Adrian DesmondReseñas

"Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s Hight Priest" is a lengthy biography of Thomas Henry Huxley by Adrian Desmond. It might be more accurate to say it is a history of his time, 1825-1895, concentrating on the development of science in England, for which which he had to battle against the entrenched and incestuous counter-forces of class, politics, universities and state-sponsored religion.

It was Huxley who coined the word "agnostic" to characterize his views. Before that, there wasn’t any good word, "atheist" being mentioned but yet entirely wrong, so "agnostic" was born of self-defense, signifying nothing against religion other than accepting the facts of nature (science) irrespective of dogma or any other contradictory assertion. (Huxley learned on his own more theology than many clerics of his time possessed.) But as soon as developing science contradicted religious dogma, the forces of the Anglican Church opposed science, and its wealth and influence soon attracted the upper classes, educators, and politicians into its battle.

This opposition made it exceedingly difficult for talented men not of privileged birth, men of merit like Huxley, to advance or even get started against class, scholastic, and economic barriers. There was no money in science. Huxley had to incur onerous debts for books alone. Science was being done in England only by men who did not have to work for a living. Huxley, self-taught, devoted his life to changing this and was highly successful, also promoting women where possible. He was instrumental in introducing scientific education into Britain, where the universities had been finishing schools for the pampered. As scientist, publicist, lecturer, writer and lobbyist, he could hardly bear to turn down any position from which he could have a positive influence and so probably worked himself into an unnaturally early death.

Charles Darwin came out with "The Origin of Species" in 1859. He had put off publication for nearly 20 years because of foreseen troubles mostly with the Anglican Church. Oddly enough, although Huxley found abundant ammunition in the "Origin", he personally dismissed its central idea, natural selection, for about eight years and lectured widely in Darwin’s defense without mentioning the process. Darwin noticed this. But Huxley gradually came to tolerate it after carefully considering the abilities of British pigeon fanciers to produce in a few generations, by selective breeding, numerous extreme varieties of pigeons (human selection).

Huxley also had to do battle with the wholly inappropriate and dangerous attempts to apply evolutionary processes set out in the "Origin" to society, economics, ethics, race, politics, international competition and empire. Towards the end he was practically defending uncorrupted faith and intelligent conservatism against socialism, Communism and anarchism.

For a lengthy biography, there seems to be oddly little about Huxley. I never got much sense of the man. Also there is precious little science for a book featuring Huxley and Darwin. This is mostly a history book about science-impacted sectors of British society and institutions of the time, clearly not written by a scientist. I would greatly have preferred it the other way around. Huxley was a distinguished scientist, perhaps (for example) the finest comparative anatomist of his day. He concluded correctly, for example, that birds had evolved from small dinosaurs. His was a golden age of science, and he was its most powerful instrument.

Few Englishmen have had a more profound – and controversial – impact on history than Charles Darwin. Born in 1809 to a prosperous family of doctors and manufacturers, he received training first as a doctor and then a clergymen before embracing a career as a naturalist. His five-year voyage on the “Beagle” became the defining experience of his life, inspiring him to reevaluate natural history and giving him a wealth of material to study. Establishing a career as a gentleman scientist, he gradually came to embrace the concept of “natural selection”, yet shied from publishing his conclusions until prodded by a similar paper by Alfred Russell Wallace. Publication of “The Origin of Species” in 1859 triggered an onslaught on controversy, one that did not deter Darwin from continuing his biological studies until his death in 1882.

Darwin’s life has received enormous attention – so much so, as Adrian Desmond, James Moore, and Janet Browne note in the preface to this book, that today “historians know more about his career than his family did, and in respects . . . they even know more about the man.” Such a massive amount of information can prove difficult to summarize, but the three authors rove more than capable of the task. Taken from their entry on Darwin for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, each draw upon their particular specialty - Desmond on the politics of evolution, evolution and Darwin’s colleagues, Moore on the secular and religious contexts, and Browne on the history of botany – to present a comprehensive portrait of Darwin, one that captures the amazing range of his natural studies. Supplemented with a final chapter on his legacy, the book serves as a good introduction to the famous naturalist, as well as a guide to the mountain of further literature on his life and legacy.

