Judith Hollowood
November 25, 2007
“If we choose to let conjecture run wild,” Darwin wrote in his personal notebooks, “then animals …-our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements-they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor-we may all be melted together.”
From these cautious early thoughts, Charles Darwin went on to develop the theory that most educated Western thinkers believe to explain the proliferation and variety of life on earth. Darwin published his theory in 1857. In the 150 years since then, the core ideas of Darwin’s theory has achieved acceptance as science. Sometimes I wonder how this happened. Learning about the life work of Thomas Henry Huxley, I understand this outcome a little better.
I grew up a hundred years after the emergence of evolutionary thought and have always glibly supposed that people who did not grasp Darwin’s ideas and support them immediately had small minds. However, when I read more about the times, in the words of the people who lived through them, I began to form a more generous understanding of their quandary. First, there was legitimate difference of scientific opinion as to whether enough evidence had yet been found to support the new theory. Second, from the very beginning, Mr. Darwin’s theory challenged the religious basis of personal morality, family relations, and public order.
To be an early adopter, as we would say today, was brave, almost reckless, and it is no wonder that many thinkers took their time. Huxley was an early adopter. ….
Quote Charles Blinderman, a Huxley scholar and cheer leader puts it like this: “THH contributed … much of what educated free people think today of deity, or religion, of science, of their values, and of their own origin and future.” This sums up why I call him a cultural hero – someone whose contributions deserve to be better known.
To give you an idea of where I am going this morning, let me list briefly the three cultural gifts we have received from Huxley:
- his spirited defense of evolution as science
- his lifetime of hands-on work to develop public scienc
- the promotion of the term agnosticism to describe people who are neither atheists nor believers in orthodox creeds
Darwin was not in a good position to defend his ideas himself. His health was dreadful, he rarely went out in public, and he had no confidence in himself as a scrapper. An historian of early Victorian science says “his conversation was an adventure of parentheses within parentheses which often produced a stammer and sometimes terminated in unintelligibility and syntactical disaster.” Irvine, p.71 [Sound like anyone else we know?] Darwin’s gift was for patiently accumulating evidence and courageously recording his conclusions. “Certainly no one who began so cautiously with facts ever got quite so deeply involved in ideas as Charles Darwin,” writes a scholar of early evolutionary thought. “He carefully avoided issues, and issues sprang up on all sides.” William Irvine, 101 Darwin needed public defenders like Huxley – and although Darwin had many supporters, Huxley was their leader and chief recruitment officer.
Huxley was a rising man in his early thirties when he took up the cause of Evolution. He had gone to work at the age of thirteen, as a poor and abused apprentice to a surgeon. The cadavers traumatized him, but he took hold and climbed steadily up from these raw beginnings. With the support of his brothers and brothers-in-law, Huxley scraped together the fees to attend a start-up medical college. He turned out to be brilliant at science and eventually won an appointment as a surgeon in the navy. At last he had a handhold in more respectable circles. Once truly launched, he abandoned medicine as soon as he could win teaching positions that would support him.
He and Darwin were friends and colleagues during the years leading up to the publication of The Origin of Species. They were godfathers to each other’s children – whatever that position may have meant to them. Though he was a meticulous scientist himself in his own areas of specialty – he knew a lot about sea squirts and was a consultant on fisheries – Huxley was chiefly invigorated by Darwin’s idea. Luckily for Darwin, Huxley enjoyed controversy. He was already popular as a public speaker and in demand to write for publication. He was in a good position to go to bat for Darwin.
Darwin’s big book sold widely in its first and subsequent editions. Buyers of all social classes snapped it up and tried to read it. (I have never gotten very far in it – have you?) There was intense curiosity to learn what it said, and Huxley took on the job of explaining and interpreting Darwin’s ideas to a hungry public. He made speeches, wrote reviews and articles, spoke about it in his popular courses of science lectures, and pushed himself and other supporters into positions of influence in learned societies.
At mid-century, many scientists were already working on explanations for the diversity of life. Geologists had paved the way; they had established that the earth was far older than Biblical accounts would suggest, and many were uniformitarians: they asserted that the forces that transformed landscapes in their own era were responsible for change in the past as well. Mining and quarrying were bringing large numbers of fossils to light. Zoologists had established the tremendous similarities of life forms to each other in their shapes, bone structures and internal organs. Scientific investigation was inexorably heading in Darwin’s direction.
But there was a bottleneck. The established church and the universities preached a Biblical understanding of species. Species existed as variants of an ideal form in the mind of God. Creation was an orderly phenomenon, established for the glory of God and ordered as God ordained – not as it had evolved. Creation had purpose: the glory of God. And it had direction: the redemption of man. The church’s biology and theory of society were one and the same.
