Nonetheless, Owen’s egotism and inscrutability made him enemies in the scientific world from the start. This habit of acquiring adversaries eventually became a serious problem. In the late 1850s, tensions with the rising star Huxley were already foreboding future ill; in 1864, a powerful group calling itself the X Club formed to take charge of science’s role in society and stuck a more persistent thorn in Owen’s side. This influential group of secular scientific naturalists, whose members included Huxley as well as Herbert Spencer, stood for much that Owen detested. Their agnosticism and naturalistic interpretation of evolutionary processes — sometimes understood as driven by what Spencer termed “survival of the fittest”, or what Darwin called “natural selection” — were anathema to Owen’s theistic evolutionism, in which humans represent the apex of God’s providentially unfolding plan. Charles Kingsley’s classic children’s story The Water-Babies (1863) memorably satirized one of the most public clashes between Owen and Huxley, in which the former attempted to distance humans biologically from apes, while the latter, stressing our humble animal descent, did just the reverse.