/ Aldous Huxley /
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"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting."
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"Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems. Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with an undergraduate degree in English literature."
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Born: Aldous Leonard Huxley, Godalming, Surrey, England
Died: (aged), Los Angeles County, California, United States
Resting place: Compton, Surrey, England
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Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1926-1929”, Ivan R Dee
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Aldous Huxley美麗新世界/再訪美麗新世界/瞬息的燭火 (短篇小說集)
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博青睞志文新潮文庫~赫胥黎【再訪美麗新世界現代文明的危機】蔡伸章譯~199110志文再版~新潮文庫32開文學~《再訪美麗新世界》~現代文明的危機~ 再訪美麗新世界赫胥黎 ...
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1977年12月5日 — 本書是英國超級作家、文明批評家阿道斯．赫胥黎的晚年傑作，距他著名的烏托邦小說「美麗新世界」的出版已廿七年，當「美麗新世界」中頗具效果的諷刺 ...
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赫胥黎. 志文, 1978 - 292 pages. 瞬息的燭火: 新潮文庫147 · 赫胥黎. Limited preview - 1987 ...
Huxley brothers - 1947年3月24日 - Google 圖書結果
LIFE - 156 頁 - 雜誌Today Julian and Aldous Huxley represent two extremes of belief which modern intellectuals can reach. At one philosophic pole stands Julian the materialist, ...
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS[1] (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century 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 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,[1] 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 was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society and its president from 1959–1962.
Contents |
Life
See also: Huxley family
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, great-uncle poet Matthew Arnold and great-grandfather Thomas Arnold of Rugby School.Early life
Student life
In 1906, after a summer in Germany, Huxley took his place in Oxford, where he developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at only 46: a terrible blow for her husband, three sons and young eight-year old daughter Margaret. In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge. Also, it was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Origin of species.Career
Early career
Huxley got a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Oxford University, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds such as the Common Redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the Great Crested Grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; 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.[4]
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characters equally developed in both sexes.[6]
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994). She was a French Swiss girl whom he had met at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a Bloomsbury Group socialite with a penchant for artists and intellectuals. The newly-weds' life together included students, faculty wives, grebes and, unfortunately, another depressive breakdown, this time rather serious. From his wife's autobiography it seems his mental illness took the form of a bipolar disorder, with the depressive phases being of moderate to severe intensity. It took a long time for him to recover on this occasion, but despite this he left a legacy of students who admired him, and who became leaders in zoology for the next thirty or forty years. E.B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.[7][8]
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks, which was happening in the few areas that remained uninhabited due to malaria. From 1933–38 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's Africa Survey.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the USA joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society — "a curious assemblage... of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"[13] — uneasy with their Secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by the rather unpleasant tactic of abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the Council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The Commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first Director-General in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the USA delegation.[14] The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable.[15][16] The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.[17]Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude.[18] Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an unbeliever. Huxley wrote the forward to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.[19]
On Huxley's death at 87 in 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men... he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days... [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".[20]
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the new evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956,[1] and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.[21]
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen,[22] and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather,[23] and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work.[24]
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley was the most important biologist after August Weismann to insist on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. He was a major player in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis. A fine communicator, he was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public. Three aspects deserve special mention:Personal influence
- In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists[25] who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.[26]
Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir.[1][27]
Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. - In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today,
Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and
the USA. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other
scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the USA he was able to
meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II
revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed.
His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of
Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair.[28] There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists.
"Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."[29]
Evolutionary synthesis
- Huxley was one of the main architects of the new evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
- "The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." Berry and Bradshaw, 1992.[30] The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.[31]
- Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association.[32] In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics.[33][34][35] Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times.[36][37] Huxley thought that sexual selection was "...merely an aspect of natural selection which... is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the Great Crested Grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
- Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: the modern synthesis was written whilst he was Secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".[38][39]
- Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J.B.S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright.
However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E.B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.
An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:
Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J.S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.
This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution. - It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis;[40] he also invented the term cline
in 1938 to describe species whose members fall into a series of
sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical
area.[41][42] The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.
Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.[43][44][45]
Evolutionary progress
- He always believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation. Progress without a goal was one of his phrases, to distinguish his point of view from classical Aristotelian teleology.
