“Into the Jungle of Fanciful Assumption”: Samuel Wilberforce Critiques Darwin

In June 1860, just seven months after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, three men hotly debated the merits of Darwin's argument at a meeting of the British Association. Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and botanist Joseph Hooker defended Darwin's theory. English bishop, speaker, and writer Samuel Wilberforce critiqued it. And though he was a man of the cloth, Wilberforce did not build a theological case against Darwin. Rather, he evaluated the argument for natural selection on scientific grounds, exposing its "loose statements and unfounded speculations" by weighing it "in the simple scales of logical examination." On this classic ID The Future out of the vault, host Andrew McDiarmid treats you to excerpts from Wilberforce's powerful critique, published as a review a month after the debate in Quarterly Review.

Source