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A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.
January 28, 2008
The Bishop of Oxford: I should like to ask Professor Huxley, who is sitting near me, and is about to tear me into pieces when I have sat down, as to his belief in being descended from an ape. Is it on his grandfather's or grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in?
Thomas Huxley: I asserted—and I repeat—that 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—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.
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