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We Are Amphibians: Julian and Aldous Huxley on the Future of Our Species
We Are Amphibians: Julian and Aldous Huxley on the Future of Our Species
We Are Amphibians: Julian and Aldous Huxley on the Future of Our Species
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We Are Amphibians: Julian and Aldous Huxley on the Future of Our Species

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We Are Amphibians tells the fascinating story of two brothers who changed the way we think about the future of our species. As a pioneering biologist and conservationist, Julian Huxley helped advance the "modern synthesis" in evolutionary biology and played a pivotal role in founding UNESCO and the World Wildlife Fund. His argument that we must accept responsibility for our future evolution as a species has attracted a growing number of scientists and intellectuals who embrace the concept of Transhumanism that he first outlined in the 1950s. Although Aldous Huxley is most widely known for his dystopian novel Brave New World, his writings on religion, ecology, and human consciousness were powerful catalysts for the environmental and human potential movements that grew rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century. While they often disagreed about the role of science and technology in human progress, Julian and Aldous Huxley both believed that the future of our species depends on a saner set of relations with each other and with our environment. Their common concern for ecology has given their ideas about the future of Homo sapiens an enduring resonance in the twenty-first century. The amphibian metaphor that both brothers used to describe humanity highlights not only the complexity and mutability of our species but also our ecologically precarious situation.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 24, 2014
ISBN9780520959569
We Are Amphibians: Julian and Aldous Huxley on the Future of Our Species
Author

R.S. Deese

R. S. Deese teaches history at Boston University. His work has been published in AGNI, Endeavour, Aldous Huxley Annual, MungBeing, and Berkeley Poetry Review.

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    We Are Amphibians - R.S. Deese

    We Are Amphibians

    We Are Amphibians

    Julian and Aldous Huxley on the Future of Our Species

    R. S. Deese

    UC Logo

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

    University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

    University of California Press

    Oakland, California

    © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Deese, R. S., 1964– author.

        We are amphibians : Julian and Aldous Huxley on the future of our species / R. S. Deese.

            p.    cm.

        Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-28152-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

    ISBN 978-0-520-95956-9 (ebook)

        1. Huxley, Julian, 1887–1975.    2. Huxley, Aldous, 1894–1963.    3. Human evolution.    4. Human ecology.    I. Title.

        GN281.D43    2015

        599.93 8—dc232014013939

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15

    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

    In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

    For my school of siblings:

    Rupert, Mary Ann, and Frank

    I would compare the present stage of evolving man to the geological moment, some three hundred million years ago, when our amphibian ancestors were just establishing themselves out of the world of water.

    —Julian Huxley, The Humanist Frame (1961)

    Every human being is an amphibian—or, to be more accurate, every human being is five or six amphibians rolled into one.

    —Aldous Huxley, The Education of an Amphibian (1956)

