Evolution and Eugenics

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Julian Sorell Huxley (1887-1975), one of the outstanding biologists of the 20th century, was a Life Fellow of the Eugenics Society from 1925, its President 1959-62, and is the only person ever to have given two Galton Lectures, in 1936 and 1962. He was also, at various times, Professor of Zoology at King’s College, London, Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, and the first Director-General of UNESCO. His scientific interests, as shown in his many publications, included courtship in birds, the biology of cancer, ants, genetics, systematics, ecology, and conservation.(1) To describe Huxley as a polymath is true but barely adequate. To few is given the inheritance, biological and social, that was his, and he made good use of it.(2)

Although he worked in many biological fields with great success there was a central theme to Huxley’s life and work: evolution. His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), was one of the first to appreciate that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection would transform biology and ultimately influence profoundly many other disciplines. He became Darwin’s chief supporter in England, being known to the Victorian public as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. At the 1860 British Association meeting in Oxford he defended evolution in an historic debate with the then Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. In his Technical Education, published in 1877, T.H. Huxley wrote “The great end of life is not knowledge but action”. Julian Huxley’s work for eugenics, conservation, and at UNESCO suggests that he too believed that knowledge should be put to practical use. His work may also have, indirectly, inspired one of the most enduring science fiction novels of the 20th century.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was Julian’s younger brother who achieved fame as a novelist, especially with his Brave New World first published in 1932. It seems likely that this satirical account of a possible future for the human race was, at least in part, inspired by Aldous’ knowledge of his brother’s interests since the literary circles in which he moved almost invariably used each other and their friends and relations as models for their fictional characters.(3) In his forward to the 1955 Penguin edition Aldous refers to a “foolproof system of eugenics” as an essential part of his plot.(4) Brave New World is set in a time when there has been considerable progress in the biological and social sciences but little, if any, in physics and engineering. Nuclear physics is unknown and technology is much as it was in the 1930s. However, humans are, mainly, cloned in the laboratory in the right numbers of various kinds to preserve the perceived optimum social class ratios. At a time when most writers of science fiction were fascinated by and fixated on the ideas of space travel, death rays, and similar technological wonders, Aldous Huxley was one of the few to base his future society on mankind taking control of its own evolution.

When Julian Huxley began his scientific career Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was a minority view among biologists. Although most of them accepted that living organisms had evolved, and few remained creationists, non-Darwinian theories of the mechanism of evolution were widely held. Exactly how evolution had occurred was the subject of much debate within the scientific community. Among the theories under discussion were Mutationism, in which single, very large genetic changes were believed to be responsible for evolutionary change, and Orthogenesis in which internally directed, non-adaptive trends were seen as being of prime importance. There were also biologists who held Lamarckian views, believing in the inheritance of acquired characters. As an evolutionary mechanism natural selection was thought by many at that time to be contrary to the laboratory findings of the new science of genetics. More importantly, however, there was a widespread feeling that evolution was, or ought to be, directed or purposeful in some way. That it should not be simply a series of chance events in which the fittest or the most fortunate survived. Surely Homo sapiens was meant to be at the top of the evolutionary tree? The idea that we would not be here if evolution had taken a different route was to many unthinkable.