Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
these transformations are being brought about by a succession of revolu-
tions in physical science.
A skin of some dimension was cast in the 16th century, and another
towards the end of the 18th, while, within the last fifty years, the extraor-
dinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among
us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new
ecdysis seems imminent. But this is a process not unusually accompanied
by many throes and some sickness and debility, or, it may be, by graver
disturbances; so that every good citizen must feel bound to facilitate the
process, and even if he have nothing but a scalpel to work withal, to ease
the cracking integument to the best of his ability.
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Condorcet's narrative had certainly been open to such an interpretation,
but Huxley's is carefully designed to ensure that the future rule of the natu-
ral sciences is its
only
interpretation. Rather than stating this openly, Huxley
allows the reader to infer this stance from the heroic posture he now attri-
butes to science. He closes this introductory section on humanity's mental
ecdyses, in fact, by writing himself into this biological narrative, declaring
that “duty” is his “excuse for the publication of these essays.” Every scientist
was called upon to wield the scalpel of evolutionary knowledge so as to
release humanity from its prescientific bondage. Knowledge of humanity's
“position in the animate world,” he declares, is an “indispensable prelimi-
nary to the proper understanding of his relations to the universe,” an under-
standing that ultimately “resolves itself” into an “inquiry into the nature
and the closeness of the ties which connect him with those singular crea-
tures whose history has been sketched in the preceding pages.”
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Evolution-
ary biology is no mere technical subject. Because it is also the apocalypse
which reveals history's universal pattern, scientists have a special responsi-
bility to make it known.
In this curious mystical conflation, the end of the evolution of science
is the discovery of biological evolution, and the end of biological evolution
is the discovery of science. The succession of “moults” through which sci-
ence has developed culminates in the discovery of biological evolution, and
in this revelation the natural evolutionary basis of science is likewise made
known. Each hill mounted by past learning has been leading upward toward
evolutionary knowledge, and as science has approached this final summit,
it has come face to face with itself. History's final apocalypse is the discov-
ery that science was created in the image of nature—because it was nature.