    Contents

    List of Illustrations

    Introduction: The Question of Questions for Mankind

    1. Late Victorians

    2. Twilight of Utopias

    3. Spiritual Biology

    4. Ape and Essence

    5. We Are Amphibians

    Epilogue: The Future of Our Species

    Acknowledgments

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    Illustrations

    1. Thomas Henry Huxley

    2. T. H. Huxley, Leonard Huxley, and Julian Huxley in 1895

    3. Aldous Huxley as a boy

    4. Julian and Juliette Huxley as newlyweds

    5. Maria Nys Huxley

    6. Juliette Baillot Huxley at age thirty-four

    7. Julian Huxley at age thirty-nine

    8. Aldous and Maria Huxley at Boulder Dam, ca. 1938

    9. Julian and Aldous at the San Diego Zoo, 1958

    10. Il faut cultiver notre oasis: Earthrise, 1968

    Introduction

    The Question of Questions for Mankind

    Yoga Berra was right when he quipped, The future ain’t what it used to be.¹ In the broadest sense, this is a story about what the future used to be. Julian and Aldous Huxley were born during the reign of Queen Victoria, but each made his mark during the most tumultuous decades of the twentieth century. Born in 1887, Julian established his reputation as a biologist just prior to the First World War and later worked to advance the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology by integrating new discoveries from across the spectrum of the life sciences.² As the first director-general of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and a cofounder of the World Wildlife Fund, Julian remained a tireless advocate for science education and wilderness preservation until his death in 1975. Seven years his junior, Aldous Huxley made his name in the 1920s as the most savage and erudite satirist of his generation, and his fifth novel, begun as a spoof of H. G. Wells, set the standard for every dystopian fable that has followed in its wake. After the publication of Brave New World in 1932, Aldous Huxley’s work increasingly defied categorization, knocking holes in the walls between science, religion, art, and mysticism. Facing the painful advance of oral cancer in the last years of his life, Aldous kept writing until the afternoon he died—a few hours after President Kennedy was assassinated—on November 22, 1963.

    Throughout their long careers, both brothers shared a passionate concern for the same fundamental question: What is the outlook for Homo sapiens, and for the complex web of life from which our species has evolved? Their grandfather, the Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, had identified this as the ultimate question. In 1863, he opened his first book on evolution, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, with the following declaration: The question of questions for mankind—the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other—is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature. . . . Whence our race has come; what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature’s power over us; to what goal are we tending?³

    Due primarily to the exponential increase in both human population and the technological powers wielded by our species, the question of questions for mankind has become at once more urgent and more difficult to answer. In the year 2000, the biologist Eugene F. Stoermer and the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen introduced a new term, the Anthropocene, to signify a fact that Julian and Aldous had both intuited during the first half of the twentieth century: the impact of human activity has become so vast in the industrial age that it signals the beginning of a new epoch in the history of the earth.⁴ In novels such as Brave New World and Ape and Essence, Aldous Huxley had explored future scenarios in which what we think of as nature would be completely transformed by the promethean power of our technologies. Julian Huxley, whose early essays and fiction on the potential of applied biology provided some of the inspiration for Brave New World, reached very similar conclusions about the power of humans to transform life on earth. While teaching biology at King’s College London in the mid-1920s, Julian had imagined the possibilities of engineering new life forms, and the interaction between human technologies and biological evolution sustained his attention throughout his career. In a 1957 essay entitled Transhumanism, Julian declared that our species is, in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth.

    In addition to their early sense of our growing impact on this planet, Julian and Aldous Huxley were also among the first public intellectuals to herald the potential of new technologies to change humanity itself. In 1921, more than a decade before he published Brave New World, Aldous sketched a brief description in his first novel, Crome Yellow, of a future world in which babies would be hatched in vast state incubators so that the family system will disappear.⁶ In 1926, Julian presented his own take on the future convergence of biology and engineering in a fantastic tale published in the Yale Review entitled The Tissue Culture King. Soon reprinted in the pioneering pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, Julian’s narrative introduced readers to a wide range of innovations that had barely been imagined at the time, anticipating the possibility of human cloning and the creation of chimeras through genetic manipulation.⁷

    Long before their contemporaries, Julian and Aldous Huxley agreed that industrial civilization was steadily transforming our planet, and emerging discoveries in the life sciences would ultimately transform human nature as well. The Huxley brothers frequently disagreed, however, about whether this state of affairs was cause for optimism or for grief. Julian, who retained the same Victorian faith in progress that had been part of his grandfather’s worldview, tended to see the growth in human power over nature—so long as it was guided by rational men like himself!—as a harbinger of progress toward a better world for all. Aldous, who shared something of the temperament of another family forebear, Matthew Arnold, expressed grave doubts about whether the fruits of industrial civilization were bringing us any closer to a better world.

