Thomas henry huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley PC, F.R.S. (Ealing, Middlesex, today Greater London, May 4, 1825-Eastbourne, Sussex, June 29, 1895) was a British biologist and philosopher, specializing in comparative anatomy, known as Darwin's Bulldog for his defense of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

His famous debate in 1860 with the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, was a key moment in the broader acceptance of evolution, and for his own career, although some historians are of the opinion that the debate, in the version that has come down to it, to our days, it was a later invention. Wilberforce asked Huxley if he was descended from an ape on his father's or his mother's side. The literal response of this is not collected, which was essentially something like this:

I would prefer to descend from a monkey before a man of great talent who uses his gifts to put obstacles to a scientific discussion.

Huxley had little formal education: he was forced to leave school at the age of 10 due to his family's financial difficulties. However, he was determined to train himself, and he became one of the great autodidacts of his century. He first worked with invertebrates, clarifying the relationships between groups that he previously knew little about. Later, he worked with vertebrates, especially on the relationship between man and apes. Another of his important conclusions was that birds evolved from dinosaurs, mostly small carnivores (Theropoda). This idea is widely supported today.

His extensive public work in science education had a significant effect on British society and around the world. Huxley is considered the inventor of the term 'agnostic' since he used it in 1869 to describe his own vision of religion. He expressed himself like this:.

Agnosticism is not, in fact, a faith, but a method, whose essence is in the rigorous application of a single principle, the fundamental axiom of modern science. In intellectual matters, follow your reason to where it takes you, without any other consideration. In intellectual matters, do not imply that there are certain conclusions that have not been demonstrated or are not demonstrable.

Biography

Huxley was born in Ealing, west London, the seventh of eight children born to George Huxley, an Ealing mathematics teacher. Self-taught, at the age of 17 he began his medical studies at Charing Cross Hospital, where he obtained his degree. At the age of 20 he obtained a medical degree from the University of London, winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology. In 1845 he published his first scientific paper, demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unknown layer of the hair follicle, a layer known as Huxley's layer.

Huxley later applied for a position in the navy. He obtained employment as a surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake, which would begin its survey work in the Torres Strait. The Rattlesnake left England on December 3, 1846, and once it reached the southern hemisphere, Huxley devoted his time to studying marine invertebrates, especially jellyfish. He began sending details of his discoveries to England, and his paper On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of Medusae was printed by the Royal Society in the Philosophical Transactions of 1849.

Thomas Henry Huxley, RN, at age 21

Huxley united, along with jellyfish, polyps to form a class called Hydrozoa. The connection he made is that all of these members of the class consisted of two membranes enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is the characteristic of what are now called cnidarians. He was able to compare these membranes with the mucosal structures of the embryos of higher animals.

The value of Huxley's work was recognized, and on his return to England in 1850 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The following year, at the age of 26, he was not only awarded the Royal Society medal, but he was also elected to the council. He secured his friendship with Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Tyndall, who would remain friends for life.

The Admiralty kept him as assistant surgeon, so he could work on the observations he made during the Rattlesnake's voyage. They thus allowed him to carry out several important essays, especially those on the Ascidiacea, which would solve the problem of the organisms that Johannes Peter Müller discovered but could not catalogue, and of the morphology of the cephalopods.

Huxley resigned from the navy, and in July 1854 began as a lecturer at the School of Mines and a naturalist at the Geological Survey the following year. His most important research of this period was the lecture delivered earlier to the Royal Society in 1858 on The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull. In this he opposed Richard Owen's view that the bones of the skull and spinal cord were homologous, a view previously held by Goethe and Lorenz Oken.

In 1859, The Origin of Species was published. Huxley had earlier rejected Lamarck's theory of transmutation on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to support it. However, he believed that Darwin at least had a good enough hypothesis as a basis, although he believed the evidence was still lacking, and he became one of Darwin's leading supporters in the debate that followed the book's publication.

Huxley lectured at the Royal Institution in February 1860, and spoke in favor of Darwinism at the British Association debate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in June. Huxley joined his friend Hooker, and they opposed the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce and the captain of HMS Beagle, Robert FitzRoy.

In this frontispiece of his Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Huxley first published his famous image comparing the skeleton of apes to humans.

