An image of bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the Bible-defender, and Thomas Huxley, the Darwin-defender, the two who butted heads at the famous Huxley vs Wilberforce debate, at Oxford, in 1860.

“Are we a fortuitous concourse of atoms?”

— John Draper (1860), opening paper “on the intellectual development of Europe with relation to Darwin's theory”; paper read, supposedly, was a dry discourse [1]

“Is it through your grandfather or grandmother that you claim descendance from a monkey?”

— Samuel Wilberforce (1860), query to Thomas Huxley [1]

“I am not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor. I would be ashamed, however, to be connected with a man who used great gifts [of speech] to obscure the truth.”

— Thomas Huxley (1860), reply to Samuel Wilberforce [1]

“I found myself asking: How do I know about Darwin to begin with? And the answer was this: I was taught him as part of history as well as part of biology. After the voyage of the good ship Beagle and the amazing discoveries that attended it, Darwin decided to change his own theistic views and also to challenge the rooted conceptions of Christian Victorian society. He succeeded beyond any expectation. The great set piece, which I was taught in school, involved the debate at Oxford between Darwin's supporter Thomas Huxley (ancestor of Aldous and Julian and coiner of the word "agnostic") and Bishop Wilberforce, known even to his own flock as Soapy Sam. In front of a large audience, Huxley cleaned Wilberforce's clock, ate his lunch, used him as a mop for the floor, and all that. It was a "tipping point." After that, there were still those who believed that god had put fossils in the rock to test our faith, and those like Bishop Ussher who claimed to have dated the birth of the world to an exact time (4004 BC), but they were a spent force.”

— Christopher Hitchens (2005), “Equal Tax: No Tax-Exempt Status for Churches that Refuse to Distribute Pro-Evolution Propaganda!” [2]