    Such differences aside, Julian and Aldous Huxley carried on a lively correspondence throughout their lives and shared an encyclopedic array of common interests. When Aldous died in 1963, Julian Huxley arranged a remarkable memorial for his younger brother at the Society of Friends Meeting House in London in December 1963, and then published the collected recollections of Aldous’s illustrious friends and colleagues.⁸ The greatest shared conviction that united Julian and Aldous Huxley throughout their lives was the sense that the human race needed a new touchstone to make sense of the world and chart a path forward after the Darwinian revolution of the late nineteenth century. Their grandfather Thomas had fought passionately to advance the acceptance of evolution, but even he had been aware, especially at the end of his life, of the enormous gap that had been left by the destruction of the long-standing religious verities about the origin, purpose, and destiny of humankind.

    Although they rejected religious dogma, both Julian and Aldous Huxley saw it as essential for the future of our species that the religious impulses of our ancestors must not be allowed to atrophy and die. Julian’s substitute for old-time religion was a secular gospel of progress through science and technology. For Aldous, the true path was not the way forward, but the way out: the transcendence of time itself through meditation and the contemplation of nature, and, in the last decade of his life, with the aid of psychedelic drugs. For Aldous, the progress of a society was not to be measured in its advancements in science and technology, but rather the level of intelligence and compassion that its culture could bring to the everyday tasks of living and self-cultivation. For all their differences, the religious ideas of Julian and Aldous Huxley were each rooted in the concept of evolution. Although they discerned different paths to a better future, both saw Homo sapiens as a work in progress, conceiving of human nature as protean and wonderfully complex.

    To express this idea, both Julian and Aldous echoed the seventeenth-century theologian and naturalist Sir Thomas Browne when he declared, "Thus is man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in diverse elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds."⁹ For Aldous, human beings could be aptly described as amphibians because we must operate in so many different elements at once. As animals whose minds have been shaped by language, we must reconcile the dynamic flow of sense experience with the more static world of signs and symbols. As mortal beings prone to believe in values and ideals that transcend time itself, we must somehow reconcile our imperfect understanding of our past, present, and future with our intimations of eternity. For Julian, the most important parallel between Homo sapiens and our amphibian ancestors was our transitional status. Just as the first amphibians had braved the harrowing passage from sea to land more than three hundred million years ago, our species was now moving from a familiar element into something entirely new. As Julian saw it, we were leaving the realm of slow evolution through natural selection and entering the accelerated realm of self-directed evolution, guided by our own discoveries in science and technology.

    With their distinctive views of the human condition, Julian and Aldous would each influence discourse on the future of our species in the late twentieth century. Aldous Huxley’s writings on mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and what he called the unexplored realm of human potentialities would help give birth to what came to be called the human potential movement in the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁰ Julian Huxley’s call for human beings to grab the reins of our future evolutionary progress would appeal to a growing number of secular progressives and technophiles who, employing the term he had coined in the 1950s, would come to describe themselves as advocates of Transhumanism by the end of the twentieth century.¹¹

    On a more fundamental level, the amphibian metaphor that Julian and Aldous Huxley both embraced reflected their common interest in ecology. In his own way, each saw the human drama as thoroughly enmeshed in what Charles Darwin had called the tangled bank of terrestrial life. For Julian this commitment was manifested in his work helping to found global institutions with the aim of protecting wild animals and their habitats in every place on earth. Aldous Huxley’s commitment to envisioning an ecologically sustainable form of civilization for the human race inspired the remarkable series of university lectures he delivered in the last years of his life, and his final novel, Island. While much of the current discourse on the future of our species emphasizes the potential of technologies such as genetic engineering, bioelectronics, and nanotechnology as means to enhance our power over nature, Julian and Aldous Huxley ultimately came to agree that our prospects for survival are contingent upon our reverence for the stunningly intricate, mysterious, and fragile web of life that supports our species. This common point of reference has given their intellectual legacy an enduring resonance. The ecological and religious dimensions that both Julian and Aldous Huxley brought to their lifelong debate about the long-term prospects of our species lent their ideas a depth and complexity too often lacking in contemporary discourse about the future.