How would anyone know his place – or be expected to remain in it – if this model were shown to be false? What could safely replace the concept of this divinely ordered universe, with man as its pinnacle and purpose?
Huxley was capable of lecturing for hours on minute details of animal structure. But when he defended Darwin to general audiences, it was the fear of science that Huxley really lit into. He denied that a clear-thinking person could fear science and its truth. Every great advance in natural knowledge, he wrote, has involved the absolute rejection of authority. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. The great tragedy of Science [is] the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. He didn’t really mean this. Of course – he loved to see a theory slain by a fact.
Huxley did not accept Darwin’s theory in its totality. The contemplation of how natural selection might actually operate, which seemed to hint at a constant and somehow personalized struggle to the death, made him shudder. But he was not afraid of one of the biggest objections that was mounted to evolution: descent of man from monkeys and apes.
The idea that humans might have descended from other animals repulsed many mid-century Victorians. “We are descended from apes,” was a common mis-statement of Darwin’s conclusions. It was such a pornographic idea that it was not discussed in mixed sex public groups. The genetic evidence for a common ancestor had not yet appeared, and I’m not sure that this fine distinction would have made a difference – the idea was too strange.
On this theme, Huxley was far less prudish than religious leaders or the general public. His first book for the general public, Evidences for the Place of Man in Nature, was a minute examination of all the physical similarities between humans and the great apes. He was particularly eager to lambast an opponent who claimed that apes’ brains lacked a critical feature present in human brains – making, this opponent thought, the idea of ape ancestry unworkable. The book is unreadable – but the passion was real.
Huxley’s strong stand about ape-human similarity gave rise to one of the best stories that comes down to us of Huxley in combat with the proprieties.
At a scientific meeting in June 1859, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (who is not to be confused with the Wilberforce of anti-slave-trade legislation) spoke at great length against evolution. He found the idea of descent from the apes so distasteful that he lost his sense of public proprieties. In a great sweep of sneering rhetoric, he asked Huxley whether it was on his grandmother’s or his grandfather’s side that he was descended from the apes? From the audience, Huxley was called up to reply. As to which ancestor was an ape, he replied, he had no evidence; “but he would rather be descended from an ape,” he said, “than from a man of intelligence who misused his powers in the abuse of science.”
This is the anecdote that you will always find in accounts of Huxley’s career. There is actually no evidence that this exchange took place in this way, except in Huxley’s memoirs. But it shows you the temper of the man, doesn’t it! I think it would be instructive to turn him lose on the scientific controversies of today ….
By the mid-1860s the defense of evolution was no longer a crisis of science. Huxley had more time for his other passion: science education. He set out to embed science education into English schooling and achieved many successes. He served on commissions that reformed public education, and typically he was the member who drafted their conclusions. He was a writing machine, in long-hand. Huxley was no democrat – but he believed that science education should be available to all classes of society.
Huxley’s third gift to the future was the word agnosticism. It is not literally true that he invented the word, but he turned it to the use that many of us employ today, to declare and claim a middle ground between religious orthodoxy and total materialism. “Everyone has an -ism,” he wrote, “and I am naked,” Perhaps because he was a collecting scientist, he wanted to be labeled correctly. He would never say he was an atheist: It implied (to him) that God could be proved not to exist. As a practical matter, he recognized the sensory limits of human knowledge. But he was not willing to say that what could not be known scientifically did not exist – only that it could not be known in the sense that scientific truth could be known.
Huxley claimed a place in the search for truth and meaning for himself and other agnostics. Like others of his era, he worried that without a hope in an after life or reward and/or God’s punishment, people would fall into despair, lose their grip on decency, no longer aspire to progress. But he rejected a religious solution that did not jibe with truth as he discovered it. He found virtue and worth in reading the evidence and accepting its conclusions. And he never maintained that human beings were only animals. He wrote: Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.
Huxley, who had benefited from upward social mobility in the early years of the century, was very worried about social ferment below the social level he had achieved. He became more conservative in his old age. He feared democracy and distrusted Socialist and other radical leaders, who suggested such destabilizing changes as the extension of the right to vote to all adult …. Males. I can forgive him this. No one of his era – and perhaps no one of our era yet – really knows how much disorder a society can endure before all falls to pieces and no one has security of any kind. He hated to see Darwin’s ideas used to support theories of life that let the winner take all.
Ultimately he suffered the down side of his success – Darwin’s ideas spread and in new niches, they evolved.
As I have read about Thomas Huxley and his cultural milieu, I have grown very fond of him. For his energy alone, he is admirable. He lived in times that provided him with the opportunity to move human understanding beyond the model that prevailed when his times began. He was nurtured by radical Unitarians in his youth in England’s emerging industrial cities, and although he never associated with them again, this gives us another reason to acknowledge and respect his gifts to us.