Thomas Huxley Quotes
The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.
The “brother of the wolf” refers to the evolution of the dog from the wolf which it now appears took place in just a relatively few generations.
Thomas Huxley, 1825-1895, British Biologist & President of the Royal Society, Evolution and Ethics, 1893
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Essentially, he was expressing a Darwinian idea in poetry. See Herbert Spencer {627582} for an even more specific argument for the same point.
Darwin believed at the time that large populations were critical to national success and development. The next 100 years would prove that large population was a handicap to progress and real growth of standard of living.
The magnificent result of modern civilization has been to extend the average lifespan of humans by decades. What Galton called “weakly lives” are those that were eradicated by smallpox, bubonic plague, polio and hundreds of other diseases and risks where we have strengthened mankind and not simply succumbed to all the many natural dangers. At the same time however, civilization has added risks and dangers to human life. Automobile crashes, industrial accidents and the like. The balance has been well in favor of “civilization.”
Darwin’s work had polarized England into two camps. Spencer was one of the major public supporters of Darwin. Tennyson expressed a similar intuitive view a decade earlier {627586}. Spencer reasoned that if an egg cell and a sperm cell could produce a human in 9 months, why was it not plausible that the cell could become a human in hunreds of millions of years.
This was not only the case in 1852, but also true 150 years later. The only difference is that there is much more proof of Evolution, and there is a much smaller proportion of the population that questions Evolution as the fundamental mechanism by which all species have developed.
See President Clinton’s quotation at the same press conference {628400}.
Actually no school teaches that. What they did teach when covering Evolution was that some modern apes (chimpanzees and bonobos) and humans were both descended from a common ancestor. The Congressman was at that point an evangelical Christian fundamentalist, Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.
This is a very good quotation showing the point of view of religious fundamentalists that if there is no fixed statement of ethics and morality as with the word of God as revealed in the Bible, what then makes anything right or wrong and the world exists in a moral behavioral vacuum. Other religionists hold that the morality is in the metaphors and philosophy of religion and not in the literal words of scripture. Still others argue that morality and religion itself is dynamic and is constantly changing. Then there are those who build their view of morality on philosophy but which is not based on a deity—Ethical Culturalists for example {592791}. Also, there are the pragmatic evolutionists who argue that cooperative behavior has evolved in man and cultural rules—morality—is also transmitted by culture and systems of law.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield. In this famous speech, Disraeli demonstrated his great political skill, by charming the scientists as well as the clerics regarding the then new concept of Darwinian evolution.
The Anglican Church of England like many others were originally threatened by the possibility of evolution. Darwin, himself a very religious man was castigated at the time. In modern days the mass of scientific evidence of evolution is overwhelming and most major religions have also learned that there is nothing inconsistent or threatening in this basic science. There are however some religious fundamentalists (mostly Christian and Muslim) who still reject this basic scientific notion, but this quotation represents most of the modern religious thinking.
Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS HonFRSE FLS was an English biologist and anthropologist specialising in comparative anatomy. He is known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
