Is it through grandmother or grandfather that you descend from a monkey?
-- Samuel Wilberforce
Would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather, or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.
-- T. H. Huxley
From an 1860 Oxford evolution debate (Quoted from Games, Groups and Global Good)
(Interestingly, the author, Robert May, after presenting these quotes, goes onto suggest that "Wilberforce, had he possessed an all-encompassing knowledge of the science of his day, could have won the debate. The Darwin–Wallace theory of evolution, at that time, had three huge problems.")
Oh what the heck, here are two of the problems that Robert May spoke of in the above quote:
...The first problem concerned the time available for evolutionary processes to operate. Fifty years were to elapse before the first glimmers of awareness of weak and strong nuclear forces were to appear. Of the four fundamental forces recognized by today’s physics, only gravitational and electromagnetic (“chemical”) forces were known in Darwin’s day. But if the sun’s energy source was gravitational, it could not have been burning for more than about 20 million years. A
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.