Darwin gingerly avoided writing much of anything about what his theory meant for humanity. “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”
He was not going to make the mistake Robert Chambers had made in Vestiges. He had an argument to make, and he didn’t want emotions to interfere. But Darwin did make some attempt to stave off the despair people might feel. “Thus,” he wrote in the final lines of his book, “from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
That winter, as blizzards buried England, thousands of people kept warm by the fire and read Darwin’s book. The first printing of 1,250 copies was snapped up in a day, and in January 3,000 more were printed. Huxley sent Darwin words of praise but warned him of the battle to come. “I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness,” he promised. Newspapers generally offered only brief articles about it, but the reviews, where the literary world debated the great ideas of the nineteenth century, went into more depth. Huxley and other allies of Darwin praised it, but many reviews saw it as blasphemy. The Quarterly Review declared that Darwin’s theory “contradicted the revealed relation of the creation to its Creator” and was “inconsistent with the fullness of His Glory.”
The review that made Darwin angriest appeared in the Edinburgh Review in April 1860. It was anonymous, but anyone familiar with Richard Owen knew he had written it. It was stunning in its animosity. Owen called Darwin’s book “an abuse of science.” He complained that Darwin and his disciples pretended that natural selection was the only possible natural creative law. Owen wasn’t actually opposed to evolution; he just didn’t like what he considered blind materialism.
Yet Darwin had done what Owen couldn’t. Owen had tried to synthesize the discoveries of biology, but he had ended up with murky notions of archetypes and continuous creation. Darwin, on the other hand, could account for the similarities between species with a mechanism that was at work in every living generation.
Owen wrote his review out of anger, both at Darwin and at Huxley. Huxley had been attacking Owen in public lectures with a venom that shocked him. Huxley despised Owen both for the way he curried favor with aristocrats and for what he considered shoddy science. He mocked Owen’s theory of continuous creation as absurd. Owen became so angry with his taunts that during one of his public lectures he glared at Huxley, declaring that anyone who didn’t see the fossil record as a progressive expression of divine intelligence must have “some, perhaps congenital, defect of the mind.”
Their fiercest fights broke out in the years just before Origin of Species was published, as Owen tried to prove that humans were distinct from other animals. During the 1850s, orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas were beginning to emerge from their jungle obscurity, and Owen dissected their bodies and studied their skeletons. He worked hard to try to find some mark that distinguished humans from them. If we were nothing but a variation on an ape, then what became of morality?
What made humans most distinct from animals, Owen assumed, was our mental capacity: our ability to speak and reason. Owen therefore looked in the brains of apes to discover the anatomy that marked that difference. In 1857 he claimed to have found a key distinction: unlike the brains of apes, the cerebral hemispheres of the human brain extended so far back that they formed a third lobe, with a structure Owen called the hippocampus minor. He declared that its uniqueness warranted putting humans in a subclass of their own. Our brain was as different from a chimp’s as a chimp’s was from a platypus’s.
Huxley suspected that Owen had been misled by studying badly preserved brains. His elaborate classifications were built on a fundamental error. (Huxley liked to say that they stood like “a Corinthian portico in cow dung.”) In fact, Huxley argued, the human brain was no more different from a gorilla’s than a gorilla’s was from a baboon’s. “It is not I who seek to base Man’s dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor,” Huxley wrote. “On the contrary, I have done my best to sweep away this vanity.”
Owen’s furious review of Darwin’s Origin of Species raised the tension between him and Huxley even higher, and finally, a few months later, in June 1860, their hostility exploded. The British Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting at Oxford, attended by thousands of people. Owen, the association’s president, gave a talk on June 28, explaining once again how the human brain was distinct from that of apes. Huxley had an ambush planned. At the end of the talk, Huxley stood and announced that he had just received a letter from a Scottish anatomist who had dissected a fresh chimpanzee brain. The anatomist had discovered that it looked remarkably like a human brain, complete with a hippocampus minor. With a packed audience looking on, Owen had no way to defend himself. Huxley could not have chosen a more public place to humiliate him.
Having won the battle of the brains, Huxley decided to leave the Oxford meeting the next day. But then he bumped into Robert Chambers, the still anonymous author of Vestiges. Chambers was horrified to hear that Huxley was going to depart. Didn’t he know what the next day had in store?
Rumors were racing through Oxford that Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was going to attack Darwin. For years, Wilberforce had been a leading religious voice against evolution. He had attacked Vestiges in 1844, calling it foul speculation, and now the bishop saw Darwin’s book as no different. An American scientist named John William Draper was scheduled to give a talk the next day about “Darwinism” and its implications for society. Wilberforce was going to use the opportunity to denounce Darwin in public, at Britain’s most important scientific meeting. Owen was staying at Wilberforce’s home during the meeting, and no doubt he was coaching the bishop. Chambers convinced Huxley to stay on for Draper’s talk and defend Darwin.
Owen opened the conference the following day. Upward of a thousand people packed the auditorium, and to them he announced, “Let us ever apply ourselves seriously to the task of scientific inquiry, feeling assured that the more we thus exercise, and by exercising improve, our intellectual faculties, the more worthy shall we be, the better shall we be fitted to come nearer to our God.”
Draper’s talk was entitled “On the Intellectual Development of Europe, Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin and Others, That the Progression of Organisms Is Determined by Law.” By all accounts it was dull, long, and poorly reasoned. Joseph Hooker was in the audience and described Draper’s talk as “flatulent stuff.” The hall grew warm, but as woozy as the audience became, no one left. They wanted to hear the bishop.
When Draper was done, Wilberforce stood and spoke. He had recently written a review of Darwin’s book, and he essentially repackaged it as a speech. He didn’t pretend the Bible should be a test of science, but in his review he had written, “This does not make it the less important to point out on scientific grounds scientific errors, when those errors tend to limit God’s glory in creation.”