May 5, 1975

Julian Huxley, (June 22, 1887 to February 14, 1975) was a major spokesman for the scientific community in an era he described as one in which "Operationally God is beginning to resemble not a ruler, but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat." Which is to say, the first half of the 20th century. His influence derived from his writings as a popularizer of the natural sciences, although he was a working scientist also. Julian was born just as the espousal of naturalism as a sufficient explanation for the world was congealed in the modern mind. The following summary of Julian Huxley's significance is taken from the article in which he is the subject in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887-1975), zoologist and philosopher, was .... the eldest of three sons and a daughter of Leonard Huxley (1860-1933) and his first wife, Julia Frances Arnold (1862-1908). Leonard Huxley was at this time a schoolmaster at Charterhouse but later became known for his writing and as editor of the Cornhill Magazine. Huxley's mother.... was a granddaughter of Thomas Arnold of Rugby.... The second son, Trevenen Huxley (1889-1914), committed suicide; the novelist Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963) was the youngest son.
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Julian Huxley followed the traditional path for a member of the intellectual aristocracy-Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford. By 1909 he had collected two poetry prizes, one at Eton, the other at Oxford...... When the war ended Huxley... in 1919 was appointed a fellow of New College, Oxford, and made senior demonstrator in zoology. ....
[Publicity from the press in 1920 for  his work on the axolotl, an amphibian, launched him on a part-time career, that of writing about science for the populace. In 1925]
... Huxley moved to the chair of zoology at King's College, London. H. G. Wells, who had made over £60,000 on his very popular The Outline of History, had persuaded Huxley to join him and his son, G. P. Wells, in writing a similar work on biology for the intelligent reader, entitled The Science of Life. Each could hope to receive about £10,000 for the effort. Under persistent prodding and demands for rapid progress from Wells-Huxley had promised 1000 words per day-he gave up his chair in 1927 to concentrate on the book. The resulting work was a great success and established Huxley as a master of scientific exposition.
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Now Huxley had to live by his pen, by lecturing and his radio talks-the most famous being with Professor C. E. M. ...Joad ...in the BBC's very popular programme The Brains Trust, which continued throughout the Second World War. He also enjoyed some seven years of salaried employment starting in 1935 when the Zoological Society appointed him its secretary....

[Huxley was] driven by a passion to experience life to the full, and to spread the gospel of evolutionary humanism. Whether it was saving wild places, religion without revelation, or the population problem, he threw himself into each topic, published what he believed, and aided organizations that supported his views or helped to found one where none existed.....
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Progress, claimed Huxley, can be defined in terms of 'control over the environment, and independence of it'. These properties, he added, 'consist in size and power, mechanical and chemical efficiency, increased capacity for self-regulation and a more stable internal environment, and more efficient avenues of knowledge and of methods for dealing with knowledge'. Huxley claimed that the natural selection of the modern synthesis [his ideas about Darwin] could account for adaptation and for long-range trends of specialization; therefore, it could account for evolutionary progress too. Evolution he pictured as a 'series of blind alleys'. All, save that of man, have 'terminated blindly'. Man's future is therefore of central importance to the future of life as a whole. For Huxley, man was the 'organ' of evolutionary progress. In this 'cosmic office' it was man's role to realize the highest possible spiritual experience. Man needs, Huxley claimed, a Columbus to explore the geography of the mind so that he can be taught techniques 'of achieving spiritual experience (after all, one can acquire the technique of dancing or tennis, so why not of mystical ecstasy of spiritual peace?)'. Huxley admitted that other authorities regarded the idea of progress as a myth, but he professed that the scientific doctrine of progress will in due time replace all other myths of human destiny, becoming the major external support for human ethics.

Religions Huxley treated as 'social organs whose function it is to adjust man to his destiny', and he classified as religious any system or teaching that concerned man's destiny. The evolutionary concept of progress was thus religious, but in contrast to old religions that helped man maintain his morale in the face of the unknown, religions today must 'utilize all available knowledge in giving guidance and encouragement for the continuing adventure of human development'. In 1931 Huxley described the role of religious mysticism as submerging the ego in a greater being. Whereas earlier religions identified such a being with a god, the evolutionary 'religion' of humanism identified it with the human species. Despite the struggle of the First World War, Huxley glimpsed the progress of coalescence of minds into super-minds taking place. At the end of his vista of progress he pictured man 'consciously controlling his own destinies and the destinies of all life upon this planet'. These views he expressed some sixteen years before he first met Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and found common ground with this mystic Catholic....
[Among many awards Huxley received] the Darwin medal of the Royal Society for his contributions to the theory of evolution (1956), and a gold medal from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife Fund for his research relating to conservation (1970). He had been elected to the Royal Society in 1938, and was knighted in 1958. In 1966 he began to write his autobiography. The second volume of this two-volume work, Memories, appeared in 1973,....

Huxley died February 14, 1975, and the last memorial service was held May 5, 1975 in Paris. We see from the DNB summary that Huxley's views were more sophisticated than those often attributed to the popularizers of modern science. Our next quote shows an obvious relevance today if less subtlety.
It is is from the introduction to "The living thoughts of Darwin", (1939) which was edited by Julian Huxley.

....because they find that there is not full agreement among biologists as to the precise method by which evolution operates they assert that biologists do not believe in evolution as a fact. Because biologists can no longer accept the theory of natural selection in the precise form in which Darwin announced, they inform the world that Darwinism is dead.
In reality the two issues do not hang together in this way. We may be perfectly assured that a process occurs without knowing very much about how it occurs....Nor is the fact that we have not yet been able to discover the natural explanation of a process in all its details, any ground for asserting that it has no natural explanation, but must be accounted for supernaturally or mystically.

And this last from Huxley's book, Kingdom of the beasts (1956):

Zoologically, the lion is one of the two giant members of the cat family. There are plenty of other species of cats, showing the same fleshy-eating specialization of teeth and claws, but each adapted to fill a slightly different niche.

There is always in empirical precision, something to be learned.