"The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and
theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary
process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false."[46]
The idea of evolutionary progress was subjected to some fierce criticism in the latter part of the twentieth century. Cladists, for example, were (and are) strongly against any suggestion that a group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and others as 'primitive'. For them, and especially for the radical group of transformed cladists, there is no such thing as an advanced group, they are derived or apomorphic. Primitive groups are plesiomorphic. Ironically, it was Huxley who invented the terms clade and grades.[47][48][49]
However, to take a rather extreme case, it would seem strange to say that when man is compared to bacteria, that mankind is not a vastly more complex and advanced form of life; or that the invasion of the land by plants and animals was not a great advance in the history of life on this planet. On this issue Julian was at the opposite end of the spectrum from his grandfather, who was, at least for the first half of his career, a propagandist for 'persistent types', getting close to denying any advances at all.[50][51]
- Huxley argued his case many times, even in his most important works. In the final chapter of his Evolution the modern synthesis
he defines evolutionary progress as "a raising of the upper level of
biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and
independence of the environment,"[52]
Evolution in action discusses evolutionary progress at length: "Natural selection plus time produces biological improvement... 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology... however, living things are improved during evolution... Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general... I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology."
"Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery... the limbs and teeth of grazing horses... the increase in brain-power... The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life."[53]
"[Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance — improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".[54]
These excerpts are much abbreviated, but give some idea of his way of thinking. He addresses the topic of 'persistent types' (living fossils) later in the same book (pp 126–8).
- The question of evolutionary advancement has quite a history. Of
course, pre-Darwin, it was believed without question that Man stood at
the head of a pyramid (scala naturae). The matter is not so simple with evolution by natural selection; Darwin's own opinion varied from time to time. In the Origin
he wrote "And as natural selection works by and for the good of each
being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards
perfection".[55]
This was much too strong; as Sober remarks, there is nothing in the
theory of natural selection which demands that selection must produce an
increase in complexity or any other measure of advancement. It is
merely compatible with the theory that this might happen.[56]
Elsewhere Darwin admits that "naturalists have not yet defined to each
other's satisfaction what is meant by high and low forms" (p336); nor
have they now – this is one of the problems. Other evolutionary
biologists have had similar thoughts to Huxley: G. Ledyard Stebbins[57] and Bernhard Rensch,[58] for example. The term used to describe progressive evolution is anagenesis, though this term does not necessarily include the idea of improvement.
The objective description of complexity was one of the issues addressed by cybernetics in the 1950s. The idea that advanced machines (including living beings) could exert more control over their environments and operate in a wider range of situations perhaps serves as a basis for making the terms such as 'advanced' amenable to more exact definition.[59][60] This is a debate that continues today.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism[63] came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T.H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man... was when he acquired the use of [language]... Man's development is potentially open... He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which... largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change".[64] Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics.[65] (see evolutionary ethics)Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;... I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern".[66] Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.[67]"Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place."[66]
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society,[68] and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool; but at least after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.[69]Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: no-one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ-plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks? "The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists."[70]
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. This passage, from 1941, puts the view forcefully:
"The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation."[71]Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types".[72] The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C.B. Davenport, H.J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "...unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay..."[73] and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Nature's enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization."[74] However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread.[75] Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.[76]
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A.C. Haddon, zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question,[77] which asserted that:
"A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"... "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion (sic) with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term ‘race’ is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term ‘race’ altogether and speak of ethnic groups"... "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division."... "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races...""The biological fact of race and the myth of “race” should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth ‘race’ has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man..."Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1957 Huxley coined the term "transhumanism" to describe the view that man should better himself through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was always able to write well, and was ever willing to address the public on scientific topics. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.[78]These articles, some reissued as Essays of a biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H.G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life.[17] This work was published in stages in 1929–30,[79] and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis".[80][81] In his memoirs, Huxley says that, all told, he made close to £10,000 out of the book.[82]
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.[83]
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite program; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.[84][85]
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.[86][87]
Terms coined
Huxley's use of language was highly skilled, and when no word seemed to suit he invented one. These are the most significant:- Clade or Cladistics 1957: a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendents.
- Cline 1938: a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect.
- Grade 1959: a level of evolutionary advance.
- Ethnic group 1936: as opposed to race
- Mentifact 1955: objects which consist of ideas in people's minds.
- Morph 1942: as more correct and simpler than polymorph.
- Ritualization 1914: formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains.
- Sociofact 1955: objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group.
- Transhumanism 1957: the improvement of human beings.
Titles and phrases
Huxley always chose his titles carefully. He wrote about fifty books (depending on how you count them), and these themes are characteristic:- Religion without revelation (1927, 1957)
- The new systematics (1940)
- The uniqueness of man (1941)
- Evolution: the modern synthesis (1942)
- Evolutionary ethics (1943)
- Evolution as a process (1954)
- Essays of a humanist (1964)
- The future of man (1966)
Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley, OM, FRS (22 November 1917 – 30 May 2012)[1] was an English physiologist and biophysicist.
