JULIAN HUXLEY

'Sir Julian Sorell Huxley', FRS (22 June 1887–14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, author, humanist and internationalist, known for his popularisations of science in books and lectures. He was the first director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund. Huxley was knighted in 1958.
Huxley came from the distinguished Huxley family. His brother was the writer Aldous Huxley, and his half-brother a fellow biologist and Nobel laureate, Andrew Huxley; his father was writer and editor Leonard Huxley; and his paternal grandfather was biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and protagonist of evolution. His maternal grandfather was the academic Tom Arnold, great-uncle poet Matthew Arnold and great-grandfather Thomas Arnold of Rugby School.

Contents

Early life

Student life

Career

Early career

Mid career

UNESCO and WWF

Humanism

Eugenics

Public life and science popularisation

References

Works

Contributions

Biographies

External links

Early life

Huxley was born on June 22, 1887, at the London house of his aunt, the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, while his father was attending the jubilee celebrations of Queen Victoria. Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College, and continued to develop scientific interests in the school laboratories that his grandfather had persuaded the school to build several decades earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology and in 1905 obtained a scholarship in Zoology at Balliol College, Oxford.

Student life

In 1906, after a summer in Germany, Huxley took his place at Oxford, where he developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at only 46: a terrible blow for her husband, three sons and young eight-year old daughter Margaret. In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge. Happily, it was also the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the ''Origin of species''.

Career

Early career

Huxley got a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed to a lecturing post at Oxford University, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds such as redshanks (which are waders) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the Great Crested Grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology.
In 1912 his life took a new turn. He was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to take the chair of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the USA in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T.H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H.J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, and hurried to complete his PhD, moving to Houston for the beginning of the 1915-1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued ''Drosophila'' lab work.
Before taking up the post at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England". In 1913 Huxley had a nervous breakdown after the break-up of his relationship with 'K' (her full name is not known), and rested in a nursing home. His depression returned the next year, and he and his brother Trevenen (two years his junior) ended up in the same nursing home. Sadly, Trevenen hanged himself. Depressive illness had afflicted others in the Huxley family: see discussion in Thomas Henry Huxley.
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first humming-bird, though his visit to McIlhenny's Bird Reserve on Avery Island in Louisiana was much more significant. McIlhenny owned the whole island, using it to produce his famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were his hobby, and he set up a sanctuary. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns, all of which (like the grebes) exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characters equally developed in both sexes.^[1]
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort, working in intelligence, first at GCHQ and then in northern Italy. After the war he took a fellowship at New College Oxford. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. On the ''first day'' of the Somme, the British had nearly 60 thousand casualites including nearly 20 thousand dead; all told there were about a million casualties during the course of the battle. Peacetime institutions were greatly damaged by this terrible war, and Oxford lost many staff and students.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot. She was a French Swiss girl whom he had met at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a Bloomsbury Group socialite with a penchant for artists and intellectuals. The newly-weds life together included students, faculty wives, grebes and, unfortunately, another depressive breakdown, this time rather serious. From his wife's autobiography it seems his mental illness took the form of a bipolar disorder, with the depressive phases being of moderate to sever intensity. It took a long time for him to recover on this occasion, but despite this he left a legacy of students who admired him, and who became leaders in zoology for the next thirty or forty years. E.B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.^[2][3]
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927 resigned his chair to work full time with H.G. Wells and his son G.P. Wells on ''The Science of Life'' (see below).
His research interests also included ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. He was a friend and mentor of the biologist and Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz. In general, he was much more an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and also contributed much to evolutionary ideas. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: he would have been shocked to see some of what transpired in the second half of the twentieth century.