The power of Darwinism fascinates. The theory of evolution through natural selection devastated every secular and sacred shibboleth held tightly for millennia. What has most impressed me is the utter victory of naturalism over super naturalism and, as logic inevitably demands, the complete redefinition of man's place in the universe. Even 150 years after its arrival on the intellectual stage the controversy rages, not among scientists certainly, but in the desperate and fragile efforts to disparage it by proponents of creationism and intellectual design. To my mind, the reality of naturalistic origins does not allow any foot hold for supernatural first causes. But, to me, this does not lead us to nihilism, but suggests a path of optimism for the future of the planet.

In On the Origins of Species, Darwin was cautious about explicitly expressing the implications of his theory on the matter of man's place in existence. He was certainly aware that such a conclusion would immediately be drawn and most certainly it was. Even such a stalwart scientific supporter as Asa Gray could not abandon the anchor of divinity as the ultimate first cause.

This fascinating book focuses on the relationship of Darwin's work to his strong abolitionist beliefs and to the debate raging on the morality of slavery. Darwin, his family and circle were among the staunchest abolitionists in England, advocating vigorously for emancipation in the Commonwealth and the Americas. Darwin's scientific logic compellingly supported the notion that the races of human kind had a unitary ancestor and were not distinct species. The so-called polygenisists held that the races were created separately and as species distinct from each other could be placed in a hierarchy of superiority without moral qualms. Great store was placed on the discernible differences among the races, but Darwin's work said these were not species differentiation but rather variations caused by environmental factors. The most obvious evidence for species commonality was the success of inter-racial reproduction.

In the context of the intense and ugly racism of the 19th century, Darwin's view was scorned by other scientists and polemicists who were determined to prove the racial superiority of Caucasians and, hence, the morality of subjugating the lesser species, principally blacks. America's renowned scientist, Louis Agassiz, was the foremost of the scientists making this claim. The aura of this pseudo science was eagerly grasped by those who sought to counter the growing intensity of moral opposition to slavery. This inevitably led its adherents down the primrose path of ascribing to genetic differences the futility of the "lessor" races ever being able to achieve the lofty heights of culture and progress achieved by the Anglo-Saxon race.

Thus to Darwin we owe another debt of gratitude. By impelling us to accept our less than divine status he has opened up the potential for diminishing the effects of our hubris on the earth. Recognizing the commonality of all humans points us toward a moral stance that best positions the perpetuation of our species. After all, isn't morality a successful and highly important evolutionary trait?

A wonderfully written life of Darwin.
Read in Samoa June 2002.

A very thought biography about one of the most important scientist ever lived. Everything you wanted to know about Darwin...

Though not the earliest professional scientist by far (Owen, for example, sustained himself through his scientific work, and he was from the previous generation), Huxley is more on the professional side of the amateur-professional transition than not. As a young man who wanted to pursue science, Huxley faced a dilemma. In the early part of the century, few direct opportunities were available to the man of science. In 1838, when Huxley decided that he wanted to study “natural philosophy” as a boy of thirteen, he had to pursue a surgical apprenticeship because he had no money available to him. Adrian Desmond reports that Huxley wrote in his diary, “Philosophy can bake no bread; but it can procure for us God freedom & immortality. Which is now the more practical Philosophy or Economy?” (9). Huxley was later forced to join the Royal Navy as surgeon’s mate to avoid debt.

Huxley (along with his friend Tyndall) wanted to reshape science, wanted to make it a legitimate part of the everyday life of Britain. This required both a change in scientific education and scientific practice. For starters, “Science required factory discipline, ‘steady punctual uninterrupted work’. His scientific-artisan lineage was being forged, a work-bench mentality far from the leisured aristocratic ideal” (198). Education was one of Huxley's biggest fights (he famously exchanged words with Arnold on it), and he was very frustrated by the level of knowledge available in Britain. He once observed that a Roman centurion’s son in a contemporary university “would not meet with a single unfamiliar line of thought” (275).

According to Desmond, Huxley foresaw a science-led society being governed by “only knowledge well organized and well tested. And that made Nature’s own education the best guide… the only way forward was a competitive, technocratic society, with the science professionals at the helm” (210-11). But such an arrangement of society privileges those who master the profession of science, and means that advancing within science becomes advancing within society, making the desire for scientific knowledge something other than just a desire to discover unknown truths.

