Thomas Huxley

Who was Thomas Huxley?

Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS FLS was an English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Huxley's famous debate in 1860 with Samuel Wilberforce was a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution, and in his own career. Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated about whether humans were closely related to apes.

Huxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. Instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, he fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition.

In 1869 Huxley coined the term 'agnostic' describing his own views on theology, a term whose use has continued to the present day.

Huxley had little formal schooling and was virtually self-taught. He became perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of the latter 19th century. He worked on invertebrates, clarifying relationships between groups previously little understood. Later, he worked on vertebrates, especially on the relationship between apes and humans. After comparing Archaeopteryx with Compsognathus, he concluded that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs, a theory widely accepted today.

Famous Quotes:

• Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peas cods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.
• Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
• There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
• Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?
• It is the fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end and superstitions.
• The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
• Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
• A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.
• The world makes up for all its follies and injustices by being damnably sentimental.
• The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.