Volume Thirteen - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - Remarkable Connections - Darwin, FitzRoy, Hawkshaw & Wedgwood . . . .

But the controversy became public and highly dramatic in Oxford in June 1860. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce attacked Darwin's theory before a large audience at the British Association meeting. Thomas Henry Huxley defended evolution. The famous confrontation subsequently became known as the 'Great Debate', although later accounts have probably embellished some of the most famous words attributed to the participants.

Darwin himself was absent through illness but Robert FitzRoy was present — and opposed Darwin. FitzRoy's objection was not simply scientific. His Christian convictions led him to reject the idea that the natural world could be explained solely through natural selection. At Oxford he publicly denounced Darwin's position.

The significance of this disagreement is difficult to overstate. The two men had sailed together aboard HMS Beagle. FitzRoy had commanded the expedition and Darwin had been the young naturalist whose observations during the voyage helped form the foundations of his later work. Yet less than thirty years later, the former companions stood on opposite sides of one of Victorian Britain's great intellectual controversies.

One saw natural selection as an explanation for the diversity of life.

The other feared that it undermined the authority of biblical creation.