As Ursula DeYoung observes in her intellectual biography of Tyndall (A Vision of Modern Science), the outcome of Tyndall and company’s drive to professionalization was eventually a model of science that rejected the kind of science Tyndall had done; remembrances of him published after his death depict him as a necessary transitional figure in the development of science, not someone to be remembered for his own scientific work. The new science had been constructed along the vision of Huxley; Desmond mentions biology professors who claimed their whole discipline and vocation had been created by Huxley and then describes the changes of the century: “Huxley’s professionals in their ‘knowledge factories’ would become ‘pioneers in the exploration and settlement of new regions’” (627). But the employment of the factory metaphor pushes away from a pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, the type of neutrality that Tyndall claimed for science in Fragments of Science for Unscientific People (1871). If the laboratory is a factory, then knowledge becomes a product—and making product becomes a means for promotion. The privileging of scientific knowledge means both that knowledge is no longer acquired for its own sake.

Tyndall’s transcendental materialism did not meet the requirements of the laboratory science era, which Desmond describes as having “a deadroom air… a dead, desiccated nature” (628). Huxley and Tyndall succeeded too well, in the end. In establishing science as a legitimate, professional pursuit, complete with various specializations, they carved it into its own sphere, removing it from the realm of “society,” and thus ultimately denying its ability to comment on the world.

Darwin said of Thomas Huxley: “My good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospels, i.e. the Devil’s gospel.” Huxley was known for lunging (figuratively) at his opponents. He was Darwin’s Rottweiler. No one stirred passions like Thomas Henry Huxley. Adrian Desmond (Darwin’s biographer) has written an absolutely fascinating biography of this man. “Huxley was one of the founders of the skeptical scientific twentieth century. We owe to him that enduring military metaphor, the ‘war’ of science against theology. He coined the word ‘agnostic’ and contributed to the West’s existential crisis.” Desmond’s biography is a contextual history of the man and his ideas. “How did England’s vicarage view of a designed, happy world of 1830 become the cold, causal, and Calvinistic evolutionary vista of 1870. . . . This is a story of Class, Power and Propaganda.” Huxley virtually created the profession of scientist. Much of his antagonism to the established church arose with the general “industrial Dissent,” a backlash of the underprivileged against the upper social strata typified by the Anglican hierarchy.

“Huxley boosted the ‘Scientists’ ‘ profile by trenching on the clergyman’s domain, raising the territorial tension by equating authority with technical expertise.” The English schools of 1870 rejected science as “useless and dehumanizing.” Their world was constructed around the classics and theology. The universities were “finishing schools” for prosperous Anglicans.” Huxley’s great feat was persuading society that science was essential to an industrial nation.

Huxley did not begin hating religion, but the experience of his youth as an apprentice drug-grinder who wandered through the poverty-stricken, rat infested, sewage-laden London of 1841 where children were literally starving in front of him made him question the validity of a religion that had failed to help these people. Huxley spent several years studying at Charing Cross Hospital on scholarship. The honor came from successful competition on a very hard exam sponsored by the Apothecaries Guild. He was the ultimate academic and could often be found dissecting corpses past normal hours. Corpses were plentiful: the squalid poor who could not be allowed in the front door for treatment of mere starvation, arrived often by the back door for the morgue. At the end of his studies he was considerably in debt, having had to pay for food and lodging, so he went to sea as surgeon's mate on the recommendation of a friend. The ship was the Rattlesnake, whose captain was as interested as Huxley in scientific observation.

Regretfully, the numbers of books he purchased for the voyage added to his debt. On any long voyage, one has a great deal of time to speculate about things, and Huxley began moving away from the orthodox. “It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt; we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however ‘venerable’ . . . .”

Huxley remained a devotee of reason and intellect, but he was not anti-religion. “My screed,” he wrote, “was meant as a protest against Theology & Parsondom . . . both of which are in my mind the natural and irreconcilable enemies of Science. Few see it but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live thirty years, it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies. But the new religion will not be a worship of the intellect alone.” He meant to retain the moral core, the ethics of love and duty, but stripping Christian mythic excrescences. “In his own pugilistic way, he was proving that evolutionary heterodoxy did not equal moral delinquency.”

Huxley was a brilliant lecturer whose perorations became famous. It was common practice for experts in shorthand to take down the words of a speaker and rush them into print, a sort of piracy, as Huxley received no royalties, but the fabulously successful little books did much to popularize Darwin’s ideas. Perhaps Desmond overstates Huxley’s triumph of rationalism over darkness for, as reviewer James Kincaid said in his review in The New York Times, the “contemporary United States seems to me about as skeptical, scientific and agnostic as a 10th century tribe of frogworshipers.”

