Asa Gray

From dKosopedia

Asa Gray was a world class scientist biologist, botanist, and zoologist who's study of plant distribution led to his intimate correspondence with Charles Darwin during the years in which Darwin was developing the doctrines that evolved into Darwinism. [1]

From 1855 to 1875 Gray was both a critic and a sympathetic exponent of Darwinism. His religious views were those of a Protestant; so when Darwinism was attacked as equivalent to atheism, he was in position to answer effectively the unfounded allegation that this new idea was fatal to the doctrine of divine design.

Gray taught that "the most puzzling things of all to the old-school teleologists are the principia of the Darwinian." He taught that the present species are not special creations, but rather derived from previously species; and he did so when evolution was scarcely recognized by any naturalists, and when to many clerical people* evolution was a synonym for atheism.

Notable exceptions included Charles Kingsley, and Frederick Temple.