Known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his impassioned defense of evolutionary theory, Thomas Huxley published this, his most famous book, just a few years after Darwin's The Origin of the Species. Unlike Origin, this book focuses on human ancestry and offers a concise, nontechnical survey of the state of mid-nineteenth-century knowledge about primate and human paleontology and ethology.Man's Place in Nature concurs with Darwin's assertion of the absence of a physiologic and psychic structural line of demarcation between humans and apes. Huxley ventures further than Darwin, however, by making the first attempt to apply the principles of evolution directly to the human race (an issue that Darwin skirted). Despite Huxley's acknowledgements of the wide gulf represented by the human capacity for rational speech and language, some Victorian readers were scandalized by the application of Darwinian theory to humans and by Huxley's evidence of the fundamental similarities between the human brain and the ape brain.A landmark of scientific progress, this immensely readable book reflects the stylistic gifts that made its author a popular public speaker.

Man's Place in Nature (Dover Books on Biology)

Science & Math

thomas-h-huxley

Biological Sciences

Dover Publications

Barnes and Noble Edition with introduction by Selman Halabi. Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863) has been considered the most important of Thomas H. Huxley's Darwinian writings. Despite warnings from friends that publishing an argument in support of evolution could ruin his career, it in fact did the opposite. This book did much to facilitate the general acceptance of Darwinism in Huxley's day. Huxley demonstrates that humans are a part of the natural order of things and not radically separate from other animals. Anyone interested in the history of the Darwinian revolution or in early anthropology can benefit by reading this book.

Evidence As to Man's Place in Nature Thomas H. Huxley with Special Introduction By Selman Halabi (Barnes and Noble Library of Essential Reading)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Barnes_and_Noble

These two essays by the famous 19th-century champion of Darwin's theory of evolution tackle a subject that is still a major focus of ethical debates today: the relation of science as a whole, and specifically evolutionary ideas, to ethics and morality. Written toward the end of Huxley's career when he was already famous as a persuasive lecturer and a fascinating expositor of new ideas, these essays demonstrate his rhetorical gifts and talent for explaining the importance of science to a lay audience."Evolution and Ethics," his last major talk delivered at Oxford in 1893, was written in response to the then fashionable "Social Darwinism" popularized by philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer and his followers had been labeling the poor, criminals, and other social undesirables as "unfit" and suggesting that society deal with them as harshly as nature deals with the physically unfit. Huxley found this approach both morally repugnant and a serious misapplication of Darwinian theory to the subject of ethics. Society progresses, Huxley maintained, through individuals who prove themselves to be ethically the best, not physically the most fit. Ethics is designed to curb our antisocial animal instincts and therefore must be detached from natural competition.In "Science and Morals," written some years earlier (1886), Huxley addresses three criticisms: namely, that he and his associates refuse to take seriously anything that (1) cannot be verified by the senses, that (2) is beyond the bounds of physical science, and that (3) cannot be subjected to laboratory experimentation and chemical analysis. To all of these criticisms Huxley replies that he takes very seriously a host of mental phenomena that do not, strictly speaking, fall within these narrow physical limits: the universal law of causation, or the esthetic pleasure of the arts, or the truths of mathematics, for example. He goes on to say that he repudiates the doctrine of Materialism as much as he does that of Spiritualism, and that he coined the term "Agnostic" to apply to his own particular philosophical viewpoint. He concludes with comments on the existence of God and free will, suggesting that science does not necessarily rule out either postulate.Students of ethics, the history of science, and the ongoing debates over evolution will welcome this new edition of two masterful essays by "Darwin's Bulldog."

Evolution and Ethics and Science and Morals

Prometheus

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