The interaction of science and world view in Sir Julian Huxley's Evolutionary biology.

Abstract

Throughout my career as a scholar I have been deeply interested in the interaction of science and world view, especially (although not exclusively) in relation to the rise and development of evolutionary biology. Everyone believes that scientific discoveries and theories profoundly influence world views, but the idea that world views influence the development of science encounters considerable resistance, especially when advanced in connection with twentieth-century science. Scientists will sometimes concede that general ideas about man, nature, God, society, history, and the like have influenced science in past centuries, but when it comes to their own researches and theories they tend to fall back on nineteenth-century conceptions of science. Their science, they assert, is based squarely on observation, experiment, and purely scientific reasoning unsullied by extraneous influences. In this respect they are witting or unwitting disciples of Auguste Comte, believing that Western thought has moved progressively from a theological through a metaphysical to a positive status. How, then, shall we test the extent to which twentieth-century evolutionary biology has been shaped by world view? Ideally, one would like to delineate a world view shared by most evolutionary biologists of this century, and then show how this world view has influenced their scientific research and thinking. But this is a task for which I am not yet ready, having just begun my studies along this line. Instead, I shall attempt an analysis of the interaction of science and world view in the evolutionary writings of one leading exponent of the "modern synthesis." Sir Julian Huxley's writings provide excellent materials for the investigation I have in mind, for it was Huxley's ambition from youth onward to define a world view based on evolutionary biology that would unite mankind under the banner of evolutionary humanism and displace forever the creeds and dogmas that had retarded the progress of civilization in past ages. No one