Draper, Darwin, and the Oxford evolution debate of 1860

Abstract

Historians of science have written much about the famous exchange over Darwinism in 1860 at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley. The event is one of the most famous in nineteenth-century science. But little has been written about the paper that served as the occasion of that debate. The paper was one presented by John William Draper, a British-born American scientist and physician. A full transcription of Draper's paper is presented here, with a discussion of Draper's earlier writing and lectures on geology, evolution, and the philosophy of history. Together Draper's writings show his early adoption of key principles of the development hypothesis, his willingness to accept the principle of human evolution, and his claims for what he saw as the evolutionary nature of human society.