page_title: Julian Huxley
section_title: Early work
hierarchical_section_title: Julian Huxley / Early work
caption_attribution_description: English: Family of Great Crested Grebes. Two adults and two chicks sitting on a parents back. Other parent bringing fish.
context_page_description: Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS 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, 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.
context_section_description: His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His observations on the ethology of the Great Crested Grebe, published in 1914, was a landmark in avian field research. His invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
caption: Great Crested Grebes
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