Fascinating account of Darwin's intellectual milieu and motivation. I knew of the Malthus stimulus and of Wallace's nearly scooping him, but the case here is that slavery was the driver. His family Unitarian background and first-hand experiences on the Beagle trip combined to form his thinking throughout. So the point was to prove mankind's origin was singular not plural, so "all men are brothers". Seems odd to think anything else, but there are still those who do.
The story is fascinating and detailed, including why he spent so much time on barnacles and pigeon-breeders, as well as why he left "Man" out of the Origin. the simultaneous US Civil War makes a dramatic part of the context. Sometimes a little hard to follow with its huge cast of twitcher-clerics, propagandists and profs. But well worth the effort.
Carlyle comes out as a prize s*** as well as such an awful prose-writer. For some reason he kept a place at the fringe of Darwin's circle despite being a rabid "niggerology" firebrand.

Link to my review -
http://reconsidering.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/review-darwins-sacred-cause-by-adr...

One of the first books that shook the slow, dumb dinosaur paradigm and forced a re-thinking of their lives and ecology.

El llibre groc d'en Darwin
Ressenya escrita per al bloc "Club de lectura Les Corts Miquel Llongueras"

L’any Darwin és una efemèride de la que estic gaudint molt, encara que ja s’ha refredat una mica. Quan em vaig trobar aquest títol a la llibreria em vaig dir que llegiria tot allò que es publiqués al voltant la figura de Darwin. A mesura que es publicaven més i més títols, em vaig adonar que fer-ho seria un esforç titànic que difícilment assoliria. Malgrat renunciar a fer aquesta lectura exhaustiva de les novetats del bicentenari, tant Darwin com l’evolució seran temes recurrents en aquest bloc (*). El motiu, simplement, és que és un tema que m’agrada.
Charles Darwin és una biografia breu escrita a sis mans (perquè és impensable que algú escrigui ja de puny i lletra) per tres experts en el científic i en la seva època. Entre aquests hi ha la Janet Browne, autora de la biografia més extensa i completa que conec i també d’un títol sobre la redacció i publicació de L’origen de les espècies. Però aquesta biografia és sobretot una biografia del seu pensament, de la idea de la mutació dels organismes, i de la rebuda d’aquesta arreu. Com és aquesta rebuda ho deixen clar els autors, amb humor, a la pàgina 124:

“[...] però les seves teories eren massa materialistes per als idealistes, massa capitalistes per als socialistes, massa empiristes per als alemanys i massa angleses pels francesos”

En qualsevol cas, la primera part del llibre parla d’un ambient molt més favorable del que jo suposava, almenys al seu entorn més proper. Parla dels naturalistes amics i companys de professió alguns d’aquests anteriors a Darwin, que el van recolzar i esperonar, així com del punt d’inflexió que suposà la lectura de Malthus i del catalitzador que fou la carta d’Alfred R. Wallace, que tenia entre mans un treball amb la mateixa teoria. Els tres biògrafs no deixen de banda esmentar l’ordre i sistematització de la seva metodologia en la recerca, ni de la seva (extrema?) prudència a l’hora de redactar els seus escrits. Dues coses em cridaren especialment l’atenció. Una és sobre la mort de la filla de Darwin. Els autors no ens donen molta informació biogràfica però sí puntualitzen que l’herència era l’aspecte dins la teoria que ell encara no podia explicar, i que això mateix afegia neguit a la mort de la nena. L’altra és la “conquesta” del darwinisme per part dels humanistes. La selecció natural ja no té un pes tan gran per als científics, o bé no és l’únic mecanisme que hi actua. El canvi de paradigma que proposa la teoria de l’evolució en el pensament fa que sigui impossible separar la càrrega ideològica de la seva explicació científica. Arribem aquí al naixement del Darwinisme.

Charles Darwin no és un llibre imprescindible, però sí una molt bona aproximació al pensament d’en Darwin. Un petit llibre que, al meu parer, no deixarà de destacar notablement d’entre l’allau de novetats del bicentenari.

