Problems of Relative Growth

by Julian Huxley, Frederick B. Churchill (Introduction)

This detailed study of the different rates of growth of parts of the body relative to the body as a whole represents Sir Julian Huxley's great contribution to analytical morphology, and it is still a basis for modern investigations in morphometrics and evolutionary biology. Huxley was the first to put the concept of relative growth—or allometry—upon a firm mathematical foundation, and since publication of this book in 1932, his work has been found to have greater implications than even he imagined. Problems of Relative Growth is at once a formulation of the basic principles of allometry and a survey of its many and various occurrences and applications. Examples are taken from such widely divergent areas as the development of the large claw in male fiddler-crabs, the size and number of points of deer antlers, heterogony in neuter social insects, the disproportionate growth of the human head from infancy to adulthood, and the formation of spiral shapes in certain mollusk shells and of the curved shape of the rhinoceros' horn. Starting from the fact of obvious disharmonic growth, Huxley formulates his first and fundamental law—that of the Constant Differential Growth Ratio. He then demonstrates that the distribution of growth potential occurs in an orderly and systematic way—that there are growth-gradients culminating in growth-centers. Other topics treated include multiplicative and accretionary kinds of growth, the role of hormones and mutations, and the relevance of the entire investigation to the problems of orthogenesis, recapitulation, vestigial organs, the existence of nonadaptive characters, physiological genetics, comparative physiology, and systematics. In their introduction to this unabridged facsimile republication of the original 1932 edition, Frederick B. Churchill and Richard E. Strauss place Huxley's work in the context of modern research in history and biology.

360 pages, Paperback

First published August 7, 1972

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

[Hunter Whitbeck · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book brings good, historical science to light. It gets you thinking about the simplicity and complexities in nature and how they coexist in a way which can explain shape and form of a huge variety of beings. However, this book is written in prose where some sentences are unintelligible and the simplest sentences take the upmost attention to get through. If that was not enough, Huxley goes on and on for some of the most boring points while he skims over some very interesting points. Finally, I would have given this book three stars but his eugenic approach to science comes through in this book which is unbearable and inappropriate (I would argue even for the time). Overall, a fine textbook but not very enjoyable.