Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Having now realized this historical destiny, science bears responsibility for
guiding evolution's future course.
It is only after Huxley has forged this identification that he finally turns
to the scientific exposition which makes up the body of his essay. Thus, even
before his readers learn anything about the evidences for human evolution,
this scientific subject matter has already been framed within a larger social-
evolutionary narrative. Huxley's scientific message flows out of myth, and in
its peroration flows back into it as well. His announced purpose in the chap-
ter's conclusion is to address the popular “repugnance” that many express
when faced with their animal ancestry, and so we might superficially sup-
pose that he is merely acknowledging his duty to comment on this salient
clash of religious and scientific views. But upon closer inspection, we see
that this topic merely provides an occasion for picking up where he had left
off at the beginning. Huxley does not merely reject the charge of traditional
religionists that an animal ancestry deprives humans of spiritual dignity;
his closing in fact turns the tables by insisting that it is in the evolutionary
viewpoint that such dignity is found.
A key signpost indicating that evolution is about to be transfigured
again into evolutionism can be found in the sudden shift into argument
from analogy that occurs just as Huxley is about to transition into the chap-
ter's conclusion. Having spent seventy pages summarizing the evolutionary
implications of comparative anatomy, paleontology, and the geographical
distribution of primates, the author concludes, again adopting the cau-
tious posture he always took on this subject, with four additional pages
on “Darwin's hypothesis.” Natural selection cannot yet be accepted, Hux-
ley explains, because a “true physical cause” can be admitted only “on one
condition—that it shall account for all the phenomena which come within
the range of its operations,” and Darwin's mechanism had not lived up to
this standard. These reservations are put “as strongly as possible before the
reader” lest the author should seem to “smooth over real difficulties, and to
persuade where he cannot convince.” 62 But he then goes on to compensate
for this tepid assessment in closing by outlining a surer basis for accepting
evolution.
But even leaving Mr. Darwin's views aside, the whole analogy of natural
operations furnishes so complete and crushing an argument against the
intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes, in the produc-
tion of all the phenomena of the universe; that, in view of the intimate
relations between Man and the rest of the living world, and between the
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