    Throughout their long careers in the twentieth century, both Julian and Aldous Huxley remained acutely aware of their Victorian inheritance. Neither brother could forget the legacy of their grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, the iconoclastic man of science who had been nicknamed Darwin’s bulldog for his passionate defense of evolution. Even in the last years of his life, Aldous Huxley described himself as being, in the tradition established by his grandfather, a cheerleader for evolution, while the elder Huxley brother was so concerned with carrying on his grandfather’s legacy that one of his peers once quipped that Julian was so busy trying to be a Huxley that he couldn’t be himself.¹² Before either of them had begun their careers, the term Huxleyan had already become part of the English language as a term denoting the relentless skepticism and intellectual bombast epitomized by their grandfather.¹³ Although the Huxley brothers no doubt valued the intellectual inheritance signaled by their family name, the technological breakthroughs and global catastrophes of the twentieth century would compel each of them to revisit and radically reimagine the paradigm of our place in nature that T. H. Huxley had advanced in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

    JULIAN HUXLEY (1887–1975)

    In a sign that his parents took to be fortuitous, Julian Huxley’s birth coincided with celebrations marking Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in the summer of 1887. In his boyhood he learned about science from his illustrious grandfather, Thomas, in playful conversations and debates that he would remember for the rest of his life. As Julian began his career as a biologist in the years prior to the First World War, he would publicly differ, however, with T. H. Huxley’s view that the cosmic process of evolution that had shaped our species could never serve as an adequate foundation for a philosophy of human progress.¹⁴ On the contrary, Julian saw social progress and biological evolution as joined at the root. Among transatlantic intellectuals during the Belle Époque, such a marriage between what the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s called creative evolution and utilitarian visions of social betterment was hardly unique, but Julian promoted it with the fervor of an evangelist.¹⁵ Julian Huxley’s vision of biosocial progress was not the Social Darwinism of the late Victorians but a gospel of efficiency infused with the values of Fabian socialism that had more in common with the ideas of H. G. Wells than with those of Herbert Spencer. Where the Social Darwinists had stressed the element of individual competition in nature, Julian Huxley emphasized the network of relationships between living things that since the 1860s had come to be known as ecology. Throughout his career, Julian Huxley adhered to a definition of Ernst Haeckel’s term that was at once succinct and infinitely flexible: Ecology is the science of interrelations. It studies the balance to be achieved in a system of interacting factors.¹⁶ That his definition contains no delimiting reference to strictly biological factors highlights Julian Huxley’s conviction that the heuristic tools of biology and especially ecology could help us to understand the complex dynamics of such human artifacts as nations, empires, and the sacred or secular belief systems that animate them. In his first book, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, published just before he took up his teaching position at the Rice Institute in Texas, the young biologist made this ambitious declaration about the social meaning and application of recent developments in biology:

    All roads lead to Rome: and even animal individuality throws a ray on human problems. The ideals of active harmony and mutual aid as the best means to power and progress; the hope that springs from life’s power of transforming the old or of casting it from her in favor of the new; and the spur to effort in the knowledge that she does nothing lightly or without long struggle: these cannot but support and direct those men upon whom devolves the task of moulding and inspiring that unwieldiest individual—formless and blind today, but huge with possibility—the State.¹⁷

    Julian Huxley would maintain the conviction throughout his career that political and social problems could best be understood in biological terms. In his earliest lectures and essays, he promoted the theory that living in communities had played a decisive role in the evolution of the human species, accounting for the development of such essential traits as altruism. He also argued that future evolution of the human state would be intertwined with the future evolution of our species: The function of the State is not power or anything like it. The function of the State has been and still is to raise humanity further and further above the beasts.¹⁸

