Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
matched only by his enormous appetite for argumentative display.
4
These
discursive powers came to the avail of science at an opportune moment in
its history, the middle of the nineteenth century, when science had a com-
pelling need to find a new and dynamic public identity.
The picture given by Huxley's biographer, Adrian Desmond, shows a
personality constantly given over to these broader ambitions.
In the Victorian high noon science
was
Professor Huxley. He was its great-
est proselytizer; he made it adventurous and dangerous. Nobody held an
audience as he did. He tweaked posh lecture-goers with his stiletto stabs
at the clergy; he roused plebeian ones with his sea slang and profusion
of “paddyisms.” He popularized fossils and morals and the meaning of
evolution. He became the high priest of a new secular faith.
5
Some of our more legendary images of Huxley remain in Desmond's depic-
tion of him as an anticlerical warrior and popular interpreter of evolution,
but the loftier aspirations that come at the beginning and end of this sum-
mation are most critical. Huxley was above all else the great architect of a
new scientific identity, and he intended to project this identity upon the
world as a “secular faith.”
It is the breadth of this ambition that gets lost in folk tales that seem
to fence this bulldog up in Darwin's back yard. Huxley's doggish tenacity
was more likely to flare up against those who dared trespass upon science's
place in English society than against those who called Darwin's work into
question—though these were sometimes the same people. For reasons that
will become clear in the next chapter, although Huxley had been an evolu-
tionist even before Darwin's
Origin of Species
, he was
never
a Darwinist after
it. If it is meaningful to associate him with the theory of natural selection, it
is only because Darwin's great achievement symbolizes the scientistic pros-
pects that were so crucial to his perennial campaign to broaden and deepen
scientific patronage. Huxley was a rhetorical Darwinist, not a scientific one;
he was evolutionism's bulldog rather than Darwin's.
Even before Huxley's career was fully in motion, we are witness to
certain inklings of this work of scientific world-building. As he endured a
long and painful search for academic employment in his mid-twenties, he
signed on as a scientific columnist for the radical weekly
Westminster Review
,
where he was positioned to play the role of John the Baptist to the publica-
tion of Darwin's
Origin of Species
.
6
Once his discursive genius had been put
on display in prominent reviews of Darwin's topic, which were published
in
Macmillan's
and the
Times
late in 1859 and then in the
Westminster
in the
