The moment
On 24 November 1859 John Murray published Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that species arise by natural selection rather than by separate acts of creation. At the British Association meeting in Oxford on 30 June 1860 Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley clashed over the book; no accurate record of what was said survives, and the famous exchange about apes rests on recollections written down decades later. Darwin called himself an agnostic and never an atheist, and his chief defender in America, the botanist Asa Gray, argued that natural selection was compatible with belief in God.
People: Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Samuel Wilberforce, Asa Gray