The dinosaur connection: a reinterpretation of T. H. Huxley's evolutionary view.

Abstract

The traditional understanding of T. H. Huxley's role in the history of evolutionary ideas has been based on certain prominent biographical, even autobiographical, material: that Huxley was a colleague of Darwin, that he was apparently forthright in his defense and exposition of Darwin's ideas almost immediately after publication of the Origin of Species, that he was in short "Darwin's bulldog," I reacting to the Origin as an overdue "flash of light."2 Michael Bartholomew's 1975 analysis of Huxley3 argues that there was no real tuming point in Huxley's scientific approach after the publication of the Origin of Species, and that even after 1859 Huxley held a basically pre-Darwinian attitude to science. Whether or not one agrees with Bartholomew's view, his article contributed to a change of perspective among scholars working on Huxley's scientific thought. A cursory examination of Huxley's scientific work reveals that he began to deploy the idea of evolution only in 1868, nine years after publication of the Origin, scarcely the response one would expect upon receipt of a blinding inspiration; Huxley's own research, in other words, seems to contradict any claim that the Origin of Species persuaded him of the value of the concept of evolution. Closer scrutiny of Huxley's work, even subsequent to 1868, reveals further that one of the obviously distinctive features of Darwin's theory the notion of natural selection fails to appear at all. A question therefore arises: was Huxley, despite his reputation and his self-assessment, actually a "Darwinian" at all? My own view is that after 1859, under the influence of Darwin, Huxley was persuaded of the value of evolution only as a working hypothesis in respect to the phenomena of organic nature; he supported