Past tense, future perfect?
PATRICIA FARA lauds a detailed double biography of grandfather-and-grandson thinkers whose ideas on evolution were both influential and inflammatory
An Intimate History of Evolution: The Huxleys in Nature and Culture
by Alison Bashford
Allen Lane, 576 pages, £30
Over 60 years ago, the biologist Julian Huxley declared with alarming prescience that “Man’s destiny is to be the sole agent for the future evolution of the planet”. Like his novelist brother Aldous, Julian enjoyed peering into the future. Among the many new terms he coined was “transhumanism”, the concept of enhancing human life artificially. This is currently provoking great controversy as emerging technologies – digital implantation, cryogenic preservation – are converting such visions into reality.
Conversely, as a scion of the burgeoning Huxley dynasty, Julian shared his grandfather’s fascination with the past. The ancestor he addressed fondly as “Grandpater” was Thomas Henry Huxley, the bulldog defender of Darwinian evolution who confronted Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in a vitriolic debate at Oxford in 1860. Thomas Henry, too, enjoyed creating neologisms: his own contribution was “agnosticism”, a declaration (at the time, heretical) of spiritual doubt. Initially, Julian rejected his grandfather’s Darwinian commitment by aligning himself with early 20thcentury sceptics who forecast the theory’s eclipse. Later, during the 1930s, he played a key role in reformulating Darwin’s original version of natural selection by combining it with other approaches such as Mendelian genetics and experimental statistics.
In her superbly original and evocatively stylish An Intimate History of Evolution, the eminent science historian Alison Bashford has combined their lives into a single narrative spanning 150 years from Thomas Henry’s birth in 1825 to Julian’s death in 1975.
Recalling the two-headed god Janus, both separately and together they looked forwards as well as backwards. But this is no conventional, cosy family biography. By comparing their work and views by themes – Genealogies,
Both men would now be denounced as bigoted racists but, as Bashford insists, should be judged by the values of their own times rather than today’s
Animals, Humans, Spirits – Bashford has ingeniously created a loosely chronological account that weaves their own lives and experiences within ever-shifting attitudes towards evolution.
By the time Thomas Henry died, a few days after Julian’s eighth birthday, they were already close. Julian once wrote to his grandfather asking with great excitement if he had ever seen Charles Kingsley’s water-babies. In his tactful reply – one of his very few legible letters – the elderly man carefully penned a child’s guide to scientific scepticism.
As well as this intellectual inheritance, they also shared the family tendency to bouts of crippling depression. In an imaginary letter to his newborn son, Julian despairingly predicted that “[Your mind will] burn your feet because it is paved like Hell with unfulfilled desires, will mock you with its puny fertility.”
Judging our predecessors is a thorny topic, yet Bashford mostly writes with great sensitivity, though she does glibly dismiss Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus – a botanical expert who authored a medical textbook studied by Charles at Edinburgh – as a “poet-dabbler”. She freely admits that, by modern standards, her two subjects held some obnoxious beliefs. Both men would now be denounced as bigoted racists; Julian was president of the British Eugenics Society. Yet, as Bashford points out, Thomas’s insistence on a single human species was enthusiastically taken up by anti-slavery protesters, and Julian collaborated with a Jewish filmmaker to campaign for multiculturalism. As Bashford insists, these doubtlessly flawed men should be judged by the values of their own times rather than today’s. After all, future historians will surely condemn the current neglect of Julian’s warning about human responsibility for the planet’s future.