Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

to evolutionary science. He also applied his scientific viewpoint
to religion and ethics.
Born May 4, 1825, into a large and not affluent family,
Thomas Huxley had limited formal education. However, he
read voraciously in many scholarly fields. He won a scholarship
to study medicine at a hospital in London. At age 21,
he became the assistant surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake, during
a voyage to map the seas around Australia. Huxley collected
and studied marine invertebrates (see invertebrates,
evolution of). He became an expert in natural history the
same way that Charles Darwin had on HMS Beagle and
Joseph Hooker had on HMS Erebus. Huxley sent specimens
and notes back to England, and when he returned in 1850
he found that these specimens and notes had made him a
celebrity among English scientists, just as had happened with
Darwin. He became acquainted with the leading natural scientists
of his day (see Lyell, Charles; Hooker, Joseph
Dalton). Huxley supported himself on a Navy stipend and
by writing popular scientific articles. In 1854 he was hired
by the School of Mines as a lecturer, a position he retained
until retirement.
Although he initially opposed evolution, especially the
version proposed in the Vestiges of Creation (see Chambers,
Robert), Huxley became convinced of evolution by
reading the Origin of Species. His reaction to it was something
like, “How stupid of me not to have thought of that.”
Accustomed to lecturing and to popular writing, Huxley
was ready to champion the theory that Charles Darwin
was, due to a quiet nature and illness, reluctant to defend
in public.
Huxley’s most famous public moment was at the 1860
meeting of the British Association at Oxford University,
where he debated Bishop Samuel Wiberforce, known as
“Soapy Sam” because of the slippery debate maneuvers
for which he was famous. Wilberforce knew little about
science but had been coached by a famous paleontologist
(see Owen, Richard). Wilberforce could not resist a jab
at Huxley, asking him whether he traced his descent from
the apes on his mother’s side or his father’s side. Huxley
muttered, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands,”
referring to the harm Wilberforce had done to his own
position by this statement. Huxley said, according to his
own account, “If then the question is put to me would I
rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man
highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means
of influence and yet who employs these faculties and that
influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into
a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my
preference for the ape.” The debate was just one part of
a series of speeches, and its importance was dramatically
exaggerated in 20th-century accounts. Wilberforce has
been portrayed as a vicious attacker of evolutionary scientists,
while in reality Darwin and Wilberforce were on reasonably
good terms. Wilberforce referred to Darwin as “a
capital fellow.” Furthermore, the main defense of Darwin’s
theory at this meeting was made by Joseph Hooker, not
Huxley. However, the audience saw this meeting as much
Huxley, Thomas Henry 0
more than a scientific debate about zoology. The captain
with whom Charles Darwin had sailed around the world
walked around, holding up a Bible, saying, “The Book! The
Book!” (see FitzRoy, Robert).
Although he was a bulldog, Huxley was ready to
admit mistakes and correct his viewpoints. He visited the
United States to present lectures on the evolution of horses
(see horses, evolution of). Fossil horses from Europe
seemed to indicate that the modern horse genus, Equus,
had evolved there. American paleontologist Othniel C.
Marsh, however, showed Huxley evidence that horses had
evolved in North America, and some of them had migrated
to Europe. Huxley completely and immediately rewrote his
speeches. In another instance, Huxley became convinced
that the ocean floor was covered with a formless ooze that
might have been an amoebalike primitive organism, which
he called Bathybius haeckelii, named after another famous
paleontologist (see Haeckel, Ernst). It turned out that the
ooze was simply a chemical product of the reaction of mud
with alcohol (used to preserve the specimens). Huxley also
admitted this error.
Huxley took Darwin’s theory further than Darwin had
dared to propose in writing. Darwin wrote in the Origin of
Species that “Much light will be thrown on the origin of man
and his history.” In 1963 Huxley published Man’s Place in
Nature, which explicitly presented the fossil evidence for the
evolutionary place of humankind among the apes. Because
little was known about human prehistory, aside from recently
discovered skull fragments of Neandertals, most of Huxley’s
evidence was to show the many anatomical similarities
between humans and other primates. This brought him into
conflict with Richard Owen, who insisted that the human
brain had a structure, the hippocampus minor, that was not
present in the brains of other primates. As more evidence
became available about gorillas and chimpanzees, both
recently discovered by Europeans, it became obvious that
Owen was wrong.
Especially in his later years, Huxley gave much attention
to ethics. He had rejected organized religion, yet was unwilling
to conclude that God could not exist. The term agnostic,
referring to someone who believes the existence of God cannot
be known, was Huxley’s invention. In Evolution and Ethics,
Huxley claimed an evolutionary origin for human behavior
but also noted that large brains give humans the ability
to behave differently than other animals (see evolutionary
ethics). In saying that good ethics consists of resisting rather
than embracing the tendencies of evolution, he placed his
philosophy firmly against those of the social Darwinists (see
Spencer, Herbert) and the eugenicists (see eugenics).
Huxley’s passion for science and scholarship established
a tradition in his family. One of his grandchildren (see Huxley,
Julian) was one of the scientists who established the
modern synthesis of evolution; another grandson, Andrew
Huxley, won the Nobel Prize for his study of nerve impulses
and muscle contraction; another grandson, Aldous Huxley,
was a writer, most famous for Brave New World. Thomas
Henry Huxley died June 29, 1895.