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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple
Adrian Desmond
Michael Joseph £20.00
The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, and the debate it sparked, marked a turning point. Nobody promoted Darwin’s views more enthusiastically or to greater effect than Thomas Henry Huxley. He earned a reputation as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’; a soldier of science, slaying the bishops and clerical naturalists who clung to their creation stories with the same resolve that they held onto their positions of influence.
Yet Huxley’s conversion to evolutionary thought was far from smooth and, as with many other converts to ‘Darwinism’, never total. For years he resisted the evidence of the progression of living forms shown in fossil record. Even after he had become reconciled to the idea of evolutionary descent Huxley expressed doubts about Darwin’s central mechanism of natural selection.
The real value of the Origin to men like Huxley was its convincingly naturalistic explanation of our world. In the hands of the new men of science evolution was a weapon in the struggle to create a new meritocracy.
It is difficult today to appreciate the influence the Anglican Church and its political allies exerted on official life. When Darwin first formulated his theory, access to parliament, Oxford and Cambridge and all manner of official bodies was restricted to those who could swear to the 39 Articles of the Anglican faith. Jews, Catholics and Dissenters were all excluded. Political influence too was largely confined to an elite of ‘old money’. Science was generally the preserve of gentlemen of leisure and wealth.
But new wealth and new professions were increasingly undermining this aristocratic and clerical domination. Manufacturers, engineers, doctors, were all aware of their own growing importance. Most too were frustrated by a society where success, acclaim and material rewards depended more on birth than merit.
Huxley was born above a butchers’ shop to a struggling middle class family. Merit was his only hope of advance and he was quick to develop a healthy contempt for deference and forelock tugging. Working as a drug grinder in the East End of London, he witnessed some of the most brutal and miserable conditions to be seen anywhere in the world, and his dissatisfaction with society (unlike many Whig reformers) extended to the miseries of the poor.
His first break came with his appointment as assistant surgeon on one of Her Majesty’s surveying ships, the Rattlesnake. This was real work in contrast to Darwin’s position as ‘gentleman companion’ to the captain of the Beagle, but Huxley found the time to dredge for specimens, for dissection and writing up his findings. Quickly he began to build a reputation, as he rewrote the work of some of the most respected naturalists, regrouping classes of sea creatures according to new physical criteria. His classifications depended purely on form and structure rather than historical development and evolution.
Despite his lack of an evolutionary perspective, Huxley was quick to lock horns on his return with England’s most respected creationist, the anatomist Richard Owen. His determination to carve out a place for professional ‘men of science’ was strengthened by personal considerations – the need to bring his fiancée over from Australia.
Respect for Huxley grew but his greatest prominence came with the debates around the Origin of Species. He wrote reviews and essays and lectured ceaselessly. He lectured as much to working class audiences as to the wealthy. Evolution had long been in the armoury of working class radicals (one of the reasons the ideas were feared). Huxley’s interest was not in socialism, but in a world dominated by a British Empire run on rational scientific lines. The victory of Huxley’s project was also a personal victory. He became president of the Geographical and Ethnological Societies, and of the ‘Parliament of Science’, the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Anyone who has read Desmond’s Darwin (co-authored by James Moore) will know what to expect of this book: a well paced enjoyable account, placing scientific ideas and personalities firmly in their historical context. The Huxley biography doesn’t have the broad historical sweep of their Darwin, but still has much to recommend it.
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