Contents |
Early years
See also: Huxley family
Huxley was the youngest son of the writer and editor Leonard Huxley by his second wife Rosalind Bruce, and hence half-brother of the writer Aldous Huxley and fellow biologist Julian Huxley, and grandson of the biologist T. H. Huxley. He studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1947 he married Jocelyn Richenda Gammell Pease (1925–2003), the daughter of the geneticist Michael Pease and his wife Helen Bowen Wedgwood, a daughter of the first Lord Wedgwood, and is thus affiliated with the Darwin–Wedgwood family. They have one son and five daughters:- Janet Rachel Huxley (born 20 April 1948)
- Stewart Leonard Huxley (born 19 December 1949)
- Camilla Rosalind Huxley (born 12 March 1952)
- Eleanor Bruce Huxley (born 21 February 1959)
- Henrietta Catherine Huxley (born 25 December 1960)
- Clare Marjory Pease Huxley (born 4 November 1962)
Career
He won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his experimental and mathematical work with Alan Hodgkin on the basis of nerve action potentials, the electrical impulses that enable the activity of an organism to be coordinated by a central nervous system.[2] Hodgkin and Huxley shared the prize that year with John Eccles, who was cited for research on synapses. Hodgkin and Huxley's findings led the pair to hypothesize the existence of ion channels, which were isolated only decades later. Together with the Swiss physiologist Robert Stämpfli he evidenced the existence of saltatory conduction in myelinated nerve fibres.Huxley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 17 March 1955. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on 12 November 1974. Sir Andrew was then appointed to the Order of Merit on 11 November 1983.
Huxley passed away on 30 May 2012 in his home in Grantchester, England.
Nobel Prize
The experimental measurements on which the pair based their action potential theory represent one of the earliest applications of a technique of electrophysiology known as the voltage clamp. The second critical element of their research used the giant axon of the Atlantic squid (Loligo pealei), which enabled them to record ionic currents as they would not have been able to do in almost any other neuron, such cells being too small to study by the techniques of the time. The experiments started at the University of Cambridge, beginning in 1935 with frog sciatic nerve, and soon after they continued their work using squid giant axons at the Marine Biological Association Laboratory in Plymouth. In 1939, reporting work done in Plymouth, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley published a short paper in the journal Nature announcing their achievement of recording action potentials from inside a nerve fibre.[3] Research was interrupted by World War II but after resuming their experimental work in Plymouth, the pair published their theory in 1952. In the paper, they describe one of the earliest computational models [4] in biochemistry, that is the basis of most of the models used in Neurobiology during the following four decades. He continued to hold college and university posts in Cambridge until 1960, when he became head of the Department of Physiology at University College London. For his research, in 1963 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1969 he was appointed to a Royal Society Research Professorship which he holds in the Department of Physiology at University College London.He maintained up to his death his position as a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, teaching in physiology, natural sciences and medicine. [5]He was also a fellow of Imperial College London in 1980.[6]
From his experimental work with Hodgkin, Huxley developed a set of differential equations that provided a mathematical explanation for nerve impulses—the "action potential". This work provided the foundation for the all of the current work on voltage-sensitive membrane channels, which are responsible for the functioning of animal nervous systems. Quite separately, he developed the mathematical equations for the operation of myosin "cross-bridges" that generate the sliding forces between actin and myosin filaments, which cause the contraction of skeletal muscles. These equations presented an entirely new paradigm for understanding muscle contraction, which has been extended to provide our understanding of almost all of the movements produced by cells above the level of bacteria.
See also
Further reading
- Huxley A.F. 1980. Reflections on muscle. The Sherrington Lectures XIV. Liverpool.
External links
References
- ^ GRO Register of Births: MAR 1918 1a 724 HAMPSTEAD - Andrew F. Huxley, mmn - Bruce
- ^ Anthony Tucker. "Sir Andrew Huxley | Science". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-05-31.
- ^ A.L.Hodgkin & A.F. Huxley (1939) Action potentials recorded from inside a nerve fibre. Nature 144, 710-711.