    After spending a few years in the United States, where he helped to establish the biology department at what would soon become Rice University, Julian returned to Britain for military training and served a brief stint with the Army Intelligence Corps in northern Italy during the First World War. In 1919, he married Juliette Baillot, a Francophone Swiss woman whom he had met at Garsington Manor near Oxford. They would have two sons, Anthony and Francis. Over the next three decades, Julian become known on both sides of the Atlantic not merely as a biologist but as a statesman of science promoting the popularization of the life sciences through the new media of radio and film, even directing an Oscar-winning documentary (The Private Life of the Gannetts) in 1934.¹⁹ Julian also served as the director of the London Zoological Society from 1935 to 1942 and did extensive work for the British Ministry of Information as part of the war effort. During this period, Julian Huxley’s combined interest in both biology and a well-planned technocratic society would at times badly distort his judgment. Visiting Moscow in 1931, he expressed a strong admiration of the Soviet commitment to state-funded scientific research, while making no public statements about the tightening grip of Stalinism on every aspect of life in the USSR. Although his obliviousness to Stalin’s brutal policies at this time betrayed nothing less than a willful blindness on his part, there would ultimately be a limit to Julian’s tolerance for such despotism in the name of progress, especially when state dogmas impaired the advance of scientific research. Eventually, Julian became an outspoken critic of the Soviet commitment to the pseudoscientific doctrine of Lysenkoism and its damaging effect on the life sciences in the USSR.²⁰

    Regarding the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, Julian Huxley presented perhaps the first systematic critique of the racial pseudoscience taught in German schools and universities after 1933.²¹ While his brother Aldous would remain loyal to the strict pacifism of Reverend Dick Sheppard’s Peace Pledge Union (PPU) in the face of the rising Third Reich, and would ultimately leave London for Los Angles as war became more likely, Julian Huxley was an early critic of the Nazi regime and dedicated his considerable energy to the war effort. Just as Julian and Aldous took very different positions on the Second World War, their views on the economic and political centralization that the war engendered would also diverge. Julian saw the Allied war effort as advancing the cause of a rationally planned society in Britain that would enhance the values of science and democracy. Aldous, on the other hand, saw the trend toward centralization as a juggernaut that would crush any and all liberal values standing in its path toward a regime of technologically enhanced control of people and resources.

    Julian Huxley’s confidence that a wise technocratic state, mastering the new tools and resources made available by advances in the applied sciences, could lead the human race to a brighter future found its expression in the steady stream of speculative essays and political manifestos he produced during the early 1930s, such as What Dare I Think? and If I Were Dictator.²² His faith in progress through the more rational organization of society would only be strengthened by his experiences during the Depression and the Second World War. On his many visits to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, Julian Huxley became a passionate promoter of New Deal initiatives such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, praising that project as much for conserving topsoil as for generating electricity and creating jobs. But his greatest interest remained the advancement of scientific research. During the last years of the war, Julian Huxley joined his longtime friend and colleague H. G. Wells to produce a series of radio broadcasts in which prominent biologists such as J. B. S. Haldane and Jack Drummond were invited to speak about the impact of new discoveries in biology on the future of the human race. Wells and Julian Huxley were both contributors to the program and collaborated in producing the anthology of readings, published under the title Reshaping Man’s Heritage.

    The introductory remarks to the volume present that odd combination of nascent ecological awareness and aggressive technological ambition that characterized the thinking of both Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells:

    Man forms part of the web of living things, plants, and animals, on some of which he depends for food and clothing. Other creatures, especially viruses, live upon him: he must master them or they will master him. Now man is continually refashioning the web: growing better plants and improving the soil in which they live, breeding finer animals, and searching for the best animal foodstuffs: in a word, reshaping the heredity and environment. He has explored the world, and by the invention of fire, clothing, houses, central heating, refrigeration, he has progressed toward independence of climate. Chemical science gives man mastery of the world of materials. Atoms are reshuffled to meet his needs.²³

    The triumphal language and the emphasis on man’s power to dominate nature is not surprising in light of the steadily accelerating advances in science and technology that both authors had witnessed since they first collaborated on The Science of Life in the 1920s.

