Today is Thomas Huxley’s birthday. He was born on May 4, 1825 in Ealing, England. He probably did more to promote Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection than anyone else but he wasn’t altogether friendly about it—he was called “Darwin’s bulldog”. He said quite a few memorable things but my favorite is “The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” As though to prove his favorite theory in his personal life he had quite a few notable descendants including one grandson, Andrew, who won a Nobel Prize for Medicine and another grandson, Aldous, who wrote the dystopic novel Brave New World.
