Posted: May 02, 2012 8:37 am
jerome wrote:Except that Huxley never said that. OK, Huxley the character says it in the film Creation, but Huxley never held anything like that opinion as far as I can see from the primary sources: and Huxley was never one to be shy talking about his religious ideas.
I stand corrected. So, Darwin "killed god" without Huxley as an accomplice! Does that not mean that Darwin himself was the leading atheist in biology at the time? Wallace can only have been confused by his own spritualism, and would not have been able to take Darwin's place as the exponent of evolution by common descent with modification. Darwin's only problem was his rejection of the then new science of genetics as a vital part of his own theory, so he had to fall back on Lamarckian ideas to fill in the gap. He nevertheless deserves more credit than Wallace for advancing the theory of evolution. If Wallace had prevailed, we might all be thinking it was the fairies that did it. Even Darwin himself was forced to backtrack in later editions of his greatest book, but by then, I guess the "cat" öf natural selection was out of the "bag".