The mad, bad and dangerous theories of Thomas Henry Huxley – The Spectator

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Huxleys in Nature and Culture

Alison Bashford

Allen Lane, pp. 560, 25

Racism lies at the heart of the Victorian rewrite of the creation myth. What happened in prehistory, according to Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwins representative on Earth, was that while Homo sapiens emerged from its primitive state among the other apes and lemurs, some Europeans developed at a faster rate. Humankind had evolved from a hairy, tailed quadruped, which was itself probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal (Darwin). But once the human species emerged, men differ more widely from one another than they do from the apes.

This ineluctably leads to the conclusion that there is as much difference, perhaps more, between the higher type of human being (such as members of the Darwin and Huxley families) and the savages as there is between, say, Queen Victoria and an orangutan. Writing to Charles Kingsley, having sent him a copy of Mans Place in Nature (1863), Huxley opined: I suspect that the modern Patagonian is as nearly as possible the unimproved representative of the makers of flint implements of Abbeyville.

It is no accident that while Huxley was penning Mans Place in Nature (or Darwin his Descent of Man, 1871) the British Empire was changing gear, moving from a commercial and missionary endeavour in Asia and Africa to a theory of racial superiority which justified not merely the abusive trading relationship between the East India Company and the indigenous civilisation but all-out colonisation. All the Polynesian, Australian and central Asiatic peoples, Huxley wrote in Mans Place in Nature, were at the dawn of history substantially what they are now.

That European humanity with the British at its apex, naturally out-classed Asian and African humanity went without question. Possessing steam trains, winged collars, top hats and newspapers made Europeans obviously superior to people who dressed and behaved differently. Inevitably, the higher races would develop Maxim guns, which could subdue the warriors who carried only spears and darts.

Alison Bashford confronts these matters honestly in her story of the Huxley family. The two central figures are Thomas Henry and his grandson Julian, who did so much, in the 20th century, to pioneer the fusing of genetics (which was scientifically proven) and Darwinian theories about human origins (which were not, and never could be). Hence emerged the modern way of viewing the world a planet with no God, which an impersonal nature had designed for the use of European humanity. This superior branch of the human race could, while polluting Earth with heavy industry, bring to it incalculable benefits such as mechanised warfare and chemical and nuclear weapons. We might even think of them as one very long-lived man, 1825-1975, Bashford writes, and it is a plausible notion. We, western humanity, have been shaped by these ideas and by these people to an extent which many of us do not fully appreciate.

George Huxley, the father of Thomas Henry, was a schoolmaster in Ealing who taught the boy John Henry Newman. Something was amiss with the man. He gave up teaching and took the family to live in his native Coventry. He sank into poverty and ended his days in an asylum. Thomas Henry, who had a permanent chip on his shoulder, never had a proper schooling and wrestled all his life with appalling depressions paroxysms of internal pain. He became a ships doctor after really quite rudimentary training, and subsequently took a job as a lecturer at the School of Mines the forebear of Imperial College.

He was a fluent, beguiling writer, but it has never been clear how much science compared with giants such as Darwins tutor at Edinburgh, Edmond Grant, or Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire in Paris Huxley actually knew. He was a bombastic, combative figure, who discovered in the theories of his hero Darwin one which explained everything, a weapon with which to drive out Christianity.

After his death, as Bashford explains, the scientific world laid Darwinism to one side, largely because the discovery of genetics a scientific realisation of how inheritance actually works in nature rendered the theory of natural selection dubious (her word). Julian Huxley fused the two, rather in the way the early Church Fathers had fused the religion of Jesus the Jew with the higher flights of neo-Platonism. Bashford writes:

As Julian already perceived, and as his colleagues recognised, sustained and intricate experiments were not his strength. Translating biological ideas for public consumption, however, was his clear talent.

He became an inspired populariser of evolutionary ideas, rather as David Attenborough and Richard Dawkins have been in the television age. He too was an incurable depressive. When his first son was born, he wrote: I see you now an infant. It is the eternal wish of fathers to instruct their sons in the art of living. But how could he, when he had himself lived so much of his life in torment? Your mind will burn your feet because it is paved like Hell with unfulfilled desires, will mock you with its puny futility. Like his grandfather and most Darwinians, Julian keenly embraced the bogus science of eugenics, openly designed to maintain the purity of the race.

It is a curious fact that when the Soviet Union collapsed, most western leftists began to re-examine their idolisation of Karl Marx. With the emergence of Black Lives Matter and a keen awareness on all sides of how the western mind was programmed to be racist by Victorian scientists, Darwin and Huxley remain enthroned. Bashfords patient, sympathetic portrait of a family riven with flaws and for much of the time half insane will, I suspect, do little to wobble the idols who created the myth by which modern humanity so bafflingly chose to live.

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The mad, bad and dangerous theories of Thomas Henry Huxley - The Spectator