The story of Thomas Huxley’s humiliation of bishop Samuel Wilberforce during their altercation in Oxford is the stuff of legend. To the Bishop of Oxford’s provocative enquiry whether Huxley would prefer to have an ape for an ancestor on his grandmother’s or grandfather’s side, Huxley famously retaliated that that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop who pronounced on matters of which he was ignorant. A victory for Huxley and for science over religion! But was it really? In this chapter, we examine the accretion of mythology surrounding this notoriously public event. There is no denying that it took place before a raucous and animated audience. Its historical significance is not so easily interpreted. By the end of the nineteenth century, by which time most features of Darwin’s theory enjoyed acceptance, Huxley’s ‘victory’ had become a foundation myth of scientific professionalism, testimony to the importance of intellectual freedom in science and the ascendancy of expert knowledge over amateur prejudice. That retrospective interpretation can, however, distort perceptions of how matters stood in 1860. Even Huxley’s son, Leonard, conceded that talk of his father’s ‘victory’ was misplaced; Wilberforce was not the scientific ignoramus commonly supposed; and Huxley, despite his anticlericalism, considered talk of ‘conflict between science and religion’ to be a fabrication fostered in ignorance.

We argue here that one common myth regarding Darwin’s influence - namely, that it led to an “immediate” change in the life sciences - is false. Darwin’s ideas regarding natural selection were not immediately and widely accepted by the scientific community. We document challenges to natural selection, alternatives considered and endorsed, and show that, rather than a rapid, “revolutionary” change, this eventual embrace of “Darwinism” was gradual, drawing in part on Kuhn’s ideas regarding revolutionary science.

Conventional wisdom has it that Darwin’s theory of natural selection needed Mendel’s theory of inheritance to become workable, and relatedly, that had Darwin read Mendel’s 1866 paper on his experiments with crossbred peas, the necessary fix would have come around 1870 rather than decades later. This chapter shows that, on closer inspection, neither of these propositions should be accepted. From Darwin’s perspective, when it came to inheritance, his theory depended only on an undoubted fact: that offspring on the whole inherit their parents’ characters. Even when a character gets transmitted in a diluted form, due to blending, the struggle for existence ensures, as Darwin saw it, that such dilution is minimal, since only organisms that vary in similarly advantageous directions will live long enough to reproduce. Against the idea that Darwin would have instantly embraced Mendel’s paper as putting inheritance on a new, theory-saving basis, thus saving evolutionary biology from decades of sterile debate, the chapter emphasizes three points: first, the similarity between Mendel’s results and ones that Darwin was already familiar with from his own snapdragon crosses; second, the differences between Mendel’s results and ones reported in 1866 by Darwin’s pea expert, Thomas Laxton; and third, Mendel’s criticisms of Darwin on whether, as Darwin believed, variation under domestication is much greater in extent than variation in the wild.

In this essay I consider what myths are, and provide a very short sketch of Darwin’s life and work. I also suggest some possible reasons about the mythology around him, paving the way for the chapters to follow.

For decades it was widely believed that Darwin avoided publishing his theory of evolution for many years. Many explanations were proposed to identify Darwin’s reasons or motives for doing so. This chapter demonstrates that Darwin’s delay is a recent historiographical theme for which there is no clear evidence, and indeed is overwhelmingly contradicted by the historical evidence. It is also shown that Darwin’s belief in evolution was not a secret before publication. Instead of a man afraid of his secret theory being revealed to his prejudiced contemporaries, it is demonstrated that Darwin was understandably very busy and began his species book when he had completed work in hand, just as he had intended all along.

This is a myth that is ‘good in parts.’ T. H. Huxley certainly emerged as the leading defender of the Origin of Species against critics who believed that organic forms are designed – directly or indirectly – by God. But this does not mean that he accepted natural selection as a complete explanation of how evolution works. The theory suited his naturalistic ideology because it was based solely on observable processes. From the start, though, Huxley cautioned that Darwin needed to show how artificial selection could produce a new species and (more importantly) that he was wrong to rule out the possibility of new characters appearing by abrupt saltations. The latter point is the key to a basic difference between their worldviews. As a morphologist Huxley was not convinced that the fundamental structure of each type could be the accumulated product of a series of small adaptive modifications. He eventually suggested that forces internal to the organism might play a role in directing variation – a position not far removed from that of anti-Darwinians such as Mivart.

