May 4, 1825 (a Wednesday) « Professor Olsen @ Large

May 4, 1825 (a Wednesday)

May 4, 2008 · No Comments

On this date, the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was born in Ealing (then a village in Middlesex).

Darwin danced around human evolution in On the Origin of Species in 1859, not addressing the topic until 1871 in The Descent of Man. Yet Huxley wrote about human and primate paleontology in Man’s Place in Nature in 1863. He examined the similarities between humans and apes and noted that greater anatomical differences separate gorillas and chimpanzees from the lower apes than separate gorillas from people. He also mused:

Is [the philosopher or poet] bound to howl and grovel on all fours because . . . he was once an egg, which no ordinary power of discrimination could distinguish from that of a Dog? . . . Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it?

Categories: Evolution · History of Science · Human evolution
Tagged: Evolution, History of Science, Human evolution

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Those who reject biological evolution do so, usually, not out of reason, but out of unjustified vanity.
-- Isaac Asimov

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science.
-- Carl Sagan

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