"Now we take a look at what Science Magazine said about the book on 1 December 2022. It isn’t pretty.
First, the opening remark by reviewer Piers J. Hale:
What is our evolutionary inheritance? What has our natural history made us, and how does this affect how we might live? Further, given our understanding of the mechanisms of inheritance, can we and should we direct our own evolution to ensure the betterment of humankind, both in body and in mind? Questions such as these are the intellectual offspring of the evolutionary view of life
that Charles Darwin described in 1859. They also motivated the Huxleys,
one of science’s most famed families and the subject of Alison
Bashford’s new book, The Huxleys.
Jesus taught his disciples that the fruit reveals the philosophy.
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s
clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by
their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from
thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree
bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a
diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit
is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by
their fruits.” (Matthew 7:15-19)
Out Comes the Bitter Fruit
Apparently Thomas Huxley tried to hold back his animal urges during the end
of the Victorian era to not besmirch the reputation of Darwin. It was
important that the materialist philosophy appear pleasingly proper to
the intelligentsia of British society.
For the Huxleys, biology was always political, but it was
also full of contradictions. Thomas' hierarchical conceptions of
race and sex were still liberal enough and typical enough of his time
that he could oppose the more extreme racism of many of
his contemporaries in British anthropology and advance sex-segregated
science education for women seemingly without internal conflict….
Despite how Thomas embraced and advanced Darwin’s views on morality—which shocked critics by discarding the notion of divinely ordained principles of right and wrong—he strove to place himself and his family beyond reproach, adhering to the most conventional moral standards of his day. His son Leonard’s children, however, broke rather than pushed societal boundaries.
Julian Huxley, Darwin’s grandson, let loose with his animal
instincts, repudiating his grandfather’s outdated prurience. And Aldous
Huxley, known for his dystopian novel Brave New World depicting a drug-ridden, morality-free tyranny, did his part to tear down “divinely ordained principles of right and wrong.”
Julian and his wife experimented with an open relationship;
he had a stream of lovers, at least one of whom she shared, and wrote popular articles on birth control, sex, and the future of humanity for Playboy. Aldous, for his part, married “a Belgian bisexual beauty,” experimented with LSD, and sought to test the nature and limits of the mind. He wrote Brave New World
in 1932 as Europe tumbled toward authoritarianism, an inclination he
recognized in the enthusiasm his brother Julian shared with H. G. Wells
for technocratic state solutions to society’s problems.
Bad Fruit Causes Sickness
So did these lifestyles based on Darwinian principles help the
Huxleys experience “the betterment of humankind, both in body and in
mind?”
Along with his surname, many of the Huxleys inherited the family patriarch’s tendency toward deep depression. Thomas Huxley wrestled with this darkness for years,
and it almost overthrew him on more than one occasion: once at the loss
of his firstborn, Noel, who succumbed to scarlet fever at 4 years old,
and again at the death of his daughter Mady, who, struggling with her own mental demons, died suddenly of pneumonia at the age of 27.
Julian, we learn, was in and out of institutions just as his career was taking off. Unable to function,
he was forbidden by his doctors even to write, just as he was supposed
to be taking up a professorship at Rice University. Noel Trevenen,
Julian’s younger brother, was similarly troubled. Missing for days on
the eve of the Great War, he was later found hanging from a tree in a
secluded forest.
It’s noteworthy that reviewer Piers J. Hale says almost nothing
positive about any of the Huxleys in his recounting of Bashford’s
descriptions of shocking ill effects of Darwinian philosophy. One might
think he would be alarmed enough to flee to Christianity to find healthy
fruit and avoid a similar fate. But no; the universal acid in
Darwin/Huxley fruit eats through all traditional beliefs, as apostate
Christian-turned-Darwinist Daniel Dennett has said. Hale ends,
Readers follow the Huxleys as they contemplate nonhuman animals, primates, man, and mind in their intergenerational quest to understand the implications of evolution on what it means, or might mean, to be human.
That leaves a little room for readers of this review to ponder the
implications of tasting of the forbidden fruit that tempts, “Ye shall be
as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5).
Q: Is it any wonder why as evolutionary indoctrination rises in schools and culture, so does sexual perversion?" CEH
