Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

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304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 27, 1923

About the author

In 1887, Julian Huxley, the brother of novelist Aldous Huxley and the grandson of agnostic biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, was born in Great Britain. Educated as a biologist at Oxford, he taught at Rice Institute, Houston (1912-1916), Oxford (1919-25) and Kings College (1925-1935). An ant specialist (he wrote a book called Ants in 1930), Huxley became Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935-1942), and UNESCO's first general director (1946-1948). A strong secular humanist, Huxley called himself "not merely agnostic . . . I disbelieve in a personal God in any sense in which that phrase is ordinarily used. . . I disbelieve in the existence of Heaven or Hell in any conventional Christian sense." (Religion Without Revelation, 1927, revised 1956.) Huxley was an early evolutionary theorist, with versatile academic interests. Some of his many other books include: Essays of a Biologist (1923), Animal Biology (with J.B.S. Haldane, 1927), The Science of Life (with H.G. Wells, 1931), Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of the HMS Rattlesnake (editor, 1935), The Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939), Heredity, East & West (1949), Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957), Towards a New Humanism (1957), and Memories, a two-volume autobiography in the early 1970s. Huxley was knighted in 1958 and was also a founder of the World Wildlife Fund.

Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award of the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.

Huxley came from the distinguished Huxley family. His brother was the writer Aldous Huxley, and his half-brother a fellow biologist and Nobel laureate, Andrew Huxley; his father was writer and editor Leonard Huxley; and his paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution. His maternal grandfather was the academic Tom Arnold, his great-uncle was poet Matthew Arnold and his great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School.

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Reviews

[Betawolf · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this essay collection by way of a reference from J. B. S. Haldane's _Possible Worlds_, and thought it sounded promising. As it turns out, I was wrong. The essays are not very well honed, and most of them are quite dull or outdated. Huxley suggests that the reader reads the first, _Progress_, and then jump to _Religion and Science_ at the end and select from the rest as interested. I would advise otherwise. Read the three-stanza poem at the start of _Progress_, then skip the rest of it and leap to _A Biologic Fantasy_, reading it and _Rationalism and the Idea of God_ which follows. You'll pick up the gist of his progress argument from the other references, and can always go back if you want it spelled out. The final essay is nonsense and can also be skipped.

_Progress, Biological and Other_ attempts to find a definition of 'progress' which fits with evolutionary theory. He advances the position that the tendency for larger organised groups is 'progressive' in this sense, from cells to civilisation. While this is not as entirely indefensible as I felt at the beginning, I was not convinced it's a useful concept. The essay takes rather a while to come to its point, which made it a bit tedious. The best part was the poem at the beginning.

_Biology and Sociology_ essentially applies the previous essay in drawing some tenuous connections between the two disciplines, with no very useful conclusions, and again is very tedious.

_Ils n'ont que de l'ame: an essay on bird-mind_ discusses how we must acknowledge animals have emotions, which I found a bit too obvious to be interesting. Huxley makes use of a number of anecdotes about courtship rituals and behaviour in birds, some of which were vaguely amusing.

_Sex Biology and Sex Psychology_ is the first essay to deal with a concrete area of human biology, and the scientific material is hopelessly dated, even to a layman like myself. He takes a number of swipes at Freud, but essentially defends psychoanalysis and argues that we shouldn't be so uptight about sex.

_Philosophic Ants: A Biologic Fantasy_: far more whimsical and amusing than the other essays, including one short story exploring ants' susceptibility to temperature changes as an allegory about the development of science, and another one which attempts to apply similar effects to man in an explicit homage to Wells (he footnotes that readers made him aware of the story _New Accelerator_, which addresses the same theme).

_Rationalism and the Idea of God_ is a fairly decent overview of religion, but I can't really understand how Huxley thinks that scientific study of religious experience in any way reconciles science with religious belief -- he seems almost to be attempting to placate the religious while scientists set to tearing down their final bastions.

_Religion and Science_ is an extended treatment of the same theme, and in it Huxley espouses a belief in the 'mental properties' of inorganic materials. Not, as I first thought, through their representation in the minds of thinking beings, but of themselves. He then skips past this to describe God as mankind's understanding of the universe, in an approximation of the previous essay. There are various thoughts collected here, including some which seem to outline a sort of humanism or transhumanism, but their essential disunity makes the essay painful.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although dated in many ways, this book of essays is still well worth reading. It propounds the notion of evolution as being something innately progressive, (something that is frowned upon by modern biologists because natural selection is essentially directionless), but it presents an intelligent and even insightful synthesis of what was then known about biology and psychology. But this book is not really a biology book at all (save for a few interesting anecdotes about birds). It is more of a philosophy book - an attempt to create a worldview that is based on a firm scientific footing but which also encompasses the emergent properties of the human mind, in their complexity and abstraction.

The final essay ("Religion and Science: Old Wine in New Bottles") is, to my mind, a very important piece of writing. It attempts to bridge the divide between religion and science. Huxley expresses the opinion that a proper scientific understanding of the world should be able, by now, to give us a universal worldview that rejects all superstition, divine revelation, dogma and miracle while still encouraging the tendency of the human mind to achieve transcendence and communion with what it perceives to be something Absolute. He maintains that "the meaning and value of...religious experiences (atonement, conversion, sense of grace, ecstasy, prayer, sacrifice)...if put on a proper psychological basis...can be shorn of excrescences" and made more accessible to people. He argues that the Absolute, if it exists, is by definition unknowable, but that the human mind's psychological need to touch the limits of its own conception of the world means that "the idea of God" remains useful and, indeed, fundamental to the achievement of inner harmony.

[Benu B · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a mesmerising collection of essays of original brilliance. The book will broaden the vision with which you will look at the world - the natural world, especially.


Sir Julian Huxley hails from a family of famous Intellectuals (T.H Huxley, often called Darwin's Bulldog was his grandfather, and Aldoux Huxley and Andrew Huxley (Nobel Prize-winning Scientist) were his brothers.

[Dina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard that J. Huxley was brilliant biologist, but only after reading him, I realized he truly was. Great book - should be a general read in biology class.