Welcome statement


Parting Words from Moristotle (07/31/2023)
tells how to access our archives
of art, poems, stories, serials, travelogues,
essays, reviews, interviews, correspondence….

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Not ashamed, but would be....

A Darwinian anecdote:
...[S]ome of the foes of Darwin's dangerous idea have planted themselves firmly on the isthmus [that connects our species with all the others], like Horatio at the bridge, intent on preventing the idea from crossing over. The famous first confrontation was the notorious debate in Oxford's Museum of Natural History in 1860, only a few months after the initial publication of Origin, between "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog." This is a tale told so often in so many variations that we might count it a phylum of memes, not just a species [refers to the memetic theory of culture first proposed by Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene]. Here it was that the good bishop made his famous rhetorical mistake, asking Huxley whether it was on his grandfather's side or his grandmother's side that he was descended from an ape. Tempers were running high in that meeting room; a woman had fainted, and several of Darwin's supporters were almost beside themselves with fury at the contemptuous misrepresentation of their hero's theory that was being given, so it is understandable that eyewitnesses' stories diverge at this point. In the best version—which in all likelihood has undergone some significant design improvement over the retellings—Huxley replied that he "was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth"....[pp. 335-336, Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, 1995]

No comments:

Post a Comment