Creationist

Frederick McCoy's scientific reputation has been diminished by his staunch opposition to the theory of evolution, which came to Australia with the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.

Born a Roman Catholic, McCoy converted to the Church of England in 1854¹. Having hitched his cart to the English establishment, he was quickly rewarded, with a ten-fold salary increase and a Professorship in Melbourne². However this allegiance also held him to an increasingly anachronistic view of creation, shared with his Anglican peers in Melbourne.

McCoy was not alone in opposing Darwin's theories. His colleague George Britton Halford, the first Professor of Medicine at Melbourne University, was Darwin's loudest critic in the Australian colonies.

Halford focussed on Thomas 'Darwin's Bulldog' Huxley's proposition that 'the differences that separate man from the gorilla and the chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate Man from the lower apes', suggesting that Huxley's book Man's Place in Nature 'might have been written by the devil³'.

In 1865 McCoy provided Halford with concrete evidence of the differences between man and gorilla, by acquiring the first specimens of gorillas seen in Australia. He implored the public to visit the museum's simian family 'to see how infinitely remote the creature is from humanity, and how monstrously writers have exaggerated the points of resemblance when endeavouring to show that man is only one phase in the gradual transmutation of animals ...'⁴

The idea that man might be descended from the apes drew the argument away from evolution's broader implications, and in part 'the species question' was avoided. Instead 'Mr Gorilla' in his glass case became the debate's focal point.

McCoy later gave public lectures on his belief in 'centres of creation'. This divided the world into six geographical regions, wherein the fauna and flora of each was assembled by God, in separate and independent acts of creation.

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¹T Darragh, 'Frederick McCoy: the Irish Years', the Victorian Naturalist, p. 164.
²ibid.
³Barry W Butcher, 'Gorilla Warfare in Melbourne: , Huxley and "Man's place in nature"', Australian Science in the Making, W Roderick (ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 153-167.
⁴Argus, 20 June 1865.