Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
had already made science an actor within the revised historical narrative
that Bacon had outlined in his
New Atlantis
. Thus when Huxley now reiter-
ated these traditional epistemological virtues under the heading of agnosti-
cism, he was also sustaining a version of this more traditional historical
narrative. To argue for faithfulness to the text of nature was merely a more
circumspect way of saying what the British had traditionally believed—that
science gave expression to something akin to providence and that it worked
to bring about something like the kingdom of God.
This interpretation will set the stage for my argument in the next chap-
ter that the Protestant character of this displaced narrative also coincided
with the enlarged symbolic role that evolutionary constructs played in Hux-
ley's worldview. Huxley's more circumspect narrative of history
was
evolu-
tion. The most direct way to bring history within the compass of the natural
sciences was to make it a product of nature, as evolution. The positivists
were on the track of this idea already. In Huxley's able hands evolutionary
science became a rhetorical resource—rhetorical Darwinism, an effort to
conflate history with science and thereby to give scientists a more complete
command of the very symbolic resources by which they had traditionally
secured their patronage.
t
homas
h
uxley
anD
the
a
RchitectuRe
of
e
nglish
s
cience
It would be impossible to fully appreciate Huxley's role in the development
of evolutionism without first appreciating certain particulars of his person-
ality and life situation. Although he was an important scientist in his own
right, he is best remembered by those of us born in the century after his
death for his public advocacy of Darwin's theory. However, historians now
agree that the popular assumption that his chief significance came from his
role as “Darwin's bulldog” is the product of selective memory and a some-
times distorted view of the role he played in the advancement of evolution-
ary science.
3
Still, the broader picture suggested by this famous sobriquet
of a man much consumed by zeal for science is meaningful. Huxley was in
some sense the firstborn of a species of scientists that continues to play a
recognizable role in formulating science's public self. Like such twentieth-
century counterparts as Jacob Bronowski, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins,
Stephen Jay Gould, and his own grandson, Julian Huxley, to name just a
few, he exercised rhetorical talents that were especially suited to the needs of
a newly powerful but perennially vulnerable profession. His native literary
gifts, evident to anyone who has read even a single page of his prose, were
