Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the constitution of the scientific identity were conjoined in one message.
Man's Place in Nature
was at once both a science topic and a scientism topic—
science in the service of the mythopoeic, a literary form designed to put the
serious and academic purposes of communicating evolutionary science to
work in order to underwrite the ideological purposes of evolutionism. As
such, the topic mirrors the labors of institutional revitalization that were
making Huxley the face of Victorian science.
Man's Place in Nature
certainly taught many scientific lessons, but set
within the larger pattern of Huxley's public life, it takes on a different sig-
nificance. The ship of science that was steaming out of the nineteenth cen-
tury had Huxley at its tiller, and in this regard it would be more accurate
to sum up his career by calling him “science's bulldog.” It was in order to
advance the place of science, not evolution, that he gave thirty-six lectures
to schoolmasters in just June and July of 1871, as his son Leonard described
it, so “that they might set about scientific instruction in the right way,” and
this was only a fraction of the workload that would soon lead to a series of
breakdowns.
10
Huxley's devotion to the scientific cause found him accept-
ing an endless succession of society presidencies, advisory board positions,
school board posts, and royal commissions, and forever moving behind the
scenes to influence the administrations of even the most remote munici-
palities of English science.
11
This was also the impetus for his many battles
with politicians and churchmen who envisioned a lesser role for science in
the new industrial empire that was expanding in step with England's ter-
ritorial imperialism.
Since Huxley's death, the same ideological needs that kept him him so
busy have worked to create him in the image of the evolutionism he helped
to create. We remember him as “Darwin's bulldog” in large part because
the internal symbolic mechanisms that continue to sustain evolutionism
demand that he should be seen simply as an advocate of science rather than
of a scientific worldview. The scientific ethos that Huxley was fashioning
invited mythogenesis, the wholesale identification of science with progress
and of progress with nature. But like other symbolic creations of this kind,
it needed to maintain the belief that this was a work of
cosmos
building
rather than of
nomos
building—a work of scientific discovery rather than
mere human invention. Were historical memory to attend too closely to
Huxley's extensive political efforts to promote science's place in the world,
the bonds that hold culture and nature together would be more likely to
come undone. Evolutionism sustains the idea that the scientific identity
springs spontaneously from the natural world, and this belief is more
