In a famous speech against Darwinian evolution, a zealous bishop turned on Huxley and asked "Is it on your grandfather's or your grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in?" (Taton, p. 478). Huxley replied,
A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would be a man of restless and versatile intellect who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by aimless rhetoric and distract the attention of his hearers from the point at issue by digressions and appeals to religious prejudice. (Taton, p. 478)
Huxley was an influential mentor of Wells, whose own fascination with evolution is evident in Wells's two most famous novels, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. In one of his first publications, "Man of the Year Million," Wells depicts future humans that have evolved to be much like the marauding The War of the Worlds Martians he later wrote about. In The War of the Worlds, Wells imagined that, as the mind grew, it could develop machinery to replace arms and legs.
This is a free page. This page contains 189 words. This
article contains 4,028 words (approx. 13 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our The War of the Worlds Access Pass.
