Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe

by Julian Huxley

98 pages. Illustrated. Cape Editions #18. The classic founding volume of comparative ethology.

98 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

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

[Sheldon Chau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cinematographer Michael Chapman was to direct a werewolf movie in the 1970s. He was unhappy with his screenwriter’s depiction of the first encounter between two potential lovers in the script. He said to the writer:

“This is awful. If you want to understand how to write the first encounter between two future mates, there’s a book that will tell you everything you need to know.”

He recommended this book about the Great Crested Grebe. The writer was initially skeptical at reading this “dryly written ornithological monograph” but instead claimed that after reading it, “it told us everything we needed to know.” He realized that humans do it just like the grebe.

I found that fascinating! The book admittedly is a bit dry, but for the parts where author Sir Julian Huxley goes into courtship habits exploring strange shaking, diving, penguin-dance, cat-pose rituals, it can totally be read as a metaphor for the awkward and potentially persistent way we humans also court one another.