Word: huxleyism
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Many scientists' prophecies about man's future are dark and gloomy. Man is doomed, say the crepehangers, to overpopulate his planet and hang on, half-starved until something worse happens. British Biologist Julian Huxley is more hopeful. In his new book, Evolution in Action (Harper; $2.75) Huxley says that man is "not just an animal"; he is something new in evolution, and he has a boundless future...
...Huxley tells how a particularly successful new species "deploys" over the earth, splitting into specialized branches. The reptiles deployed; then the mammals took over and deployed even more variously...
Ages ago, says Huxley "most of the possibilities available to living substance had been exhausted ... The efficiency of nervous conduction, of sense organs, or digestive systems, of mechanical construction, had all reached limits of one sort or another. Only one feature remained capable of improvement-brain organization and behavior. Only a greater flexibility of behavior and a higher organization of awareness enabled living substance to become capable of conceptual thought and symbolic language; and these ... are the two distinguishing marks of man, and the basis of the latest deployment of life...
Common Pool. Huxley moves from man's tree-borne forefathers, acquiring intellect, to full-fledged men, who began to teach each other what was learned by experience. This ability proved to be the evolutionary jackpot...
...something new was to mix in Tory politics (at which he still worked closely with Woolton). He became public-relations director for the Ministry of Works, and later boss of Britain's veterans' resettlement program. He started his own firm of business consultants and, with Julian Huxley and C.E.M. Joad, was on the panel of BBC's famed Brains Trust program...