---
title: "Charles Darwin"
chunk: 8/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:05.516999+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The book aroused international interest, with less controversy than had greeted the popular and less scientific Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Though Darwin's illness kept him away from the public debates, he eagerly scrutinised the scientific response, commenting on press cuttings, reviews, articles, satires and caricatures, and corresponded on it with colleagues worldwide. The book did not explicitly discuss human origins,[IV] but included a number of hints about the animal ancestry of humans from which the inference could be made. Upon reading it, Huxley remarked "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"
The first review asked, "If a monkey has become a man – what may not a man become?" It said this should be left to theologians as being too dangerous for ordinary readers. Among early favourable responses, Huxley's reviews swiped at Richard Owen, leader of the scientific establishment which Huxley was trying to overthrow.
In April, Owen's review attacked Darwin's friends and condescendingly dismissed his ideas, angering Darwin, but Owen and others began to promote ideas of supernaturally guided evolution. Patrick Matthew drew attention to his 1831 book, which had a brief appendix suggesting a concept of natural selection leading to new species, but he had not developed the idea.
The Church of England's response was mixed. Darwin's old Cambridge tutors Sedgwick and Henslow dismissed the ideas, but liberal clergymen interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God's design, with the cleric Charles Kingsley seeing it as "just as noble a conception of Deity". In 1860, the publication of Essays and Reviews by seven liberal Anglican theologians diverted clerical attention from Darwin. Its ideas, including higher criticism, were attacked by church authorities as heresy. In it, Baden Powell argued that miracles broke God's laws, so belief in them was atheistic, and praised "Mr Darwin's masterly volume [supporting] the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature".
Asa Gray discussed teleology with Darwin, who imported and distributed Gray's pamphlet on theistic evolution, Natural Selection is not inconsistent with natural theology. The most famous confrontation was at the public 1860 Oxford evolution debate during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce, though not opposed to transmutation of species, argued against Darwin's explanation and human descent from apes. Joseph Hooker argued strongly for Darwin, and Thomas Huxley's legendary retort, that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his gifts, came to symbolise a triumph of science over religion.

Even Darwin's close friends Gray, Hooker, Huxley, and Lyell still expressed various reservations but gave strong support, as did many others, particularly younger naturalists. Gray and Lyell sought reconciliation with faith, while Huxley portrayed a polarisation between religion and science. He campaigned pugnaciously against the authority of the clergy in education, aiming to overturn the dominance of clergymen and aristocratic amateurs under Owen in favour of a new generation of professional scientists. Owen's claim that brain anatomy proved humans to be a separate biological order from apes was shown to be false by Huxley in a long-running dispute parodied by Kingsley as the "Great Hippocampus Question", and discredited Owen.
In response to objections that the origin of life was unexplained, Darwin pointed to acceptance of Newton's law even though the cause of gravity was unknown. Despite criticisms and reservations related to this topic, he nevertheless proposed a prescient idea in an 1871 letter to Hooker in which he suggested the origin of life may have occurred in a "warm little pond".
Darwinism became a movement covering a wide range of evolutionary ideas. In 1863, Lyell's Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man popularised prehistory, though his caution on evolution disappointed Darwin. Weeks later, Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature showed that anatomically, humans are apes. Then, The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates provided empirical evidence of natural selection. 
Following the publication of The Origin of Species, both Prince Albert, who supported Darwin's ideas, and the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, recommended Darwin for a knighthood but without success; among the opponents of the proposed honour was Bishop Wilberforce.
Later lobbying brought Darwin Britain's highest scientific honour, the Royal Society's Copley Medal, awarded on 3 November 1864. That day, Huxley held the first meeting of what became the influential "X Club" devoted to "science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas". By the end of the 1860s, most scientists agreed that evolution occurred, but only a minority supported Darwin's view that the chief mechanism was natural selection.
The Origin of Species was translated into many languages, becoming a staple scientific text attracting thoughtful attention from all walks of life, including the "working men" who flocked to Huxley's lectures. Darwin's theory resonated with various movements at the time[V] and became a key fixture of popular culture.[VI] Cartoonists parodied animal ancestry in an old tradition of showing humans with animal traits, and in Britain, these droll images served to popularise Darwin's theory in an unthreatening way. Darwin had started growing a beard during illness in 1862. After he reappeared in public in 1866, caricatures of him as an ape helped to identify all forms of evolutionism with Darwinism.
Othniel C. Marsh, America's first palaeontologist, was the first to provide solid fossil evidence to support Darwin's theory of evolution by unearthing the ancestors of the modern horse.  In 1877, Marsh delivered a very influential speech before the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, providing a demonstrative argument for evolution.  For the first time, Marsh traced the evolution of vertebrates from fish all the way through humans.  Sparing no detail, he listed a wealth of fossil examples of past life forms.  The significance of this speech was immediately recognized by the scientific community, and it was printed in its entirety in several scientific journals.

=== Descent of Man, sexual selection, and botany ===