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Evolution in Action
Starting with the first one-celled organisms, a world famous biologist analyzes the broad processes of evolution: the pattern of genetic structure; the formation, adaptation, and specialization of species; heredity; mutations; and natural selection--in short, the mechanisms and principles common to all life.
Passing from the general to the specific, he lucidly explains how, in advancement toward general efficiency, new capacities appear, such as the ability to fly or to learn by experience--capacities that may lead a species to a blind alley of specialization, or to further progress, or even (uniquely with man) to a point where the species may learn how to control the course of its own development.
Passing from the general to the specific, he lucidly explains how, in advancement toward general efficiency, new capacities appear, such as the ability to fly or to learn by experience--capacities that may lead a species to a blind alley of specialization, or to further progress, or even (uniquely with man) to a point where the species may learn how to control the course of its own development.
141 pages, paperback
First published January 1, 1953
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About the author
Julian Huxley
308 books124 followersIn 1887, Julian Huxley, the brother of novelist Aldous Huxley and the grandson of agnostic biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, was born in Great Britain. Educated as a biologist at Oxford, he taught at Rice Institute, Houston (1912-1916), Oxford (1919-25) and Kings College (1925-1935). An ant specialist (he wrote a book called Ants in 1930), Huxley became Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935-1942), and UNESCO's first general director (1946-1948). A strong secular humanist, Huxley called himself "not merely agnostic . . . I disbelieve in a personal God in any sense in which that phrase is ordinarily used. . . I disbelieve in the existence of Heaven or Hell in any conventional Christian sense." (Religion Without Revelation, 1927, revised 1956.) Huxley was an early evolutionary theorist, with versatile academic interests. Some of his many other books include: Essays of a Biologist (1923), Animal Biology (with J.B.S. Haldane, 1927), The Science of Life (with H.G. Wells, 1931), Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of the HMS Rattlesnake (editor, 1935), The Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939), Heredity, East & West (1949), Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957), Towards a New Humanism (1957), and Memories, a two-volume autobiography in the early 1970s. Huxley was knighted in 1958 and was also a founder of the World Wildlife Fund.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. 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 Linnaean 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 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; his father was writer and editor Leonard Huxley; and his paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution. His maternal grandfather was the academic Tom Arnold, his great-uncle was poet Matthew Arnold and his great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School.
More: http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Jul...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_H...
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. 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 Linnaean 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 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; his father was writer and editor Leonard Huxley; and his paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution. His maternal grandfather was the academic Tom Arnold, his great-uncle was poet Matthew Arnold and his great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School.
More: http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Jul...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_H...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 28, 2020
Not an easy book to get your hands on! Thankfully, my friends Chris and Jackie bought me a first-print paperback copy from 1957 (the text being originally published in 1953). In Evolution in Action, esteemed evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley (grandson of Darwin's early defender and "bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley and father of Aldous) assembles the best knowledge of his time to explain evolution to the lay reader. It's a fascinating window into scientific consensus 67 years ago, showing what the best examples and means of explanation were at the time, and hinting at the "evolution" of evolutionary theory itself.
Huxley has a brilliant mind and is a gifted explainer: one of those educators who engages your cognition on all cylinders and makes you feel smarter as you read. Of course, some of the examples show their age. Modern discussions of embryology are even more careful in separating ontogeny (the process of individual development) from phylogeny (the broader history of species development) while highlighting the relevant structural developments. Scientists hadn't yet solved the riddle of the dinosaurs' demise, so Huxley suspects they were simply out-competed by the upstart mammals. Huxley understood genetic inheritance perfectly but didn't have the benefit of decades' worth of comparative genome analysis. There's a sense of the "purpose" and "direction" of evolution, culminating in the pinnacle of mankind, that is oversold. However, my overall impression was that the presentation was remarkably accurate, careful, soberly aware of what wasn't yet known and predictive of what future evidence should look like, and filled with examples from nature that I hadn't encountered in other books.
For anyone seeking to learn about evolution for the first time, there are a dozen modern books I'd point them towards instead (The Ancestor's Tale, Your Inner Fish, and Human Errors come immediately to mind), but I'd recommend this to anyone who cares about evolutionary theory and education and would like to take a sounding somewhere between the eras of On the Origin of Species and The Selfish Gene.
Huxley has a brilliant mind and is a gifted explainer: one of those educators who engages your cognition on all cylinders and makes you feel smarter as you read. Of course, some of the examples show their age. Modern discussions of embryology are even more careful in separating ontogeny (the process of individual development) from phylogeny (the broader history of species development) while highlighting the relevant structural developments. Scientists hadn't yet solved the riddle of the dinosaurs' demise, so Huxley suspects they were simply out-competed by the upstart mammals. Huxley understood genetic inheritance perfectly but didn't have the benefit of decades' worth of comparative genome analysis. There's a sense of the "purpose" and "direction" of evolution, culminating in the pinnacle of mankind, that is oversold. However, my overall impression was that the presentation was remarkably accurate, careful, soberly aware of what wasn't yet known and predictive of what future evidence should look like, and filled with examples from nature that I hadn't encountered in other books.
