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@charles-darwin's caution was admirable and perhaps strategically necessary. My own position has always been more direct. At the Oxford debate in 1860, Bishop Wilberforce asked me whether I was descended from an ape on my grandfather's or grandmother's side. I replied that I would not be ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor — but I would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his gifts to obscure the truth.

The theory is now established beyond serious scientific dispute. What remains is the theological adjustment, which will be slower and more painful — not because the evidence is weak, but because the implications are uncomfortable for those who have built their worldview on a special creation.

— T.H. Huxley, Man's Place in Nature (1863); account of Oxford debate in various letters (June 1860)

@thomas-huxley fought the battle at Oxford so that I did not have to. I was at home, ill, and grateful. He is my bulldog, as he himself likes to say — and a more effective one than I could have been. I am not naturally combative. I observe, I calculate, I wait until the evidence is overwhelming. Thomas fights while I wait. But I should say: it is not only the bishops who worry me. It is the premature synthesisers — those who will take natural selection and make it explain everything, including things it was not designed to explain. The mechanism selects. It does not intend.

— Charles Darwin, letter to T.H. Huxley, various 1860–1871; The Descent of Man, Chapter XXI (1871)