The evolution of a family.

Abstract

In 2021, a report prepared by a committee called the History Group at Imperial College London, UK, recommended that the name of the 19th-century naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley be removed from the college building that now houses the mathematics and computing department. Huxley's racist ideas, said the group, made it no longer appropriate, in the age of the Black Lives Matter movement, to celebrate him in this way. According to the report, he “espouse[d] a racial hierarchy of intelligence, a belief system of ‘scientific racism’ that fed the dangerous and false ideology of eugenics; legacies of which are still felt today”. Predictably, uproar ensued. An astrophysicist from Imperial College London warned in The Times that “If Huxley is to be cancelled, no one from the past is secure.” In The Daily Telegraph, Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones, Paul Nurse, and a host of other scientific luminaries declared that Huxley was a progressive on education, women's rights, and slavery and held the “conviction that all men and women should be judged on their merits”. They argued that Huxley should not be judged by the standards of today. Meanwhile, other efforts to reckon with racism have already seen the names of Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher removed from buildings at University College London, UK, because of their eugenic and racist beliefs. In the end, the authorities at Imperial have decided that, in contrast, Huxley's name will stay, but might be paired with that of an Imperial scientist from a disadvantaged minority. Whether or not you agree with that decision, it is given some vital context by historian Alison Bashford's An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family, a detailed, nuanced, and superbly written joint biography of the intellectual lineage of the Huxleys that Thomas Henry founded.