The Guardian Weekly

Darwinism’s outriders

A sprawling history of the Huxley family charts the evolution of science and society as the Victorian era gave way to modernity

By Stephen Buranyi STEPHEN BURANYI IS A WRITER SPECIALISING IN SCIENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Charles Darwin was, by all accounts, a meek and conflict-averse man. In his written work he tended not to personally attack his adversaries. He rarely gave public lectures, and never participated in the fractious debates that were the public proving ground for scientific ideas in Victorian England.

Fortunately, he had outriders to do all that for him – most famously Thomas Henry Huxley, a scientific pugilist who styled himself Darwinism’s “bulldog”. Huxley delighted in dragging down old orthodoxies, whether scientific or religious, in the name of evolution.

Huxley’s grandson, Julian Huxley, is less known outside scientific circles, but he was also a biologist, and a tireless populariser of Darwin’s theories in the 20th century. In programmes for the BBC, in more than 30 books, and as head of institutions such as London Zoo and Unesco, he is partly responsible for the idea that the logic of evolution suffuses modern life, from our bodies and minds to politics and society itself.

Alison Bashford’s book is an intriguing hybrid. A deeply researched biography of Thomas Henry, Julian, and the wider Huxley family, it also serves as an intellectual history of Britain through the radical shifts in science and society that gave birth to modernity. Thomas Henry was born in 1825, and died in 1895 when Julian was eight years old. Julian died in 1975. Bashford sees them as bookending this era, “Janus-like”: Thomas Henry turning to natural science to make sense of the past; Julian looking to a more uncertain future.

By roping in both men – and their extended family – Bashford can cover more than a century while maintaining continuity and an intimate scale. Each is as near an exemplar of liberal English society at their time as one could ask for. Thomas Henry is a lower-class striver who climbs the meritocratic ladder of professionalised science, and has immense faith in its project of demystifying the world. Yet the basic assumptions of his time – from gender relations to the benefits of empire – suit him well once cleared of religious and reactionary cobwebs.

Eton-education Julian is more flexible and fallible. He flits among the newly created jobs of the era, from film-making to world government. He is a committed scientist, but puzzles over where Darwinian thinking might fit into the emerging landscapes of psychology, art and culture.

The whole of British intellectual life seems accessible through this sprawling family tree. Thomas Henry’s son Leonard married into a literary dynasty through Julia Arnold – daughter of Thomas and niece of Matthew. Julia’s sister, Mary Augusta Ward, the novelist and anti-suffrage campaigner, influences Thomas Henry’s late-life engagement with religious philosophy. Julian’s brother Aldous haunts the margins, bringing the bleeding edge of psychedelic and psychiatric culture to Huxley family life. There is the sense of an author having fun rifling through a rambling family home, reading all the books and letters.

But Bashford pulls the threads tight late in the book. Questions of human difference – physical, mental and cultural – occupy the Huxleys. Thomas Henry sailed on scientific expeditions under an imperial flag, and the concept of the “savage” stayed with him. He correctly and repeatedly shot down the idea that there were different species of human as defined by science, yet subscribed to – and often promoted – an idea of civilisational development that envisaged a non-scientific hierarchy of races.

The aim here isn’t to cancel Thomas Henry, but to show the progression of ideas through the people who develop and expound them.

Julian was intimately aware of the failings of previous generations of scientists, including his grandfather. As head of Unesco he consciously helped shape a new utopian, anti-racist internationalism. But he also believed that understanding evolution would give humankind power to alter its genetic destiny. He worried about overpopulation, and for decades sought to redeem eugenics from its fascist associations. Bashford is too artful to present her subjects simply as avatars for their times. But by the end of Julian’s life, there is a sense of how things have changed. Thomas Henry’s project succeeded: science triumphed over religion, but Julian is drawn to new and unknowable frontiers. Late in life he developed a sceptical interest in phenomena such as telepathy. Progress is a funny thing. The world, Bashford suggests, can always be re-mystified.

Inside

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2022-09-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

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