Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth-century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959–1962), and the first president of the British Humanist Association. Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in the 1958 New Year Honours, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1956 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt, Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a biologist, forceful supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution. Huxley's father was writer and editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother opened a school in Compton, Guildford in 1902 and died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley. In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, Compton, the school his mother had founded and run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there. In 1919, Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well. Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life. Sir Julian and Lady Juliette Huxley had two sons: Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists. His ashes are buried with his wife, son Anthony, parents and brother at the Huxley family grave in Watts Cemetery, Compton.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Shackleford, Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa, having studied with the Oxford experimental embryologist J.W. Jenkinson. From Jenkinson, alongside the biologist Geoffrey Smith, themselves inspired by the English biologist W.F.R. Weldon, Huxley gained an 'epigenetic' understanding of the development of animal characters, which reverberated afterwards in his work. He also developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first-class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge. Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
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