Not everyone has a chimpanzee named after them. When the primate ethologist Jane Goodall called one of the troop she studied in Tanzania ‘Huxley’, it was an affectionate tribute to her colleague Julian Huxley, distinguished biologist and prominent popular science writer. But observers (and perhaps other chimps) could be forgiven for thinking it was a reference to Thomas...
An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family by Alison Bashford. It can be hard to grasp how ambitious the synthesis that Julian Huxley tried to provide actually was. In his hands, evolution became emphatically a story of progress, especially human progress. ‘Because the human brain (and only the human brain) can comprehend evolution by natural selection,’ Alison Bashford writes, ‘humanity can install its own purpose into the process.’ Or as Julian put it: ‘the future of progressive evolution is the future of man.’