JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
“The Gorillas Dilemma”, 1862.
This poem, which appeared in the London Punch in October 1862, three years after the first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, addresses the confrontation between Richard Owen and Thomas Huxley (and by extension, of course, Charles Darwin). Owen had earlier attacked the Origin in an anonymous review in the Edinburgh Review (volume 111, page 521, 1860), and Thomas Huxley, of course, who was one of the earliest and who became the greatest of Darwin’s “disciples” (and known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”).
Owen wrote with a very heavy and dark pen, in 1860:
“To him, indeed, who may deem himself devoid of soul and as the brute that perisheth, any speculation, pointing, with the smallest feasibility, to an intelligible notion of the way of coming in of a lower organised species, may be sufficient, and he need concern himself no further about his own relations to a Creator. But when the members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain are taught by their evening lecturer that such a limited or inadequate view and treatment of the great problem exemplifies that application of science to which England owes her greatness, we take leave to remind the managers that it more truly parallels the abuse of science to which a neighbouring nation, some seventy years since, owed its temporary degradation. By their fruits may the promoters of true and false philosophy be known.”
Tough stuff. And Darwin took it personally and seriously, absorbing the blows against himself (and his supporters, especially Huxley and Hooker), as well as the spurious and ethically-challenged mistaken assertions that Owen tricked out in his piece. “It is painful to be hated in the intense depth with which Owen hates me” Darwin wrote a few months later (Darwin Correspondence, volume 8, April 1860, page 154.)
Huxley and Owen would have it out over the years (though Darwin himself would not partake due to illness and such, preferring to respond through written help to Huxley and others).
And so the poem:
” (To Professor Owen & Huxley)
SAY am I a man and a brother,
Of only an anthropoid ape?
Your judgment, be ‘t one way or ‘tother,