Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley had almost no formal schooling and taught himself comparative anatomy well enough to become, by some accounts, the finest practitioner of the later 19th century. He worked through invertebrates first, then vertebrates, and after studying Archaeopteryx alongside Compsognathus concluded correctly that birds descended from small carnivorous dinosaurs. In 1860 he nearly skipped the Oxford debate on evolution but stayed after a chance encounter, then spent the next decades as Darwin's most vocal defender - even while privately doubting gradualism and remaining uncertain about natural selection itself. He pushed scientific education forward in Britain, coined the term "agnosticism" in 1869 to describe what can and cannot be known, and delivered an 1893 lecture on evolution and ethics that, translated into Chinese, reshaped how Darwin's ideas entered that country.