    In the thirties and forties, the crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War compelled many liberal democracies such as Britain and the United States to embrace a proliferation of technocratic projects and institutions without pausing to debate their impact on the social contract. The flurry of technological competition that characterized World War II and the subsequent Cold War created the vast and intricate nexus of universities, research institutions such as Los Alamos and RAND, defense contractors, and government agencies that President Dwight Eisenhower would ultimately term the military-industrial complex.²⁴ In large part because of the stunning advances in applied science and technology that it had helped to accelerate, the conclusion of the Second World War witnessed more than the ascendancy of the United States to the position of global dominance previously held by Great Britain. It also witnessed the ascendancy of Homo sapiens as the decisive power in determining the future direction of life on earth. In his environmental history of the twentieth century, J. R. McNeill cited 1945 as the year when a steadily expanding global economy, with its attendant consumption of resources and creation of pollution, began to alter the biosphere in unprecedented ways.²⁵

    Julian’s work during the Second World War put him in a unique position to have some influence on the institutions of this emerging postwar order. Just months after the defeat of the Axis powers, the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education met in London to draw up plans for the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Julian Huxley’s international reputation as a scientist and public intellectual, as well as his wartime work for the British Ministry of Information, made him a favored candidate to lead the new organization. Taking the helm at UNESCO in 1946, just as emerging tensions with the Soviet Union were darkening an already uncertain postwar landscape, Julian Huxley would present a vision for the future of our species that he believed could transcend the ideological conflicts of the eastern and western blocs, because it was predicated, unlike Communism or liberalism, on what he saw as a new integration of science and religion.

    For Julian Huxley, this combination of unprecedented human knowledge and technological power signaled the dawn of a new epoch that required a new and rational religion for the human race. Since the 1920s, Julian had promoted the idea of a religion without revelation based on the principles of evolutionary biology.²⁶ Two decades later, he would conceive of UNESCO as offering a framework for the unification of knowledge and culture on a global scale. Ultimately, Julian speculated, this amalgamation of modern science and cultural traditions from around the world would lead to an entirely new form of rational and universal religion:

    What celebrations will be devised of human achievement and human possibilities, what pilgrimages and gatherings, what ceremonies of participation, what solemnizations of the steps in individual lives and personal relations? What rituals and techniques of salvation, of self-development and self-transcendence will be worked out, what new incentives and new modes of education, what methods for purgation and for achieving freedom from the burdens of guilt and fear without inflicting harm on oneself and others, what new formulations of knowledge and consequent belief? What modes will the future find of distilling its ideas of its destiny into compelling expression, in drama or architecture, painting or story, or perhaps wholly new forms of art?²⁷

    Almost a century after T. H. Huxley had mocked Auguste Comte’s proposals for a religion of humanity as "Catholicism minus Christianity, Julian Huxley offered the world a very similar proposal for a rational religion with its own rituals and techniques of ‘salvation’ and methods of purgation."²⁸ As if this were not ambitious enough, Julian Huxley saw the cultural and religious unification of the human race as precursors to the creation of a unifying world government. Julian Huxley reasoned that the educational program of UNESCO should stress the need for world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization. This was not a goal that Julian Huxley believed would be achieved in the near term, but he saw UNESCO programs for promoting science and the arts across borders as small and practical steps that could do a great deal to lay the foundations on which world political unity can later be built.²⁹

    Julian Huxley’s visions for a new religion and a world government have earned him a choice spot among the perennial villains of conspiracy theorists, especially on the political right. Reverend Tim LaHaye, coauthor of the best-selling Left Behind novels, which depict the Anti-Christ as a future secretary-general of the United Nations, sees Julian Huxley as one of the primary architects of the UN’s secular-humanist and, as LaHaye sees it, implicitly anti-Christian agenda.³⁰ Goading religious conservatives had been a Huxley family tradition since T. H. Huxley’s public debate on evolution with the Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860, but Julian Huxley, by going beyond the agnostic skepticism of his grandfather to promote a raft of causes from secular religion to eugenics and world government, has earned a lasting place in the demonology of the religious right. Ironically, Julian Huxley’s insistence that evolution is imbued with a clear direction and purpose that should serve as a religious inspiration for humanity has meant that his work holds little appeal for the New Atheists of

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