Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Touche

In an 1860 debate between the Darwin-doubting Bishop of Oxley and Darwin protégé Thomas Huxley, the bishop asked Huxley which side of his family was descended from an ape.
Huxley famously replied, "If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who ... plunges into scientific questions with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."

Bravo.

2 comments:

mightybob said...

Were it me, I would have to say... definitely my dad's side...

Anonymous said...

Don’t worry be happy. At least he was very smart.