Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
However, the defense of Darwin also meant the defense of the naturalistic
program that was unfolding south of London at the elder scientist's Down
estate, and this was emblematic of Huxley's broader campaign for science.
Darwin's work also symbolized historical progress. This is manifest
in the broader context that Huxley gave to his defensive actions when he
repeated this phrase to Charles Lyell the following spring in a letter on
the question of women's emancipation. “If my claws and beak are good for
anything,” he told the elder geologist, those who bar the way to women's
advancement “shall be kept from hindering the progress of any science I
have to do with.” Read out of context, as such statements frequently are, we
might easily imagine that he meant only “progress” of science in a merely aca-
demic sense. In fact Huxley was also speaking of something much broader—
the universal “progress” of modernism, the advancement of civilization that
would be achieved once the advancing empire of naturalism broke down
the gender divide through universal science education. “I don't see how we
are to make any permanent advancement while one-half of the race is sunk,
as nine-tenths of women are, in mere ignorant parsonese superstitions.” By
combating feminine superstition, science education would change the world
in which “five-sixths of women stop in the doll stage of evolution to be the
stronghold of parsondom,” and become a “drag on civilisation, the degrada-
tion of every important pursuit with which they mix themselves—'intrigues'
in politics, and 'friponnes' in science.”
18
If Huxley's sharpened beak and claws were meant to ensure a fair hear-
ing for Darwin's work but also to advance the “evolution” of women, this
cause exceeded the scope of biology. We can also see this pattern in his
1860 lecture on Darwin's theory at the Royal Institution. While biological
evolution was its topic, what had begun as a public lecture on Darwin's work
ended as a sermon, a hortatory discourse urging the public not so much to
accept Darwin's theory as to trust in the evolutionary growth of civilization
that it signified once naturalism was mapped onto human history. Speaking
from this higher summit, Darwin's discovery was just one additional detail
within an ever-widening evolutionary panorama, merely a “new link” in
the “mighty chain which indissolubly binds us to the rest of the universe.”
19
The story Huxley was most interested in at the climax of his presentation
was not biological development at all but the unfolding drama of human
progress, the success of which would henceforth depend upon the inevitable
consolidation of scientific authority.
In saying this, Huxley was once again displacing an indigenous Baco-
nian narrative of history into the naturalistic story that had been presented