(*) L’autor va publicar una altra versió d’aquest text al seu bloc personal (A lei de Lem)

Adrian Desmond & James Moore: Darwin: 1992: eerste druk 1991: 677 blz: Penguin

Darwins vader was een welgestelde plattelandsarts, zodoende hoefde Charles en zijn oudere broer Erasmus nooit te werken om hun geld te verdienen. In zijn jeugd was Charles niet opvallend, hij hield van jagen en was een verwoed keververzamelaar. Op zijn 22e verjaardag kreeg hij een uitnodiging om mee te gaan met de reis van de Beagle om de wereld. Op deze reis die 5 jaar duurde en waarop hij herhaaldelijk ernstig zeeziek was gaf hij zijn ogen goed de kost en deed hij de ideeën op die zouden leiden tot de Origin of Species. Na afloop van de reis schreef hij 3 boeken over de geologie van Z-Amerika en een verslag van de tocht. Intussen trouwde hij nadat hij de voordelen van het trouwen had afgewogen tegen de nadelen. Hij kreeg 10 kinderen waarvan er 3 in de kinderjaren stierven. In 1842 schreef hij een eerste versie van het boek dat de Origin zou worden. Hij hield het bestaan van het manuscript geheim en bleef er tot 1859 aan werken. In de tussenliggende tijd schreef hij een dikke pil over eendemossels. In 1859 kreeg Darwin een brief van Alfred Wallace die een soort samenvatting van zijn evolutietheorie was. Darwin was geschokt en besloot om snel tot gelijktijdige publikatie met Wallace over te gaan. "On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection" werd goedverkocht en zou de grondslag vormen voor de wetenschap van de biologie. Tijdens zijn latere jaren schreef Darwin nog een aantal gespecialiseerde boeken. Hij werd na zijn dood in Westminster Abbey begraven.
Afgezien van het feit dat "Darwin" een erg dik boek is, is het goed geschreven, leest het vlot en is het inhoudelijk erg boeiend.
Uitgelezen: zondag 6 oktober 2002, waardering ****

There's a tongue-in-cheek quality to this biography that leaves you rather uncertain as to what the authors really thought of Darwin. The writing style is breezy, postmodern, very much a look back at Darwin from the 21st century point of view. That makes this chunky book quite easy to read, but it did grate on me sometimes.

I did like the way in which this book placed Darwin's life at the center of so many others, and showed the links between his thinking and that of his contemporaries. He comes across as a man always anxious to preserve the status quo and avoid the extreme views both of the religious conservatives and of the atheist scientists. And yet his work was the catalyst for a total upheaval in the way people thought; Darwin was right at the center of the late nineteenth century shift towards secularism that is still playing out today. By the end of his life he was practically regarded as a saint by many, as a devil by others. But the picture I'm left with is of a sickly, fussy, obsessive worker who, after the Beagle voyage that made his name, was happiest in his comfortable yet modest home with his experiments, his devoted wife, and his children.

This book shows how science and polical and cultural values are mixed togethier. Darwin hated slavery to undermind slavery he wanted to show how the different races had started as one. in other words blacks and whites are not in any way different. Darwin was a careful and through scientist that followed the facts, and those facts led to natural section and sexual section as the force behind evolution.

This is a thorough biography of the life of one of the most important scientists of the 19th century (in fact, the man who first used the term "scientist" to describe a profession). It was Huxley, even more than Darwin himself, who spread the idea of natural selection to the masses. Desmond does an excellent job of making Huxley come alive to the reader. The book drags in places, especially during Huxley's youth and Rattlesnake voyage. To me, the most interesting part is Huxley's championing of Darwin's views, and his endless feud with Owen.

A great biography of Charles Darwin. This is a very thorough investigation into the life of a man whose ideas have changed the world.

I was fascinated by Darwin's background, motivation and fear of the consequences of publishing On The Origin Of Species.

Informative and sometimes very moving.

I read "Huxley" after "Darwin" (also by Adrian Desmond) and enjoyed it even more.

Huxley had none of the privileged background that Darwin enjoyed, working his way up by necessity, a fascinating struggle against social adversity. He was a brilliant man in his own right, and yet he is only known (if at all) as "Darwin's Bulldog", which is a shame.

Darwin sailed the world on the "Beagle" but Huxley joined the "Rattlesnake" - which is an amusing comparison of their characters. Without men like Huxley, who were prepared to stand up and support Darwin's ideas, no-one today would have heard of Charles Darwin.

The book captures Huxley brilliantly, his friendship, constrasts and similarities with Darwin, and the social and moral harnesses of the age.