Huxley: From Devil's Disciple To Evolution's High Priest

Thomas Henry Huxley incarne un moment particulièrement important de l'histoire de la biologie et de l'histoire des sciences. Il participe aux débats sur l'évolution en devenant le plus acerbe des défenseurs de Darwin et il s'affirme comme le promoteur acharné de l'enseignement moderne et professionnel de la science. A ces combats, que Desmond analyse avec rigueur, s'ajoute la personnalité attachante d'un bourreau de travail, d'un intellectuel à l'ironie mordante. Les sources et le contexte scientifiques sont utilisés avec une grande rigueur. Mais ce livre a (pour moi) un grave défaut : le style ampoulé (ou flamboyant selon les goûts) de l'auteur. IL a fini par gâcher la lecture d'une biographie sinon très attachante.

This very thorough biography not only describes the often astonishing twists and turns to our developing understandings of evolution in the years after the publication of Origin of Species (even Huxley, an ingenius and dogged scientist himself--and "Darwin's bulldog"-- didn't seem to really quite "get" some fundamental implications of natural selection. Also fascinating is the history this book gives us of the invention of "scientist" as an honorable paid profession in Britain in the late 19th century. According to the book, Thomas Huxley stood at the center of that crusade (so to speak) to make science an essential part of education and our working lives. Even after reading numerous books about Darwin and related folk, I come away from this biography with a much, much deeper sense of the complexity and slow and often quirky progress with which science has advanced.

While this is an extremely thorough and complete review of Huxley's life and work, I found several problems with the book. In brief, these include: A Hemingwayesque type of writing (short declaratory sentences) without H's style to pull it off. An overuse of adjectives by about a factor of three. Many sentences that, in spite of being short, were hard to disentangle grammatically. My most serious criticism of the content, though, is that the author stuck much too closely to a time-line rather than an idea or subject line. For example, he makes the statement, in several places, that finally Huxley saw the light and fully bought into evolution and natural selection as presented by Darwin. But he never seems to explain this: why the hesitancy and why the "sudden" conversion. There is too much mixing up of private life with scientific ideas. And no real counter is given to Huxley's antipathy to Owen whose work seems to be at least as long-lived as Huxley's (dinosaurs?). For my taste, a much more satisfying way of writing scientific biography can be found by reading Janet Browne's first vol. of a bio. of Darwin ("Coasting").

Considering that this book is unavailable as a Kindle book which I would have preferred and considering that the author is Adrian Desmond who co-authored the authoritative biography of C. Darwin I think finding this used book a real bargain. I have read Desmond and Moore's biography of Darwin and was very impressed with the level of scholarship and so far what I have read of the TH Huxley biography I can see the same level of in depth research.