Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
What Huxley had said on this subject was indeed quite lukewarm, that it
is “impossible to admit that the doctrine of the origin of species by Natural
Selection stands upon a totally safe & sound physical basis.”
29
This was to
become a thematic refrain in all his major treatments of the subject. In
1880, when the twentieth anniversary of
Origin of Species
was celebrated,
Huxley was again called upon to deliver the doxology, but again his praises
were muted by personal ambivalence. Huxley's “The Coming of Age of 'The
Origin of Species' ” celebrates the general influence of Darwin's theory but
says not a word about the theory's central doctrine.
30
The best-remembered
passage from this demonstrative oration is Huxley's quip “that it is the cus-
tomary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions,”
but in context the “new truth” that he was warning against
was
Darwin's
theor y.
31
Darwin could hardly have failed to recognize how wavering was
his friend's commitment, and so Huxley wrote him to patch things up, even
as he forthrightly acknowledged his reservations.
I hope you do not imagine because I had nothing to say about “Natural
Selection,” that I am at all weak of faith on that article. On the contrary,
I live in hope that as palæontologists work more and more . . . we shall
arrive at a crushing accumulation of evidence in that direction also. But
the first thing seems to me to be to drive the fact of evolution home into
people's heads; when that is once safe, the rest will come easy.
32
Huxley's belief in evolution continued to stand on the same basis as it had
before 1859, “a generalization of certain facts,” which had been accumu-
lated “under the heads of Embryology and Palæontology.” Natural selection
could not be accepted as the mechanism of evolution, Huxley would again
repeat in 1893, “until selective breeding is definitely proved to give rise to
varieties infertile with one another.”
33
It seems odd that Huxley should have been determined “to drive the
fact of evolution home into people's heads” even while remaining agnostic
concerning its mechanism. But this mystery deepens more once we realize
the even greater reserve that apparently manifested in his classroom lec-
tures. Father Hahn, a Jesuit priest who studied under him in 1876, noticed
that he never discussed evolution in his teaching lectures, even when topics
were being treated, such as comparative anatomy, that seemed to lend them-
selves to this subject.
But Huxley was so reserved on this subject in his lectures that, speak-
ing one day of a species forming a transition between two others, he
