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00 Huxley, Julian S.
ited property. As he traveled through Europe to learn farming
techniques, he studied the landscapes and began thinking about
the processes of their formation. After he had established his
farm in working order, he leased it and returned to Edinburgh
to devote himself to scholarly pursuits, including geology.
Several observations made Hutton question catastrophism,
the prevailing view of Earth history that attributed geological
formations to a series of worldwide catastrophes. Hutton
noticed that Hadrian’s Wall had hardly eroded at all during the
millennium and a half since its construction. This led Hutton to
realize that geological processes such as erosion and the uplift of
mountains were very slow. He also noticed that some features
of the Earth’s surface would have required a very long time to
produce. In particular, Siccar Point, on the Atlantic Ocean near
Edinburgh, was an uncomformity in which an older, lower
set of sediments had been deposited and turned to rock, and
then a younger set of sediments had been deposited upon them
and also turned to rock. This could not have occurred during
a single biblical flood. Physicist Sir Isaac Newton and others
had revealed a cosmos that appeared timeless and orderly; Hutton
came to believe that the Earth was an ever-cycling machine
that was just as timeless and orderly as the stars. Old continents
erode, sediments are transformed into rock by heat and
pressure of the deposits over them, new continents arise, the
boundary between land and sea shifts, but the Earth continues.
Hutton believed that the world had a beginning, a supernatural
creation, and that it would have an end, but that neither the
beginning nor the end was within the framework of natural
cause and effect. Between the beginning and the end, the world
operated by natural law. The Earth, he said, had “… no vestige
of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”
In 1785 Hutton communicated his views to the Royal
Society of Edinburgh in a paper entitled “Theory of the
Earth, or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the
Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land upon the
Globe.” This became the basis of his 1795 book, Theory of
the Earth. Many people found Hutton’s attention to detail
unreadable, and five years after Hutton died, John Playfair
wrote a summary of Hutton’s book, Illustrations of the Huttonian
Theory of the Earth, in which form Hutton’s views
gained widespread attention.
Hutton’s contributions were not limited to geology. He
wrote a paper about rain which laid the framework for the
current understanding of relative humidity and condensation.
He also wrote about the nature of matter, fluids, cohesion,
light, heat, and electricity. He wrote “An Investigation into
the Principles of Knowledge” and “Elements of Agriculture.”
Hutton died March 26, 1797.
Further Reading
Baxter, Stephen. Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the True Age of
the World. New York: Forge, 2004.
Repcheck, Jack. The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the
Discovery of Earth’s Antiquity. New York: Perseus, 2003.
Huxley, Julian S. (1887–1975) British Zoologist Julian
Sorell Huxley was born June 22, 1887. As the grandson of
Thomas Huxley (see Huxley, Thomas Henry) and the son
of writer Leonard Huxley, Julian Huxley grew up seeing
scientists in action. During Sir Julian Huxley’s early career,
Darwinian evolution was fully accepted by scientists, but
natural selection was not. mutation was considered to
be an alternate method of the origin of species, rather than
as raw material for the process of natural selection. In the
1930s, scientists began to integrate Mendelian genetics
with natural selection. Several scientists explored the mathematical
and theoretical basis of genetics and evolution (see
Fisher, R. A.; Haldane, J. B. S.; Wright, Sewall). Several
other biologists, along with Julian Huxley (see Dobzhansky,
Theodosius; Mayr, Ernst; Simpson, George
Gaylord; Stebbins, G. Ledyard), gathered the scientific
evidence that allowed the modern synthesis of genetics
and evolution. Huxley’s book, Evolution: The Modern
Synthesis, was perhaps the central biological contribution to
this synthesis.
Huxley also devoted great attention and effort to science
education and to world issues in which science was involved.
He was the first director-general of the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
and one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund. In particular
he worked against racism; largely due to his efforts,
the UNESCO statement on race reported that race was a
cultural, not a scientific, concept, and that any attempts to
find scientific evidence of the superiority of one race over
another were invalid. His Heredity, East and West was one
of the first exposés of Lysenkoism. He collaborated with science
fiction writer H. G. Wells to write The Science of Life,
one of the first biology books for a popular audience. He
also defended and wrote about the philosophy of humanism.
One of his famous quotes about humanism and religion (in
Religion Without Revelation) was that “… God is beginning
to resemble not a ruler, but the last fading smile of a cosmic
Cheshire Cat.” Huxley made numerous television and radio
appearances. He died February 14, 1975.
Further Reading
Huxley, Julian. Religion Without Revelation. New York: Harper,
1927. Repr. New York: New American Library, 1961.
———. Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen and Unwin,
1942.
Wells, Herbert George, Julian S. Huxley, and George Philip Wells.
The Science of Life. New York: Literary Guild, 1929.
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825–1895) British Evolutionary
scientist Thomas Henry Huxley was one of the first
and most passionate defenders of Darwinian evolution, both
in the scientific community and with the general public (see
Darwin, Charles; origin of species [book]). Huxley
thus earned the enduring description as “Darwin’s bulldog.”
However, Huxley did not hesitate to disagree with Darwin on
several points; in particular, he disagreed with Darwin about
gradual transformation by natural selection as the principal
mechanism of evolutionary change. As a zoologist and
paleontologist, Huxley made many of his own contributions