Julian Huxley

Julian Sorell Huxley (June 22, 1887 to February 14, 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, science popularizer, and eugenicist who coined the modern usage of "transhumanism" in 1957. He was the grandson of the Darwinian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the elder brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley. He was an architect of the "modern synthesis" of Darwinian selection and Mendelian genetics, the first Director-General of UNESCO from 1946 to 1948, a cofounder of the World Wildlife Fund in 1961, and president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962. He was knighted in 1958.¹²

The Modern Synthesis and Evolutionary Humanism

Huxley's standing as a biologist rested on Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), which named and consolidated the mid-twentieth-century reconciliation of Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian and population genetics. The book gathered the work of theorists such as R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright into a unified account in which selection acting on Mendelian variation drives evolution, and the phrase "modern synthesis" entered biology as its standard name. Huxley was also a prolific popularizer who reached mass audiences through radio, the Brains Trust broadcasts, and books, and who directed the London Zoo as secretary of the Zoological Society of London.¹³

From evolution Huxley derived a secular creed he called "evolutionary humanism," the view that humanity, having become through evolution the agent of its own further development, bears responsibility for consciously directing the future course of life on earth. He set this out across decades in works including Religion Without Revelation (1927) and Essays of a Humanist (1964), and served as the first president of the British Humanist Association. Evolutionary humanism placed the improvement of the human genetic and cultural inheritance at the center of human purpose, and it carried his lifelong commitment to eugenics inside an optimistic, progressive frame.¹⁴

UNESCO and Its Eugenic Charter

Appointed the first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1946, Huxley wrote a sixty-page founding statement, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy (1946), that set out the philosophical basis for the new agency as he understood it. The document grounded UNESCO's mission in evolutionary humanism and argued that the agency should foster a single emerging world culture and advance the scientific study and improvement of human populations. Member states never adopted Huxley's text as official policy, and his term was cut to two years, but the statement stands as his programmatic vision for the body.²⁵

The document tied the agency explicitly to eugenics. Huxley wrote that "even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable." He framed the task as one of moving eugenics from the impossible to the thinkable, charging UNESCO with preparing public opinion for measures that the recent association of eugenics with Nazi policy had made unspeakable.²⁵

The Eugenics Society and Race

Huxley's involvement with the British Eugenics Society spanned his career: he served as a vice-president in the 1930s and 1940s and as president from 1959 to 1962. He delivered the society's Galton Lecture in 1936 under the title "Eugenics and Society," and he advocated a "reform eugenics" that emphasized voluntary measures, birth control, and the genetic effects of class and environment over the cruder race-typology of the older movement. He nonetheless retained the foundational premise that the genetic quality of human populations could and should be deliberately managed, and he warned of the dysgenic effects of differential birth rates between social classes.⁴⁶

Huxley's record on race was mixed by the standards of his contemporaries. He coauthored We Europeans (1935) with the anthropologist A. C. Haddon, a book that attacked the pseudoscientific race doctrines of Nazi Germany and argued that the term "race" be replaced with "ethnic group," and he lent his name to the UNESCO Statement on Race tradition. He continued at the same time to hold that human groups differ in average innate mental capacity and that selective reproduction was a legitimate aim, positions that kept him within the hereditarian tradition founded by Francis Galton.⁴⁶

Coining Transhumanism

Huxley introduced the modern usage of "transhumanism" in the title essay of his collection New Bottles for New Wine (1957). He wrote that "the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself, not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity," and proposed: "We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature." He added, "I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man."⁷⁸

For Huxley transhumanism was the practical expression of evolutionary humanism, the program by which a self-aware humanity would take charge of its own biological and psychological evolution through science. Nick Bostrom's history of the movement credits Huxley with the term's modern coinage, and the critics Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru place him, alongside Galton, among the eugenic progenitors of the TESCREAL bundle of transhumanism, extropianism, effective altruism, and the related ideologies that now animate the artificial-intelligence industry.⁷⁹