Education as an Evolutionary Phenomenon: Huxley, Waddington, and the Foundational Importance of Ethics

Abstract

This essay sheds light on the “father of epigenetics,” Conrad Hal Waddington’s (1905–1975) tacit critique of one of the most prominent biologists of the twentieth century, Julian Huxley’s (1887–1975) theses concerning the evolutionary meaning and importance of learning and education for the human species. This topic has great significance today when it comes to educators both recognizing and being able to orient themselves in relation to the profound biological and evolutionary aspects of their role and purpose, and in determining their own ethos and modes of activity therein. Here, I highlight Waddington’s stance in relation to Julian Huxley’s thesis that education comprises humanity’s new “psycho-social,” or alternatively, “socio-genetic,” mode of biological inheritance parallel to, yet beyond, the “rawer” biological struggle for existence that most other living organisms are engaged in, namely, that involving natural selection acting on genes or genomes and the exigency of adapting successfully to the environment. According to Huxley, the gradual, yet cumulative, transmission of the knowledge and attainments of one generation to the next, over evolutionary time, via various modes of learning and education, has enabled the human species to have surpassed the capacities of all other organisms on the planet, such that it has become super-dominant. Waddington was in general agreement with Huxley’s thesis regarding the evolutionary significance of humanity’s learning and education here, as well as the latter’s notion that education is an epigenetic phenomenon, namely, comprising a distinct, yet interrelated inheritance system beyond that of genetic inheritance. However, Waddington tacitly disagreed with Huxley’s assertions that in light of such realizations, going forward: (1) humanity should exert the power of its selective agencies so as to take control of the biological processes of all life-forms on the planet; (2) formal education should be reformed into a function of evolutionary humanist ideology, eugenics, and transhumanism; (3) humanity ought to attempt to transcend its current capacities, as though there were a linear progression to some higher stage of biological development that is mechanistically calculable in advance. Waddington’s chief argument against Huxley is that this “socio-genetic” and/or epigenetic system of inheritance has part of its foundation in ethics and in the moral conduct of teacher and learner, and that Huxley’s inert vision of the future of education and of the role and conduct of educators therein are unethical. As such, for Waddington, Huxley’s view can be said to undermine the very inheritance system that has enabled humanity to reach its privileged place, rendering it unsustainable. From a Waddingtonian standpoint, Huxley’s stance is “biologically unwise” in that it undermines the teacher-learner relationship, given that it treats learners mechanistically, namely, as means only to the ends of evolutionary humanist and transhumanist ideology, rather than organismically, meaning as having selective agency and intrinsic worth (a notion that is grounded in the notion that living organisms are bearers of intrinsic purposiveness, as evidenced by the homeostatic, chronobiological, and autopoietic processes belonging to them which enable persistence in the face of entropy). On the contrary, Waddington calls for the cultivation of “biological wisdom” surrounding formal education (e.g., in relation to the aims of such education, its content, its curricula, the behaviour of educators, and the educational activities to be engaged in by learners), that would serve to strengthen the foundations of education qua humanity’s “psycho-social” inheritance system rather than to diminish or undermine it. Last, I associate the Waddingtonian notion of “biological wisdom” with the evolutionary-environmental ethic of “critical pan-selectionism.”