Viewpoint: Revisiting first UNESCO director Julian Huxley’s embrace of eugenics

Julian Sorell Huxley was born in London in 1887, the eldest son of Julia Arnold, an educator, and Leonard Huxley, … the son of Thomas Henry Huxley, a famed zoologist who had been dubbed ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ and ‘Evolution’s High Priest’ …

It is hard to say when he was first drawn to eugenics. He was likely inspired by his Oxford tutor Geoffrey Smith, a zoologist who also wrote on the idea of improving humanity, and influenced by his friend Alexander Carr-Saunders, a eugenicist who had written books on Malthusian topics and on eugenics. It is also likely that during Huxley’s time at Oxford he may have absorbed the well-established idea of the ‘Oxford man’ – a supposedly highly educated and genetically endowed person.

Harmony was a key concept for Huxley. … Huxley argued that science could create greater harmony in society by giving humanity a common vision of the future, based on our shared evolutionary past. He called this endeavour to use science for human progress ‘scientific humanism’. This would become central to his project of eugenics at UNESCO.

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[F]or Huxley, eugenics was always future-oriented. After his talk to the Eugenics Society in 1936, one review in the journal Nature claimed that his views on eugenics were ‘destined to become part of the religion of the future, or of whatever complex of sentiments which may then take the place of organised religion.’

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