It is commonly held that Darwin discovered natural selection in a flash of insight after reading Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on Population in September 1838. Additionally, most people think this was the missing piece that completed his theory of evolution. However, the Eureka moment is a myth, as is the claim that its purported insight finalized his theoretical understanding. Darwin not only slowly worked out his idea of natural selection over many months but he also took another twenty years to formulate the theory presented in On the Origin of Species. Most notably, his thinking changed radically in 1856 with the introduction of the principle of divergence. Analyzing this history demonstrates that there are a variety of misunderstandings about what exactly Darwin’s theory was, how it was structured, and whether it changed over time. Overall, this casts doubt on the claim that Darwin’s theory was ever “essentially complete,” even after contemplating several different meanings for this phrase. Rejecting this myth yields a richer understanding of the way scientific inquiry operates, especially how its methods and outcomes are justified, while augmenting our confidence in the importance of natural selection for explaining adaptive evolution.

This chapter will focus on debunking the myth that sexual selection was Darwin’s afterthought to natural selection by more fully situating sexual reproduction and sex differentiation in Darwin’s intellectual trajectory, dating to the 1830s. This long-standing myth results, in part, from the scientific communities’ discomfort with sexual selection theory and, more to the point, the social radicals who embraced it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To unpack the gendered reception of the Descent, this chapter also analyzes the related myth that sexual selection theory naturalized female inferiority by highlighting the nuanced and varied reception of sexual selection theory within and, importantly, beyond the scientific community especially among socialists and feminists.

It is sometimes said that Darwin was converted to the theory of evolution by the striking evidence provided by his famous Galápagos finches, and, in this connection, that his historic visit to the Galápagos Islands had an immediate impact on his evolutionary thinking.  Such was not the case.  During his five-week visit to these islands in September and October 1835, Darwin was still under the spell of creationist thinking, so much so that he failed to label most of his Galápagos birds by island—information that was of vital importance for establishing that these species had arisen by geographic isolation on the different islands of the Galápagos group.  Moreover, at the time Darwin collected the famous finches that are now named after him, he was misled by their remarkable beak diversity into thinking they were members of different avian families rather than being closely related descendants of a common ancestor. It was not until after Darwin’s return to England, and more particularly during Darwin’s fateful meeting with distinguished ornithologist John Gould in March of 1837, that Darwin finally became convinced that different species of birds indeed inhabited the different islands of the Galápagos group.  In addition, Gould’s astute correction of Darwin’s provisional voyage taxonomic assessments of the Galápagos finches allowed Darwin to grasp that these birds were members of a single avian subfamily. Inspired by this new information, Darwin realized that evolution could account for it, and he now generalized these conclusions to other aspects of his Beagle voyage collections.

Some of the criticism that followed the publication of The Origin of Species was generated by theological prejudice. Few experts in the field would deny or doubt that. However, Darwin and his followers lumped these critics together with other detractors whose objections were first and foremost of a scientific kind, collectively painting them with the tar brush of creationism. A case in point is the enduring misrepresentation – from Darwin till Dawkins – of Owen and several of his allies. Yet Owen had been an adherent of evolution well before his critique of Darwin’s 1859 book. He himself was severely censured by creationists when he put forward his famous vertebrate archetype as palpable evidence for the evolutionary origins of backboned animals. His approach to origins was in fact more comprehensive than the Darwinian one. It had been developed previously, from the year 1755 on, when Kant published his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels. Kant’s unified theory of evolution had many and eminent followers, not least Humboldt with his first two volumes of Kosmos. Denigrating Owen’s critique as theologically prejudiced and without a sound scientific basis is a Darwin myth.