charles_darwin

70
CHARLES DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
At most, neither side won. The audience enjoyed themselves.
(The undergraduates in the audience had come to see and be part of
the spectacle.) The hot conditions resulted in at least one woman
fainting, which added to the sense of drama. Perhaps the most important
result of the British Association meeting was that the Darwinians,
Huxley’s name for the supporters of Darwin’s theory of
evolution, did not suffer a defeat. A draw meant more time to convince
their fellow scientists and the rest of society that Darwin’s explanation
of the origin of species was the right one.
The combination of articles in journals and magazines and discussions
among scientists was effective. Between 1859 and 1872,
more than one hundred British periodicals had multiple articles discussing
Darwin’s ideas. 22 Within a decade, many scientists considered
Darwin’s explanation of the origin of species more plausible
than the idea of a special creation or multiple creations by God. Furthermore,
the progressivist element in Darwin’s theory—that natural
selection could effect greater complexity as well as more diversity—
fit well into European and American cultural ideas about the progress
in society. As one contemporary noted,
Ten years later [than 1860] I encountered [Huxley] ... at the
Exeter meeting of the Association. Again there was a bitter
assault on Darwinism, this time by a Scottish doctor of divinity;
with smiling serenity Huxley smote him hip and thigh, the audience,
hostile or cold at Oxford, here ecstatically acquiescent.
The decade had worked its changes. 23
In fact, the period after 1870 would have been a complete triumph
for Darwinism had it not been for two significant objections.
In 1867, Fleeming Jenkin (1833–1885), a British engineer, asserted
that the blending of male and female characteristics in sexual reproduction
would mean that any beneficial mutation would reduce by
half in each succeeding generation. (Jenkin, like all scientists of the
nineteenth century including Darwin, did not know about the discrete
genetic units involved in reproduction: this was not discovered
until the twentieth century.) Three years later, in 1871, the physicist
William Thomson (1821–1907) read a paper at the British Association
meeting in which he suggested that the Earth was about
100 million years old, based on his calculation of the cooling of the
Earth’s crust. Thomson was one of the foremost mathematician/
physicists of the nineteenth century—he was ennobled as Lord Kelvin
in 1892 and the Kelvin scale of temperature measurement was named
after him—if his calculations suggested the Earth was much younger