Mid career

In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. As with so many scientists his views changed as the abuses of human rights and the Lysenko affair revealed the hidden weaknesses of the Soviet system. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his zoological research. In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy after stating that he believed the United States should join World War II a few weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Because of the country's joining the war his lecture tour was extended and the council of the Zoological Society, who were uneasy with their secretary, used this as an excuse to remove him from his post. Huxley seized this opportunity to dedicate much of the rest of his life to science popularisation and political issues.
Huxley made a significant contribution to evolutionary biology: he was the most important biologist after August Weismann to insist on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was one of the key biologists in the modern evolutionary synthesis,together with Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson and the population geneticists J.B.S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. The evolutionary synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
It was Huxley who coined the terms new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis (Huxley 1942); he also invented the term cline (population genetics) to describe species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull ''Larus'' round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.
Huxley coined the terms "mentifacts", "socifacts" and "artifacts" to describe how cultural traits take on a life of their own, spanning over generations. This idea is related to memetics. Towards the end of his life Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he did not, however, accept de Chardin's views on evolution.

UNESCO and WWF

In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including creation of national parks, which was happening in the few areas that remained uninhabited due to malaria. He was later asked by the British government to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. On these trips Huxley developed a concern for education and conservation throughout the world, and was therefore involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first Director-General in 1946.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund) as an international fundraising group dedicated to the conservation of nature.

Humanism

Less well known is the fact that Huxley, a Humanist, also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.

Eugenics

Like many biologists in the first half of the twentieth century, Huxley was a proponent of eugenics as a method of bettering society. After the Second World War he wrote two books critical of genetics in the Soviet Union and which was dominated by Lysenkoism, a pseudoscientific doctrine based on the inheritance of acquired characters. Lysenkoism he considered dangerous because it denied proven genetic facts, and stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system. Huxley feared a similar process of genetic stagnation would occur in the human population without the aid of eugenics, which the Lysenkoists rejected.
While Huxley saw eugenics as important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool as a whole, he believed that races were equal, and was an outspoken critic both of the eugenic extremism that arose in the 1930s, and of the perceived wisdom that working classes were eugenically inferior (Kevles 1985). Huxley was a critic of the use of race as a scientific concept, and in response to the rise of fascism in Europe was asked to write ''We Europeans''. The book, on which he collaborated with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, sociologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and Charles Singer, which amongst other things suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. Following the Second World War he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement ''The Race Question'' [1], which asserted that "A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens" and "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows : The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." The UNESCO statement also helped destroy the idea that Jewish people form a distinct racial group when it asserted that "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races..."
In the post war years, after the realisation that eugenic ideas had been used to excuse mass murder, Huxley (1957) coined the term "transhumanism" to describe the view that man should better himself through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.

Public life and science popularisation

Huxley discovered the lucrative business of popular science writing after publishing articles in newspapers. In the late 1920s he was introduced to book writing when asked to collaborate on two projects, a textbook of animal biology with his Oxford colleague J.B.S. Haldane, and by H.G. Wells on a definitive nine-volume set of popular science books on biology, ''The Science of Life''. Other notable publications include ''Essays of a Biologist'' and ''. This latter book is a thoroughly professional attempt to bring together all the strands of research to explain how evolution may have taken place.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist R.M. Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary ''The Private Life of the Gannet''. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television and radio appearances. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, ''The Brains Trust'', in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". He was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows, ''Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?'', in 1955.
In his essay ''The Crowded World'' published in ''Evolutionary Humanism'' (1964), Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as 'The Day Of 6 Billion'.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes.

References

1. Huxley, Julian 1970. ''Memories'', chapters 7 and 8.
2. Huxley, Juliette 1986. ''Leaves of the tulip tree: autobiography''. Murray, London. Chapter 4.
3. Ford E.B. 1989. Scientific work by Sir Julian Huxley FRS. In Keynes M & Harrison G.A. ''Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley''. Macmillan, London.

