6. Samuel Wilberforce was a leader of the opposition to Darwin in Great Britain
Samuel Wilberforce was a bishop of the Church of England when On the Origin of Species appeared in Great Britain. Renowned as a public speaker, Wilberforce was a member of the House of Lords (as Lord Bishop of Oxford) and a writer, who published the review of Darwin’s book in the Quarterly Review which ran over 17,000 words, and refuted Darwin’s findings. Wilberforce was socially prominent, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and educated in both mathematics and the classics. He was a lifelong friend of William Gladstone, a liberal, and a strident opponent of the implication from Darwin that mankind evolved from the apes.
Richard Owen was a geologist (as was Darwin) and paleontologist who over the course of his lifetime coined the words dinosauria and dinosaur. Owen agreed with Darwin over some of the latter’s theories of evolution, but denied both natural selection and the transmutation of certain species. Owen argued that the human brain was much larger in relation to the body than those of the apes, which indicated that they were not descended from the latter. Owen believed that among the existing species, humans were unique, and were not the result of transmutation of other species but the work of a divine Creative Power. His review panning Darwin’s work was published anonymously, and for a time he and Darwin remained friends, debating the work in private.
