Julian Huxley and biological progress

Abstract

In a recent paper, "The Interaction of Science and World View in Sir Julian Huxley's Evolutionary Biology," John C. Greene has described how deeply Huxley's scientific work in evolutionary biology was influenced by his world view an ideology that embraced inorganic. organic, and human sociocultural evolution.' I think there is no doubt of the soundness of Greene's general argument and I differ from him on only one point, but it is a point of some significance. I argue in this paper that, whatever one may think of Huxley's world view, it did in fact lead him to some genuine scientific conclusions of considerable importance. It may well be asked: Is that likely? Is it likely that a person who throughout his whole adult life had been devoted to a powerful, quasi-religious view of the world, which he sought to disseminate by means of innumerable writings and addresses, would be led by that view to do serious and important scientific work? I agree that it is not likely unless the person in question was an able scientist who was clear about what he was trying to do. Huxley was that. There are some precedents. The history of science presents a number of cases in which important scientific work was inspired by a dubious metaphysic, an outstanding example being the influence of Platonism on Renaissance scientists. It was Galileo's Platonic vision of the Book of Nature being "written in the language of mathematics" (how many biologists would agree with that?) that inspired his grand achievement of mathematicizing motion. And it was Kepler's mystical, Platonic conception of celestial harmony, which to us today seems so outlandish, that helped to lead him to the laws of planetary motion that constituted a major element in the Copernican Revolution. Huxley's contribution to evolutionary theory is not of that