Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
science, their mythical dimension of meaning will seem to stand upon a
scientific authority. Except for its teleologically pregnant phrase concerning
the “goal” of human history, this paragraph's other claims might seem to
outline merely scientific objectives. And perhaps even here we might allow
the author some poetic license in assuming that by “goals” he does not
refer to a purpose embedded in natural history but merely to what can be
predicted once certain mechanisms of biological evolution are understood.
But the solemnity of the utterance and the grandeur of its framing as the
“question of questions” should tip us off to an equivocation, that what Hux-
ley gives with one hand as science he takes back with the other as myth.
He seems to want the ambiguities of the term “place” to have free play, so
as to suggest that natural evolution is capable of giving human life some of
the meaning traditionally assigned to it by this metaphor. This interpreta-
tion gains further support as he goes on to intimate that his own questions
about “place” are those same perennial ones that “present themselves anew
and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world.”
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If the
new evolutionary science covers the same ground that was formerly trod
by religious and philosophical thinkers, then implicitly, at least, it is their
natural successor.
Once “place” takes on this dual significance, the title phrase “man's
place in nature” no longer denotes just a zoological category. The evolu-
tionary meaning of “place” has become a metaphor of hierarchy, a version
of what Arthur Lovejoy dubbed the “Great Chain of Being.”
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But unlike
more traditional versions of the
scala naturae
that explicitly integrated scien-
tific understanding with theology, the value hierarchy that Huxley proposes
presents itself as something entirely of science's making. Scientific authority
seems to be self-affirming: science illuminates a natural hierarchy, and in
doing so also finds itself perched atop it.
This is reinforced by the placement of this famous icon of evolution
(reproduced in figure 6 below) which appears on the page just opposite his
paragraph on the “question of questions.”
Rather than being situated amidst the anatomical discussion it refer-
ences, which does not appear for another twenty pages, this image by Water-
house Hawkins, the celebrated Victorian illustrator of dinosaurs, is adjacent
to Huxley's remarks about the “goal” of human history.
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Consequently,
the reader who first turns the page to contemplate this parade of primate
skeletons and is next ushered into Huxley's discourse on our “place” in the
universe, is likely to give this image a similar metaphorical significance.
Contextualized in this fashion, the Hawkins lithograph invites reading
