On June 30, 1860, there was a debate in Oxford between Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin's chief explainer, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, himself a considerable intellectual. Concluding his skeptical remarks, Wilberforce turned to Huxley and asked mockingly whether it was through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed descent from an ape. Taking the podium, Huxley thundered that if he had to choose for a grandfather either an ape or a clever and influential man who used his gifts to turn new scientific ideas to ridicule, he would certainly choose the ape. There were no more snide jokes about Darwinism in Victorian England.
Still, one feels for the bishop. It was hard, in 1860, to get one's mind around evolution by natural selection, and it still is. It's difficult talking about causation without purpose, but that is what Darwinism requires. And telling a story about the origins of morality that begins hundreds of thousands of years before any creature had a sense of right and wrong, or even a sense of self, is a tall order.
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