after the event itself.

Turning to reports by journalists, we must first mark the outstanding negative evidence. In a nation with a lively press, and with traditions for full and detailed reporting (so hard to fathom from our age of television and breathless paragraphs for the least common denominator), the great debate stands out for its nonattention.
Punch
, Wilberforce’s frequent and trenchant critic, ignored the exchange but wrote poem and parody aplenty on another famous repartee about evolution from the same meeting—Huxley versus Owen on the brains of humans and gorillas. The
Athenaeum
, in one of but two accounts (the other from
Jackson’s Oxford Journal
), presents a straightforward report that, in its barest outline, already belies the standard version in two or three crucial respects. On July 7, the reporter notes Oxford’s bucolic charms: “Since Friday, the air has been soft, the sky sunny. A sense of sudden summer has been felt in the meadows of Christ Church and in the gardens of St. John’s; many a dreamer of dreams, tempted by the summer warmth…and stealing from section A or B [of the meeting] has consulted his ease and taken a boat.” But we then learn of a contrast between fireworks inside and punting lazily downstream while taking one’s
dolce far niente
.

The next issue, July 14, devotes a full page of tiny type to Dr. Draper and his aftermath—the longest eyewitness account ever penned. The summary of Wilberforce’s remarks indicates that his half-hour oration was not confined to gibe and rhetoric, but primarily presented a synopsis of the competent (if unoriginal) critique of the
Origin
that he later published in the
Quarterly Review
. The short paragraph allotted to Huxley’s reply does not mention the famous repartee—an omission of no great import in a press that, however detailed, could be opaquely discreet. But the account of Huxley’s words affirms what all letter writers (see below) also noted—that Huxley spoke briefly and presented no detailed refutation of the bishop’s arguments. Instead, he focused his remarks on the logic of Darwin’s argument, asserting that evolution was no mere speculation, but a theory supported by copious evidence even if the process of transmutation could not be directly observed.

By the standard account, chaos should now break out, FitzRoy should jump up raving, and Henslow should gavel the meeting closed. No such thing; the meeting went on. FitzRoy took the podium in his turn. Two other speakers followed. And then, the true climax—not entirely omitted in Francis Darwin’s “official” version so many years later, but so relegated to a few lines of afterthought that the incident simply dropped out of most later accounts—leading to the popular impression that Huxley’s riposte had ended the meeting. Henslow turned to Joseph Hooker, the botanist of Darwin’s inner circle, and asked him “to state his view of the botanical aspect of the question.”

The
Athenaeum
gave Hooker’s remarks four times the coverage awarded to Huxley. It was Hooker who presented a detailed refutation of Wilberforce’s specific arguments. It was Hooker who charged directly that the bishop had distorted and misunderstood Darwin’s theory. We get some flavor of Hooker’s force and effectiveness from a section of the
Athenaeum
’s report: