Julian Huxley gave grebe courtship names like penguin dance and plesiosaurus race
Before he became UNESCO's first director, Julian Huxley spent seasons watching water birds court. His 1914 study of the great crested grebe, with rituals nicknamed the penguin dance and the plesiosaurus race, became a landmark in the science of animal behaviour and made the subject vivid for ordinary readers.
Science ran in the family. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's fierce champion and the man who coined the word agnosticism, and his brother was the novelist Aldous. As a small boy Julian interrupted a dinner-table remark about fish neglecting their young with a question about the stickleback. He went to Eton as a King's Scholar, where a science master nicknamed Piggy Hill encouraged his birdwatching, then won a zoology scholarship to Balliol, graduating with first-class honours in 1909.
His career zigzagged. In 1912 he agreed to found the biology department at the new Rice Institute in Houston, recruiting the geneticist H. J. Muller from T. H. Morgan's famous fly laboratory. On Avery Island in Louisiana, where the McIlhenny family made Tabasco sauce and kept a bird sanctuary, he studied egrets and herons that court as mutually as grebes. After war service in army intelligence he returned to Oxford, joined a 1921 expedition to Spitsbergen, and in 1927 astonished colleagues by resigning his London professorship to write The Science of Life with H. G. Wells, who had extracted a promise of 1,000 words a day.
Public life followed. On a 1929 trip advising on education in British East Africa he noticed that tsetse flies had kept people off the Serengeti, leaving its wildlife almost untouched, and he later championed national parks. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London from 1935 to 1942, first director of UNESCO, a founder of the World Wildlife Fund and first president of the British Humanist Association. He also led the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962, a role that sits uneasily with his reputation today.
He was a gifted populariser, directing an Oscar-winning wildlife film and winning UNESCO's Kalinga Prize in 1953. Knighted in 1958, a century after Darwin and Wallace announced natural selection, he was a leading figure in the modern synthesis. He wrote openly about his own manic depression, and he died on 14 February 1975.
Source: Julian Huxley