After this Huxley concentrated on the issue of human origins, maintaining that hominids were related to apes. In this he opposed Richard Owen, who indicated that humans were clearly differentiated from other animals by the anatomical structure of their brains. This was indeed inconsistent with the known facts, and was effectively refuted by Huxley in several articles and lectures, summarized in 1863 in Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.

Huxley also clashed with Owen on the ground of homology and archetype theory. Huxley admitted special homologies, interpreting them as due to common descent, but rejected serial homologies (in particular, the vertebral theory of the skull).

The 31 years during which Huxley held the chair of natural history at the School of Mines were spent largely on paleontological research. Numerous trials of fish fossils established many far-reaching morphological facts. The study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstration, in the course of Lectures on Birds, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1867, of the fundamental affinity of the two groups which he united under the name of Sauropsida.

From the 1870s the demands of public duty kept Huxley from scientific inquiry. From 1862 to 1884 he to serve on ten Royal Commissions. From 1871 to 1880 he was secretary of the Royal Society, and from 1881 to 1885 its president. He was made a privy councilor in 1892. In 1870 he was president of the British Association in Liverpool, and in the same year he was elected to the newly created London School Board. In 1888 he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society.

His health took a marked turn for the worse in 1885. In 1890 he moved from London to Eastbourne, where he would die. Huxley was the founder of a prominent family of British academics, including his grandsons Aldous Huxley, Sir Julian Huxley and Sir Andrew Huxley.

Influence on teaching

Huxley had a major influence on the way of teaching in British schools. In primary education he advocated teaching a wide spectrum of disciplines: reading, writing, arithmetic, art, science, music, etc. At higher levels he envisioned that schools should function with two years of basic study followed by two years at a higher level of work focusing on a more specific field of study.

This was a new approach to the general classical studies of English schools. Much of his educational insights are found in his work "On a Piece of Chalk," a profound essay published in 1868 by MacMillan's Magazine in London. The work reconstructs the geological history of Great Britain from a piece of chalk and shows the methods of science as "organized common sense".

Another significant defense of Huxley not seen today was his promotion to teach the Bible in schools. This could be seen as a step backwards from his evolutionary theories, but he believed that the Bible had significant literary and moral teachings that were relevant to English ethics. He attempted to reconcile evolution and ethics in his book Evolution and Ethics , which proposed the principle of "adapting as much as possible to survive."

Work

Caricature by Carlo Pellegrini

• The Oceanic Hydrozoa. London 1859; online
• Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. London 1863; online
  • finished by J. Victor Carus. Zeugnisse für die Stellung des Menschen in der Natur (Certification of man's position in nature). Braunschweig 1863, Gutenberg eText
• On Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature. Six Lectures to Working Men. London 1863; online
• Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy. London 1864; online
• Lessons in Elementary Physiology. London 1866; online
• Aphorisms by Goethe.London, November 4, 1869 (First issue of the scientific journal Nature)
• A Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals. London 1871; online
• A Course of Practical Instruction in Elementary Biology. London 1875 – with H. Newell Martin; online
• Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature. London 1877; online
• A Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals. London 1877; online
• Introductory Science. London 1880; online
• The Crayfish: An Introduction to the Study of Zoology. London 1879; online
• Collected Essays9 v. London 1893-1894
  • V. 1: Method and Results. Full text
  • V. 2: Darwin. Full text
  • V. 3: Science and Education. T. complete
  • V. 4: Science and Hebrew Tradition. T. complete
  • V. 5: Science and Christian Tradition. T. complete
  • V. 6: Hume, with Helps to the Study of Berkeley. T. complete
  • V. 7: Man's Place in Nature. T. complete
  • V. 8: Discourses, Biological and Geological. T. complete
  • V. 9: Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays. T. complete
• Originally published as:
  • Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews. London 1870; online
  • Critiques and Addresses. London 1873; online
  • American Addresses. London 1877; online
  • Science and Culture. London 1882; online
  • Social Diseases and Worse Remedies. London 1891
  • Essays upon Some Controverted Questions. London 1892; online
• Michael Foster (ed.) The Scientific Memoirs of Thomas Henry Huxley5 v. London 1898-1903
• Julian Huxley (ed.) T.H. Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake. London 1935

Abbreviation (zoology)

The abbreviation Huxley is used to denote Thomas Henry Huxley as the authority on description and taxonomy in zoology.

Eponymy

• Moon crater Huxley carries this name in his memory.
• Martian crater Huxley also commemorates his name.