Works

★ ''The individual in the animal kingdom'' (1911)

★ ''The courtship habits of the Great Crested Grebe'' (1914) [a landmark in ethology]

★ ''Essays of a Biologist'' (1923)

★ ''The stream of life'' (1926)

★ ''Animal biology'' (with J.B.S. Haldane, 1927)

★ ''Religion without revelation'' (1927, revised 1957)

★ ''The tissue-culture king'' (1927) [science fiction]

★ ''Ants'' (1929)

★ ''Bird-watching and bird behaviour'' (1930)

★ ''An introduction to science'' (with E. Andrade, 1931-34)

★ ''What dare I think?'' (1931)

★ ''The captive shrew and other poems'' (1932)

★ ''The science of life'' (with H.G. & G.P. Wells, 1931)

★ ''Problems of relative growth'' (1932)

★ ''A scientist among the Soviets'' (1932)

★ ''Scientific research and social needs'' (1934)

★ ''Elements of experimental embryology'' (with Gavin de Beer, 1934)

★ ''Thomas Huxley's diary of the voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake'' (1935)

★ ''We Europeans'' (with A.C. Haddon, 1936)

★ ''Animal language'' (photographs by Ylla, includes recordings of animal calls: 1938, reprinted 1964)

★ The present standing of the theory of sexual selection. In G.R. de Beer (ed) ''Evolution: Essays on aspects of evolutionary biology'' (p11-42). Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938)

★ ''The living thoughts of Darwin'' (1939)

★ ''The new systematics'' (1940) [this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'New Synthesis', a unification of evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics]

★ ''The uniqueness of man'' (1941)

★ ''Evolution: the modern synthesis'' (1942, revised ed 1963) [this summarises research on all topics relevant to evolution up to the Second World War]

★ ''Democracy marches'' (1941)

★ ''Evolutionary ethics'' (1943)

★ ''TVA: Adventure in planning'' (1944)

★ ''On living in a revolution'' (1944)

★ ''Touchstone for ethics'' (1947)

★ ''Man in the modern world'' (1947) eBook

★ ''Heredity, East and West'' (1949)

★ ''Soviet genetics and World science: Lysenko and the meaning of heredity'' (1949)

★ ''Evolution in action'' (1953)

★ ''Evolution as a process'' (1954, with Hardy A.C. and Ford E.B. eds) Allen & Unwin.

★ ''From an antique land'' (1954, revised 1966)

★ ''Biological aspects of cancer'' (1957)

★ ''Kingdom of the beasts'' (with W. Suschitzky, 1956)

★ ''Towards a new humanism'' (1957)

★ ''New bottles for new wine'' (1958)

★ ''The coming new religion of humanism'' (1962)

★ ''The humanist frame'' (as ed, 1962)

★ ''Essays of a humanist'' (1964) (reprinted in 1992: ISBN 0-87975-778-7)

★ ''The human crisis'' (1964)

★ ''Darwin and his world'' (with H. Kettlewell, 1965)

★ ''The wonderful world of evolution'' (1969)

★ ''Memories'' (2 vols 1970 & 1972) [his autobiography]

Contributions

★ Eliot Howard, ''Territory in bird life''. Collins (1948 edition) - Foreword, with James Fisher

Biographies

★ Baker John R. 1978. ''Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887-1975''. UNESCO, Paris.

★ Clark, Ronald W. 1960. ''Sir Julian Huxley''. Phoenix, London.

★ Clark, Ronald, W. 1968. ''The Huxleys''. Heinemann, London.

★ Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. ''If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence''. World Scientific, Singapore.

★ Green, Jens-Peter 1981. ''Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys''. Carl Winter Universitatsverlag.

★ Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1972. ''Memories'' and ''Memories II''. George Allen & Unwin, London.

★ Huxley, Juliette 1986. ''Leaves of the tulip tree''. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]

★ Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. ''Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley''. Proceeding of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.

★ Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. ''Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science''. Rice University Press, Houston.

External links

★ Short biography.

★ Guide to Huxley's papers, 91 linear feet.

★ "Transhumanism" in ''New Bottles for New Wine''. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.

★ "The New Divination" in ''Essays of a Humanist''. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.