Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
this earlier mythical conflation. In 1893, he was simply clarifying that not
every aspect of evolution manifested progress. Darwinian natural selection,
in particular, did not account for ethical advancement. But so far as Huxley
was personally concerned, this did not mean that he had let up on the sup-
position that progress is grounded in nature—only that Darwin's theory did
not account for the whole of evolution.
In his earlier days, he had seemed to suggest otherwise, most famously
in the Darwinian-sounding “chess-board” metaphor he plied in his 1868
working man's lecture on “Liberal Education.” For the younger Huxley,
the biological world was an opponent but one that was “always fair, just
and patient,” a “calm strong angel” who repays the one who obeys its laws
with that “overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in
strength” and who checkmates the “one who plays ill . . . without haste
but without remorse.”
6
But this earlier “analogical naturalism,” as Paradis
has called it, had only given way to a different kind of evolutionary ethics
three decades later.
7
In his Romanes lecture, Huxley may have exerted more
caution than Spencer and Stephen had about supposing that the material
forces described by biologists could always be applied in the human arena,
but this never amounted to denying that morality and civilization were the
ends of natural evolution. If “Evolution and Ethics” was “the missing chap-
ter of
Man's Place in Nature
, filled in after 30 years,” as Adrian Desmond
has suggested, this was not because the author had abandoned evolutionary
naturalism.
8
He still believed that evolution accounted for moral progress;
he was only insisting that this was not the same evolutionary mechanism
that had been responsible for biological life.
Huxley was more willing to make this distinction in 1893 because sci-
ence's different rhetorical context now made it less risky to do so. As Ruth
Barton admonishes us, any examination of Huxley's messages “must take
account of their polemical context,” and must not assume that they repre-
sent “judicially-balanced analyses of philosophical and theological prob-
lems.”
9
New circumstances had inspired him to present a more nuanced
version of the earlier evolutionism. In the 1860s, as the battle for science
was reaching its peak, Huxley was more willing to draw evolutionary sci-
ence wholesale into a moral vision of history.
His predominant concern in the peak years of his public career with
reinventing the scientific ethos makes
Man's Place
in Nature
more representa-
tive of his abiding rhetorical aims than the Romanes lecture. More impor-
tantly, this topic also represents the creation of a new genre of scientific
communication. For the first time, the work of scientific exposition and