For anyone seeking to learn about evolution for the first time, there are a dozen modern books I'd point them towards instead (The Ancestor's Tale, Your Inner Fish, and Human Errors come immediately to mind), but I'd recommend this to anyone who cares about evolutionary theory and education and would like to take a sounding somewhere between the eras of On the Origin of Species and The Selfish Gene.
August 5, 2016
Having done a lot of reading about evolution from authors that were more popular in recent decades, it was interesting to cover this short collection of six pieces by Julian Huxley, a hereditary peer of evolutionary science and one of those who was an experienced player at the time the Modern Synthesis emerged. The pieces are all written accessibly and in layman's terms, representing as they do popular lectures which Huxley conducted for the general public.
Unfortunately for this writing, evolutionary science has burgeoned in the intervening decades and some of Huxley's ideas look decidedly dated, and in a couple of cases outright mistaken. The K/T impactor thesis was not aired at this time, and he attributes the disappearance of the dinosaurs and rise of mammals to adaptational advantages which became relevant due to a period of mountain-building. We are now as sure as is probably possible that this was not the case, and that the survival of mammals and birds was a contingency due to the cataclysmic impact off Chicxulub.
Again, with lungfish, Huxley lived in a world that had not yet discovered that swim-bladders derive from lungs rather than lungs from swim-bladders, so he mischaracterises their role in the evolution of amphibians. He also cleaves to ideas of a "scale" or "ladder" of evolution that is simply incoherent in terms of modern evolutionary theory, and in my opinion owes more to the persistence of Christian "great chain of being" thinking.
Huxley's grandfather was the bulldog that chomped down on the clerical nose at the time when natural selection was first fighting for acceptance. Any modern author enjoys decades of new work to illustrate the science with depth and richness, a depth and richness which extend almost by the day. Huxley, through no fault of his own, finds himself between these two stools from the perspective of the early 21st-Century reader. This work is therefore historically interesting and very well written, but it is necessarily neither pivotal nor contemporary. I would recommend reading it, but not before covering modern textbooks, Darwin, Dawkins and a number of others.
Unfortunately for this writing, evolutionary science has burgeoned in the intervening decades and some of Huxley's ideas look decidedly dated, and in a couple of cases outright mistaken. The K/T impactor thesis was not aired at this time, and he attributes the disappearance of the dinosaurs and rise of mammals to adaptational advantages which became relevant due to a period of mountain-building. We are now as sure as is probably possible that this was not the case, and that the survival of mammals and birds was a contingency due to the cataclysmic impact off Chicxulub.
Again, with lungfish, Huxley lived in a world that had not yet discovered that swim-bladders derive from lungs rather than lungs from swim-bladders, so he mischaracterises their role in the evolution of amphibians. He also cleaves to ideas of a "scale" or "ladder" of evolution that is simply incoherent in terms of modern evolutionary theory, and in my opinion owes more to the persistence of Christian "great chain of being" thinking.
Huxley's grandfather was the bulldog that chomped down on the clerical nose at the time when natural selection was first fighting for acceptance. Any modern author enjoys decades of new work to illustrate the science with depth and richness, a depth and richness which extend almost by the day. Huxley, through no fault of his own, finds himself between these two stools from the perspective of the early 21st-Century reader. This work is therefore historically interesting and very well written, but it is necessarily neither pivotal nor contemporary. I would recommend reading it, but not before covering modern textbooks, Darwin, Dawkins and a number of others.
May 28, 2017
While I was a little doubtful of the current validity of a scientific book published more than sixty years ago, I am quite glad I read it. Huxley gives the reader a beautiful account of the process of evolution in action and the way it can point us in the right direction for the future of humankind. He makes a nuanced but essential difference between biological improvements (numerous) and biological progress (rare). This allows him to focus on the way in which, without falling into teleology, biological life has been following a course of progress and that while humankind is certainly not its pinnacle it is perfectly poised to continue the trend. Similarly, while I was afraid of the conclusions that Huxley might reach, given that the book was written in the 1950s, I was pleasantly surprised to find Huxley disavow any racial or eugenic outlooks, opting instead for an advocacy of the fulfillment of all human beings. In short, I found this book illuminating, thought provoking and quite uplifting.
January 17, 2008
It was good.
July 26, 2014
Not likely to be encountered much now, but for a short work it explains the basics of Neo-Darwinism rather well.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews