Huxley also developed scientific education in Britain, and fought against the more extreme forms of religion. These activities had a big effect on the way people in Britain and elsewhere thought about the world. Huxley used the term "agnostic" to say that he did not know if there is a god or not. We continue to use the term "agnostic" today. Huxley was for many years a close friend of the Irish physicist John Tyndall.
Huxley had little schooling, and taught himself almost everything he knew. Remarkably, he became a great anatomist and zoologist. Later, he discussed the evolution of man and the apes. Another of his ideas was that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs, which is now known to be true.
Huxley died in Eastbourne, Sussex. Three of his grandsons became famous in the 20th century.
As a young man, Huxley went on a long voyage of discovery to the southern continents. He was Assistant to the Surgeon on the Royal Navy ship HMS "Rattlesnake". What he did was to collect sea animals, and study them. He went ashore in New Guinea and the eastern coast of Australia, to study the animals, and the native peoples. He fell in love with a girl in Sydney, Australia, and some years later they married and had children.
For nearly ten years he worked on the relationship of man to the apes. This led him into a clash with Richard Owen, a man who was disliked for his behaviour, but admired for his skill. The struggle between them ended in some severe defeats for Owen.
Huxley's public lectures grew into his most famous work "Man's place in Nature" (1863). There he deals with the evolution of man, before Charles Darwin published his "Descent of Man" in 1871.
In the book Huxley gives evidence for the evolution of man and apes from a common ancestor. It was the first book devoted to the topic of human evolution. The book proposed to a wide readership that "evolution applied as fully to man as to all other life".
Huxley was an important public figure. When he was young there were virtually no degrees in British universities in biology, and few courses. Most biologists of his day were either self-taught, or took medical degrees. By the time he retired there were professors in biology in most universities, and a broad agreement on what should be taught. Huxley was the single most influential person in this transformation. Huxley was for about thirty years evolution's most effective champion. For some, Huxley was ""the" leading English spokesman for science in the nineteenth century".
Huxley supported the reading of the Bible in schools. Huxley was against organised religion, but he thought the Bible's moral teachings and use of language helped English life. "I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches".
However, what Huxley proposed was to create an "edited version" of the Bible, without "shortcomings and errors... These tender children [should] not be taught that which you do not yourselves believe". The London School Board voted against his idea, but it also voted against the idea that public money should be used to support students attending church schools. Vigorous debate took place on such points, and the debates were written down in detail. Huxley said "I will never be a party to enabling the state to sweep the children of this country into denominational schools". The Act of Parliament which founded board schools allowed the reading of the Bible, but did not permit any particular religious doctrine to be taught.
It may be right to see Huxley as helping the secularisation of British society which gradually occurred over the following century. Ernst Mayr said "It can hardly be doubted that [biology] has helped to undermine traditional beliefs and value systems". Huxley more than anyone else was responsible for this trend in Britain.
Huxley worked on ten Royal and other commissions. The subjects included medical law, contagious diseases, vivisection; fisheries; universities in Scotland, and science education in Ireland. He was Inspector of Fisheries 1881–85, and held many awards from many universities. He was President of the Royal Society from 1883–1885. The British state made him a Privy Councillor, as a reward for his public work.
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Theodosius Dobzhansky, or Theodore Dobzhansky, (24 January 1900 – 18 December 1975) was a noted geneticist and an evolutionary biologist.
Dobzhansky was born in the Ukraine (then part of Imperial Russia) and emigrated to the United States in 1927. He was a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work on the fruit-fly "Drosophila". He did research on these flies in California, mostly on populations of "Drosophila pseudoobscura".
Dobzhansky was important in the modern evolutionary synthesis, which was the synthesis of evolutionary biology with genetics.
At school Dobzhansky collected butterflies and beetles, and studied biology at Kiev University. After graduation he moved to St Petersburg (then called Leningrad), and studied under Yuri Filipchenko, who had a "Drosophila" lab. Dobzhansky collected Coccinellidae (ladybird beetles) in the wild, and explored their genetics.
Dobzhansky emigrated to the United States in 1927. He worked with Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University, who had pioneered the use of fruit flies ("Drosophila melanogaster") in genetics experiments. He followed Morgan to the California Institute of Technology from 1930 to 1940. Dobzhansky took fruit fly research out of the laboratory and into the field. He discovered that regional varieties of flies were more similar to each other genetically than to flies from other regions.
In 1937 Dobzhansky published one of the major works of the modern evolutionary synthesis, entitled "Genetics and the Origin of Species". He defined evolution as "a change in the allele frequency within a gene pool". It is through changes in the proportion of alleles in a population that evolution takes place. Also in 1937, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. During this time he had a falling out with one of his "Drosophila" collaborators, Alfred Sturtevant, based perhaps on professional competition.
Dobzhansky returned to Columbia University from 1940 to 1962. He was one of the signatories of the 1950 UNESCO statement "The Race Question". He then moved to the Rockefeller University) until his retirement in 1971.
Julian Huxley
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was born in London, and died there. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the modern evolutionary synthesis.
He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund.
Huxley came from the distinguished Huxley family. His brother was the writer Aldous Huxley, and his half-brother, a fellow biologist and Nobel laureate, Andrew Huxley; and his paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He was awarded UNESCO's "Kalinga Prize" for the popularisation of science in 1953, the "Darwin Medal" of the Royal Society in 1956, and the "Darwin-Wallace medal" of the Linnean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award of the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population. Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society.