In the 18th century, European scholars began to envision a more enlightened world in harmony with nature. The old aristocratic regime, some hoped, would soon be replaced by a progressive society in which moral and social values were aligned with the natural and mechanical sciences. Aligning with nature, however, was not always a straightforward or positive process. An enlightened world could not be one in which human populations were allowed to expand indefinitely. Resources would quickly become depleted by growing demand, slowing progress and sending humanity backward. That is why, at the end of the century, the British economist Thomas Malthus proposed that the growth of human populations needed to be kept in check. Like other species that were held in equilibrium with their environment, we should also find a balance between the supply of available resources and their demand. Malthus believed that out-of-control human populations could be reduced by various means, including war, famine, disease and even moral abstinence. If we ever wanted humanity to advance, we needed hard limits.

Malthus’s ideas emerged at a time when Britain was being socially reconfigured. Rapid industrialisation and the expanding economy were followed by a population boom in which growing cities became overcrowded and dirty, leading to deteriorating living conditions. Poverty was on the rise, and social unrest grew as riots, strikes and protests spread across Britain. In 1843, Thomas Carlyle described England as ‘dying of inanition’ – a word that suggested the country was, despite its material abundance, starving to death from a lack of nourishment. The fabric of society seemed to be unravelling, the long-awaited enlightened world became a faraway dream.

A solution came from a naturalist inspired by Malthus’s vision. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection echoed the same idea: living organisms could not multiply infinitely, while resources were finite. Too few resources increased the pressure for survival, leaving only the ‘fittest’ to survive. But in the process of understanding ourselves as survivors, we lost our special status as divine creations. In 1867, the poet Matthew Arnold felt this loss when he described the spiritual emptiness created by evolution in terms of a retreating ocean heard only as a ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’. For Arnold, the fact that humans were part of an aimless natural process was a source of anguish. For others who were inspired by Darwin and Malthus, the problem was exactly the opposite: human societies had become unlike processes of the natural world. Medicine, social reform, benevolent people and institutions had relaxed the struggle for existence. The less fit no longer had to strive for their survival, which meant evolution had slowed. Even worse: society and nature seemed to collapse under the weight of the growing numbers of the ‘unfit’.

To Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, this scenario was apocalyptic. Galton’s solution: human society had to take evolution into its own hands. In Hereditary Genius (1869), he wrote that social decline could be scientifically altered by applying Darwin’s laws of natural selection. Poverty and other social ills, he claimed, could be alleviated by selectively breeding more ‘endowed’ human beings, and slowing down the multiplication of the less fit. In 1883, Galton called his dream for new human possibilities ‘eugenics’.

Francis Galton by Charles Wellington Furse, 1903. Courtesy the NPG, London

Within several decades, however, Galton’s carefully crafted science of ‘improvement’ had begun to usher in some of humanity’s worst nightmares. In the early 20th century, eugenicists in the United States forcibly sterilised ‘feebleminded’ mentally ill people as well as ‘inferior’ Native American Women. And in Nazi Germany, the racial underpinnings of eugenics would soon lead to the unthinkable: the orchestrated deaths of millions. Recall the words of the German professor of medicine and Nazi party member Eugen Fischer who said in 1939: ‘I reject Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in order to preserve the hereditary endowment of my people.’ For Fischer and other Nazis, ‘every means’ included genocide.

As the horrors of the concentration camps came to light, those who had advocated for utopian human possibilities through eugenics suddenly seemed naive. Galton and others appeared, at best, horribly misguided. Criticism of the Nazis’ racial hygiene project ran high immediately after the Second World War, with many equating eugenics itself with the Holocaust. Not only were the Nazis condemned, but the word ‘eugenics’ was, too. It was, as the American historian Nancy L Stepan wrote in 1991, eventually ‘purged from the vocabulary of science and public debate’.

In response to the devastation of the war, including the catastrophic outcomes of racial science, global efforts were made to establish a new humanitarian vision for Earth’s future. And central to this vision was the founding, in 1945, of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). From the beginning, UNESCO aimed to overcome the ignorance and prejudice that contributed to the Second World War. The agency’s founders sought to promote cosmopolitanism and interculturalism to ameliorate fraying international relations. UNESCO, they hoped, would become a beacon of peace, cooperation and human dignity. The only problem? The man hired to direct the fledgling institution was a eugenicist.

Julian Sorell Huxley was born in London in 1887, the eldest son of Julia Arnold, an educator, and Leonard Huxley, a noted writer. Julia came from a family of authors – she was the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold – while Leonard was the son of Thomas Henry Huxley, a famed zoologist who had been dubbed ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ and ‘Evolution’s High Priest’ for his advocacy of natural selection. Julian and his brother Aldous Huxley, who would later write the novel Brave New World (1932), inherited their family’s love of both the Classics and biology. Their grandfather’s fame, however, did not translate into great wealth for the family. They were, by the day’s standards, middle class, affording a governess-companion to look after their children, but sending those children to university was a real financial challenge. Julia and Leonard were thus anxious that their children should get scholarships. Julian eventually won his way into Eton and Oxford, which instilled in him a view (expressed much later, in 1970), that children should receive financial help to study only if they are gifted. Just as it had been for Malthus and Galton, Huxley’s middle-class sentiments meant that he believed nature and nurture should be balanced.

At Oxford, where he studied between 1906 to 1909, Julian chose to study zoology, but that was by no means a straightforward decision – with his mother’s encouragement, he had seriously considered studying Classics. While at Oxford, the young Huxley was taught by the embryologist J W Jenkinson, who had completed a degree in Classics before taking up zoology. And it was partly Jenkinson who infected Huxley with a passion for broad philosophical questions about life, including how the seemingly immaterial mind could be explained through material biology, and whether life had an aim.........

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