Darwin’sleading defender, the intellectual “bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley, belonged to the second group. A lifelong hater of the Catholic church, he acknowledged that he found the new theory appealing because he saw it undermining ecclesiastical doctrine. “One of its greatest merits in my eyes is the fact that it occupies a position of complete and irrec- oncilable antagonism to … the Catholic church.”
But these “irreconcilables,” as Himmelfarb calls them, were outnumbered by other groups: scientists who raised non-religious objections to Darwin’s theory and religious people who saw no conflict between evolution and Christianity. There were in fact intelligent objections to natural selection raised by British naturalist Richard Owen and Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz.
Ernst Mayr, a longtime champion of evolution, writes that when Darwin published the Origin of Species “he actually did not have a single clear- cut piece of evidence for the existence of natural selection.” Another Darwin enthusiast, Jonathan Weiner, concedes that despite its title, Darwin’s book “does not document the origin of a single species.’
Then there was the problem of the age of the earth. Renowned physicist Lord Kelvin published thermodynamic calculations that showed the earth was far too “young” to give evolution time to take place along Darwinian lines. Kelvin turned out to be wrong because the physicists of his day had not discovered radioactivity and nuclear processes that generate energy and heat, prolonging the earth’s cooling process. Today we know that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old, giving natural selection more time to produce its transformations. But Darwin and his scientific contemporaries didn’t know that. The best physics of the day seemed incompatible with Darwinism.
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