Family matters

The Huxleys is a biography of two of the more prominent members of a pedigree that is famously riddled with high achievers.Specifically, Alison Bashford's book focuses on Thomas Henry Huxley (TH), arguably the originator -both genealogically and chronologically -of Huxley greatness, and one of his grandsons, Julian Sorrel Huxley (JS).Through their lives, we are promised, in the words of the book's subtitle, "An intimate history of evolution."I suspect that the subtitle was conferred by an editor rather than by Bashford herself: it's useful but misleading.It's useful because it distinguishes this book from The Huxleys by Ronald Clark (1968), which is decidedly more catholic in its embrace of the family, giving Aldous, for example, as much airplay as his brother JS, and because it forewarns us of the emphasis on evolutionary ideas.However, it's misleading: in my opinion, neither TH nor JS was central in the development of evolutionary thinking.They had important -in both cases, primarily polemical --roles to play, and they jointly spanned the history of the field (TH lived 1825(TH lived -1895;; JS, 1887 JS, -1975) ) but neither was responsible for the key advances that drove the field from its murky pre-Darwinian phase to its (relatively) unified and coherent late 20 th century guise.They were participants in, and observers of, the history of evolution without themselves being driving forces.Arguably, in fact, they contributed more in areas other than evolution, meaning that, in some ways, the evolution focus is a sideshow, a distraction from what they achieved.Despite her subtitle, Bashford has accordingly elected (sensibly, in my view) to de-emphasize some of the biological detail that readers of Evolution might expect to see.JS, for example, coined the term "cline" and is renowned for his foundational work on allometry, but neither word, "cline" or "allometry," appears even once in the book.Of the two, TH is probably more familiar to readers of Evolution than JS, despite the generational divide (there are, I suspect, current readers of Evolution who knew JS personally).TH is famous as Darwin's "bulldog," the self-appointed defender of evolutionary thinking against naysayers while, post-Origin, Charles Darwin remained quietly reclusive and controversy-averse at Down House.Curiously, TH's first clear reference to this role, in a letter to Darwin written the day before The Origin was published in November 1859, casts the enemy, not the defender, in canine terms: "And as to the curs which will bark and yelp, you must recollect that some of your friends, at any rate, are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often and justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead.I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness" (Darwin, 1887.Vol.2: 232) The role reversal -with Huxley doing the barking and yelping (and biting) -came later.The US paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn recalled after TH died that, in conversation some 15 years earlier, TH had referred to himself as "Darwin's bull-dog" (Osborn, 1895) TH's most storied act of bulldoggery is surely his famous put down of Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of