Get started
Work

The Huxleys: An intimate history of evolution By AlisonBashford, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2022. pp. 576. $30 (Cloth)

Year: 2023
Type: book-review
Abstract: Evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley's personal library is preserved in the archives of Rice University (Houston, TX, USA), where he taught briefly in the 1910s. It contains scientific publications, such as T. H. Morgan's findings in new genetics; popular science books, like George Schaller's The Year of the Gorilla (1963)1; Science and Synthesis (1967), the proceedings of a symposium on Albert Einstein and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin organized by Unesco, which Huxley directed 1946–19482; as well as studies of psychedelics and the occult, such as his brother Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954).3 These eclectic works encapsulate the world of Julian, now best remembered for his popular writings across a wide range of scientific fields. Alison Bashford's beautiful and highly readable history “is an effort to interpret [this] library's meaning, an intellectual ecosystem of the modern natural and human sciences” (p. 413). In fact, the library contains not only Julian's 20th-century volumes but also his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley's 18th- and 19th-century tomes: Comte de Buffon's Natural History (1749–1804), Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–1833). Thomas Henry, best remembered by historians for defending Darwinism in a high-profile debate with the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce in 1860, was himself a prominent public intellectual at the center of Victorian British evolutionary science. The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution, a double biography that spans Thomas Henry's birth in 1825 to Julian's death in 1975, traces the 150-year arc of British evolutionary biology, anthropology, zoology, literature, psychology, eugenics, imperial politics, and more. In Bashford's adept hands, the illustrious Huxley family serves as a fascinating lens into rapidly changing science and politics from the Victorian era through the Cold War. Bashford offers an “intimate history” of evolutionary thinking by weaving developments in science with biographical elements, including the grandfather–grandson pair's shared struggles with debilitating depression, their proclivity for literature, and most of all, their attempts to understand “man's place in nature” through—and sometimes against—religion, spirituality, and culture. Grappling with humanity's relationship with the natural world, she writes, was the most enduring Huxley project of all. Thomas Henry defended the evolutionary continuity between human and animal, and largely privileged biology over culture in arguing for the monogenetic singularity of the human species. Bashford nuances the stereotype of him as “Darwin's Bulldog,” aggressively defending natural selection against the clergy and scientific establishment. Instead, he was a skeptic who only slowly and hesitantly came around to Darwinism because he thought it was scientifically verifiable and because of his friendship with Darwin. Natural selection came to be widely accepted by the 1870s. But by the time Julian was wrestling with humans' relationship with nature 50 years later, Mendelian genetics had challenged some of Darwin's theories, especially around the mechanism of inheritance. Some biologists had started to question natural selection once more. Amid these doubts, Julian came to be one of the most loyal 20th-century defenders of Darwinism and contributed to the reconciliation of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics in the so-called modern synthesis. Julian's father Leonard penned a poem “The Inheritor” to commemorate his birth; ironically, Bashford writes, it is not “Darwin's Bulldog,” but “The Inheritor” who—in inheriting natural selection from his ultimately doubtful grandfather—was one of its most vigorous champions. Evolution is a science steeped in politics. Bashford is unflinching in her portrayal of Thomas Henry's support for British imperialism and white superiority over nonwhite peoples, as well as Julian's promotion of eugenics. The grandfather conducted research on skulls knowingly stolen from aboriginal gravesites and argued that indigenous people from Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania were “living ancients.” In the context of the American Civil War, he confessed to his sister in Tennessee that he had “no sympathy for the ‘black man’” and contended that slavery should be ended only for the sake of the morality of “the white man” (p. 305). The grandson Julian believed in a “Family of Man” and argued against racial prejudice and class privilege in the 1939 Geneticists' Manifesto4 but asserted that culture was hierarchical. Amid Malthusian fears of population growth, he endorsed sterilization and forms of fertility selection that privileged men over women, such as artificial insemination with “preferred” donor sperm. For both Huxleys, if evolutionary theory reworked humans' similarities and differences with other species, it did the same within the human species. Human difference was, for each of them, as much a biological question as it was one of political philosophy. Ultimately, Bashford maintains, the Huxleys considered humans free but inherently unequal. Within the worlds of 19th-century Victorian imperialism, on the one hand, and 20th-century African decolonization, on the other hand, the Huxleys' rarefied scientific and social milieus indelibly shaped their investigations into what humans are. For all their scientific accomplishments and political work, the two Huxleys (especially Julian) inhabited a rich literary environment and wrote extensively for popular audiences. According to Bashford, both practiced what is now known as science communication, with Julian becoming one of its most skilled practitioners in the first half of the 20th century. Thomas Henry lectured on natural history to working-class men, with a published version of a lecture The Crayfish (1880)5 becoming so popular that Julian was once greeted in Germany as “the grandson of the Crayfish” (p. 149). Julian gave up an academic career to write the wildly popular introductory zoological text Science of Life (1929) with H. G. Wells and G. P. Wells6; regularly appeared on the radio; made a number of films, including Oscar-winning The Private Life of the Gannets (1934)7; and published extensively in magazines in addition to his own books. His Cambridge-educated mother Julia Arnold was part of a storied literary family including Matthew Arnold and Mary Arnold (who wrote under her married name Mrs. Humphry Ward). Julian grew up with his aunt technically appraising his poems. He remained close to Aldous, perhaps best known for Brave New World (1932),8 and the two corresponded extensively about writing. He even met his wife Juliette Baillot at Garsington Manor, a center for English cultural modernism that at times hosted Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Katherine Mansfield. Bashford details how Julian put his literary skills to use championing an “evolutionary humanism” that expanded evolution into a holistic cosmology. For him, human and nature were united in a wondrous world where spirit and matter progressed evolutionarily. This was a neo-Romantic vision that Thomas Henry would have opposed. The older Huxley's scientific naturalism emphasized empirical evidence against metaphysical and religious explanations. (He even coined the term “agnostic” to proclaim the absence of evidence for a creator, an epistemological assertation he saw as distinct from atheism.) Both were champions of Darwinian evolution but understood and conveyed it in radically different ways. Against a conventional narrative where evolution drove secularization and disenchantment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bashford juxtaposes Julian's holism against Thomas Henry's naturalism to present a story of re-enchantment. Two of the numerous beautiful images in this book encapsulate this arc: in Bashford's analysis of their respective portraits, Thomas Henry holds a skull that signifies “nature,” symbolizing science as the secular trustee of humankind. Julian holds an Igbo wooden sculpture from Nigeria that signifies “culture,” standing in for the unity of science with spirituality. The rise of Darwinism, Bashford illustrates, did not denote the ascendance of “nature” over “culture.” With natural selection relatively secure in the first half of the twentieth century, Julian sought to capture the wonder of our world by reaching beyond “nature.” The bookish Huxleys understood and conveyed their worlds through texts; Julian's library is a testament to his voracious literary appetite. In this magisterial double biography—which deserves a place in the libraries of scientists and historians alike—Bashford conveys those worlds to us, in all their intimacy and messiness, while providing an illuminating and digestible account of British natural and human sciences over 150 years. Thomas Henry and Julian, she writes, might be thought of as one very long-lived man at the center of these scientific developments. Indeed, despite what might seem to be their radically different Victorian and postwar contexts, they were working through the same inexhaustible question of “man's place in nature.” Scientists today continue their inquiry.
DOI: 10.1096/fj.202301310
Author: Anin Luo
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4384273908
Cites: 4
Cited by:
Related to: 10