Leave Huxley where he is
Scientists write a letter to Nature:
Once again a group of us—this time a different group—got together not to protest an article in Sci. Am. or Nature, but to make a public statement in Nature about the impending defenestration of a great scientist: Thomas Henry Huxley. As the Guardian and other sites have reported, Imperial College in London is pondering—and almost certainly will execute—the relocation of a statue of Huxley, and is also considering renaming one of its structures, the Huxley Building.
That’s annoying. Huxley was a progressive guy, more so than Darwin.
An investigation into Imperial College London’s historical links to the British empire has recommended the university remove a statue and rename buildings and lecture theatres that celebrate scientists whose work advocated eugenics and racism.
The recommendations by the college’s independent history group are intended to address racial inequalities and improve inclusivity at the Russell Group university.
The report identified a number of problematic renowned scientific figures who have been honoured with buildings, rooms and academic positions in their names.
For example, it calls for a building named after the English biologist and anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley, lauded for determining that birds descended from dinosaurs, to be renamed due to his racist beliefs about human intelligence.
The report says Huxley’s essay Emancipation – Black and White “espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence, a belief system of ‘scientific racism’ that fed the dangerous and false ideology of eugenics; legacies of which are still felt today”.
Jerry Coyne responds:
As you’ll see if you investigate Huxley’s life (and I’ve put some relevant facts below the fold), while he said a few things that might be considered “problematic” today, he was nevertheless far more liberal and abolitionist than nearly all of his peers. His early views on races also changed over his life, becoming more tolerant. More important, he was an ardent advocate of evolution (Darwin was too timorous to defend it in person), and an advocate of women’s rights and of the education of working people. He spent much of his later life actually giving science courses to people from the working class, and trying to enact educational reform. There is nobody who can claim that, on balance, his life caused more harm than good.
In light of the misleading accusations of Huxley’s inherent racism, claims that can rest only on either ignorance or an drive to efface the past to make it palatable to today’s standards, a group of us from the U.S. and the U.K. wrote a short letter to Nature. I’ve put it between the lines below. Nature summarily rejected our letter on the grounds of “we don’t take petitions”, but that’s completely disingenuous. It’s not a petition but a comment or a letter, and I can guess why Nature didn’t touch it. (They are, of course, very woke.) As one of my colleagues said, “Cowardly f*****s—they have loads of self-righteous letters. Calling it a petition is a way of ducking the issue.”
Cowardly fuckers, that is. I don’t know why JC is squeamish about the word – maybe it’s to encourage restraint in his very large group of commenters.
Progressives are getting to be experts at circular firing squads, and this is an example. If we consider all imperfect historical figures to be “problematic,” for whatever reason then we will become a world without statues. I can understand the idea behind removing the statues of confederates, as they were traitors in the first place. I can understand the toppling of statues of Saddam Hussein, Lenin, Stalin, and if there are any, Pinochet. If there were a statue of Custer placed near the Little Big Horn, I could empathize with removal of that.
But if a great scientist and communicator had some faults (and I haven’t read the letter or seen the decision to remove Huxley from Imperial College,) that causes people some level of discomfort, I don’t think that merits removing him from places of honor. He helped “sell” natural selection, which has advanced our understanding of race as differences that are only of degree based on common ancestry. It disproved the idea that there were separate creations of the different races, after all.
People need to pause and think, rather than react emotionally to such imagined harms.
We need to recognize that few come close to perfection.
In the case of people who on the side of the Confederacy in the War of the Slaveholders Treason, I *might* retain a statue of one who did some major positive action which counterbalances his fighting to retain slavery. I’m not aware that any of them did anything anywhere near good enough.
Similarly, Winston Churchill was imperfect, but he was right on the enormously important issue of opposing Nazi Germany which outweighs but should not erase any of his errors.
These days it would be easy to put a QR code linking to something about why s/he is honoured & what s/he got wrong.
Jim Baerg,
Look up General Longstreet. Whether he merits forgiveness for his post-war actions is debatable, but it’s telling that there are no monuments to him in the south.
The underlying motive of erasing even people who were enlightened for their time is to send a message to the less enlightened people of our time: no compromise, no accommodations, no excuses, no generous interpretations or leniency. And this message is ironically being given on behalf of protecting those who are easily hurt or offended by harshness.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
No wonder anxiety levels in the young are going through the roof.
Maroon #3
Thanks for pointing out Longstreet
Sastra #4
Excellent observation. I shall quote you.
In the future, social psychologists are going to have a field day analyzing the psychology behind totalitarian Wokeism.
I have a slightly different take: white men were responsible for most of the historically significant accomplishments for the past few hundred years and rather than admit others have catching up to do let’s just delete their accomplishments so others can feel smug.
Now the reason white men were so predominant was just circumstances and opportunity, not any special merit by virtue of skin colour. Just chance.
LM @ #6: The conscientious ones may have a field day; the less conscientious ones will simply plagiarise Carl Schmitt.