- ^ one of the earliest computational models
- ^ The Master of Trinity at Trinity College, Cambridge
- ^ http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/aboutimperial/imperial_people/nobel_laureates
安德魯·赫胥黎爵士，OM，FRS（Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley，1917年11月22日－2012年5月30日）出生於英國倫敦[1]，是一位生理學家與生物物理學家，與艾倫·勞埃德·霍奇金共同研究神經的動作電位，兩人因此與研究突觸的約翰·卡魯·埃克爾斯共同獲得1963年的諾貝爾生理學或醫學獎。
赫胥黎在1955年獲選成為皇家學會會員，並在1974年獲得騎士勳銜。此外，他也是赫胥黎家族的成員之一，父親是小說家里歐納德·赫胥黎（Leonard Huxley），祖父是19世紀的著名生物學家托馬斯·亨利·赫胥黎。
赫胥黎在2012年5月30日於劍橋郡艾登布魯克斯醫院逝世，終年94歲。[2]
參考來源
- ^ GRO Register of Births: MAR 1918 1a 724 HAMPSTEAD - Andrew F. Huxley, mmn - Bruce
- ^ Elliott, Chris, "Nobel laureate Sir Andrew Huxley Dies", cambridge-news.co.uk, 3 June 2012.
Andrew Huxley
Sir Andrew Huxley, neurophysiologist, died on May 30th, aged 94
Jun 16th 2012 | from the print edition
The link between electricity and life had been known for over a century when he became interested in it. The power of electricity to create a simulacrum of life in dead bodies, by causing their muscles to twitch, was a fairground trick. But the details were not clear. The young Andrew came into the problem through mechanics; a handy boy, with a well-loved Meccano set and a metal-turning lathe on which he made his own apparatus long into adulthood, he found that the only sort of life science that drew him was physiology, or how bodies worked.
In 1935 the shy young Huxley met Alan Hodgkin, a fellow student at Trinity College, Cambridge. The two were both interested in investigating nerves. They began with dead frogs, whose sciatic nerves had been stimulated to make their legs twitch by no less a scientist than Luigi Galvani, the first to look into the matter, in 1771.
Individual frog-nerve cells, though, are hard to get at and manipulate. Instead, in 1939 the two researchers exiled themselves to Plymouth, where the Marine Biological Association has a laboratory, and turned to the nerve cells of squid—a species that has what are known as giant axons.
The axon is the long protuberance from a nerve cell that connects it to the next cell in the circuit. The nerves that activate a squid’s jet-propelled escape mechanism have particularly big axons, allowing signals to travel at great speed. That also makes it easy to attach electrodes to various points along an axon, to track those signals.
This the two biologists did—the finest optical and microscopical work being left to Sir Andrew, who had a particular fondness for microscopes. Somewhat to his surprise, and much to his pleasure, as he put it later in his understated way, it all went more smoothly than he expected. And to cut a long story short, after regrouping once they had done their service during the second world war (Sir Andrew venturing into both gunnery and marriage) they were able to work out what was going on.
Their main finding was that a nerve impulse, now known as an action potential, is caused by the movement in opposite directions across the axon’s surface membrane of sodium and potassium ions. The ions inside the axon are held out of equilibrium with those outside it (there are too many potassium ions within, and too few sodium). As the action potential passes, special proteinaceous gates open in the cell’s membrane. The first of these to do so let sodium ions in. Once that has happened, a second set let potassium ions out. Then, when the action potential has passed, the ions are laboriously pumped back to where they once were, so that the cell is primed to respond again. But nothing actually travels the axon’s length except a wave of electrical potential.
Lights. Camera. Action potential
The seminal paper on the matter hit the presses in 1952. Messrs Hodgkin and Huxley thus beat that other famous biological double-act, Watson and Crick, by a year. That their paper is less well known now reflects that pair’s flair for publicity, as much as the relative importance of the work. Sir Andrew, in fact, often showed his strong opinions in wry smiles rather than words.
Honours nevertheless followed, as night follows day. A Nobel prize, shared with Hodgkin (and also with John Eccles, an Australian scientist) came in 1963, the year after Watson’s and Crick’s. The knighthood was somewhat delayed, until 1974. The British establishment, then as now, was dominated by arts men and could be a bit dense about the value of scientific advance.
The Order of Merit—the true prize of the British honours system, because it is limited to 24 living members and is in the personal gift of the monarch—came in 1983. Sir Andrew also followed his grandfather, Thomas Henry, as president of Britain’s main scientific academy, the Royal Society. The Huxleys are thus the only family to have provided two holders of that post. And he became master of Trinity, an institution regarded, at least by those who have attended it, as the pinnacle of British academic life. That was a post he hugely enjoyed. He did not even mind the master’s duty of officiating in chapel, since he was, he explained, not atheist but agnostic (a word usefully invented by his grandfather), and was “very conscious that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that we are conscious.”
He also liked to joke that his college had produced more Nobel prize-winners than France. That is a good story, but not actually true. Whether it will ever be true of the Huxleys remains to be seen.
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