The Debate Everyone Quotes and Nobody Recorded

The exchange with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at the British Association meeting in Oxford on 30 June 1860 is the founding scene of the science-versus-religion story: Wilberforce asks whether Huxley is descended from an ape on his grandmother's or his grandfather's side, and Huxley replies that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a man who uses his gifts to obscure the truth.

There is no contemporary transcript, and no two accounts agree on the words. The best-known version of Huxley's reply comes from letters and reminiscences written down decades later, several of them by partisans with an interest in how it had gone; contemporary press reports are thin and do not present it as a rout. Historians of science have shown the encounter was built up retrospectively, largely by Huxley's own circle and by his son's Life and Letters, into a decisive victory it does not appear to have been on the day. Joseph Hooker, who was there, thought at the time that he himself had made the more effective reply.

This bears directly on the word Huxley coined nine years later. He meant agnostic as the name of a method rather than a creed, follow reason as far as it goes and claim no certainty beyond what can be demonstrated, and he applied it as strictly to confident unbelief as to confident belief. A myth grown from unverified recollections is exactly the sort of claim his own principle tells you to hold loosely.