The Writer's Almanac for Monday, June 30, 2025 | Garrison Keillor

On this day in 1860, a debate on the merits of the theory of evolution took place at Oxford University. It occurred as part of the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Darwin's book On the Origin of Species (1859) had just been published seven months earlier, and was hotly contested by scientists and theologians on both sides of the issue. Noted biologist Richard Owen had written a scathing review of the book in the Edinburgh Review, and he also coached the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, in his condemnation of the book. On the pro-Darwin side of the issue were several liberal theologians — including mathematician and priest Baden Powell — as well as scientists Joseph Dalton Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was such an ardent and vocal supporter of evolutionary theory that he came to be known as "Darwin's bulldog."

Bishop Wilberforce, one of the most famous orators of the day, was to be one of the speakers on Saturday the 30th. The hall was packed and hundreds lined up outside to hear the discussion, which came to be known as the Wilberforce-Huxley debate (or the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, depending on whose side you were on), even though there were many contributors to the discussion. There is no transcript of the day's events, but one exchange has reached the status of legend. Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was descended from an ape on his father's side or his mother's, and Huxley retorted that he was not ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor, but he would be ashamed to descend from someone who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. Most accounts include some version of this story, but according to Hooker, that may have been all that most people heard. In his report to Darwin (who was too ill to attend), Hooker wrote:

"Well, Sam Oxon got up and spouted for half an hour with inimitable spirit, ugliness and emptiness and unfairness … Huxley answered admirably and turned the tables, but he could not throw his voice over so large an assembly nor command the audience … he did not allude to Sam's weak points nor put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience. The battle waxed hot. Lady Brewster fainted, the excitement increased as others spoke; my blood boiled, I felt myself a dastard; now I saw my advantage; I swore to myself that I would smite that Amalekite, Sam, hip and thigh if my heart jumped out of my mouth, and I handed my name up to the President as ready to throw down the gauntlet."

Hooker was the closing speaker of the discussion, and he felt that his speech had carried the day (of course, Wilberforce and Huxley each felt the same way about their own speeches). In the end, though each side claimed victory, most accounts chalk it up as a win for the Darwinians.

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-monday-june-30-2025/

Bill Moyers, Presidential Aide and Veteran of Public TV, Dies at 91

Hard to imagine any recent former presidential press secretary producing thoughtful and incisive documentaries on mythology, poetry, and philosophy… let alone politics.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/business/media/bill-moyers-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?

Some of us are still here, though we may be culturally irrelevant. So much the worse for the culture.

Men are leaving fiction reading behind. Some people want to change that.

...One real challenge at hand is a frenzied attention economy competing for everyone's time, not just men's. To present the sorry state of the male reader as having solely to do with the gendered quality of contemporary fiction misses a screen-based culture that presents nearly unlimited forms of entertainment.

"Our competition isn't other publishers," said Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. "It's social media, gaming, streaming. All these other things that are vying for people's time, attention and financial resources."

Asked whether the publishing industry needed straight men to read more fiction as a purely economic matter, Mr. Manning focused instead on the social benefits of reading.

"It's a problem if anyone isn't taking advantage of an incredible artistic medium," he said. "It's hurtful not to be well-rounded."
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nyt

Winning the cosmic lottery

"On the whole, I don’t fear death. Instead, I fear a life where I could have accomplished more. An epitaph worthy of a tombstone comes from the nineteenth-century educator Horace Mann: 'I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.'

Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another. If so, then human curiosity and wonder, the twin chariots of cosmic discovery, will ensure that starry messages continue to arrive. These insights compel us, for our short time on Earth, to become better shepherds of our own civilization. Yes, life is better than death. Life is also better than having never been born. But each of us is alive against stupendous odds. We won the lottery—only once. We get to invoke our faculties of reason to figure out how the world works. But we also get to smell the flowers. We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises, and gaze deeply into the night skies they cradle. We get to live, and ultimately die, in this glorious universe."

"Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization" by Neil deGrasse Tyson: https://a.co/9AHEXyH