Editing Modern synthesis (20th century) (section)

===Huxley's popularising synthesis, 1942===

{{main|Evolution: The Modern Synthesis}}

[[File:Julian Huxley 1964.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Julian Huxley]] presented a serious but popularising version of the theory in his 1942 book ''[[Evolution: The Modern Synthesis]]''.]]

In 1942, [[Julian Huxley]]'s serious but popularising<ref name=Ruse/><ref name=Lamm>{{cite web |last1=Lamm |first1=Ehud |title=Review of Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis – The Definitive Edition, with a new foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller |publisher=[[MIT Press]] |url=http://www.ehudlamm.com/huxley.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111224104526/http://www.ehudlamm.com/huxley.pdf |archive-date=2011-12-24 |url-status=live |access-date=21 August 2017}}</ref> book ''[[Evolution: The Modern Synthesis]]''{{sfn|Huxley|2010}} introduced a name for the synthesis and intentionally set out to promote a "synthetic point of view" on the evolutionary process. He imagined a wide synthesis of many sciences: genetics, developmental physiology, ecology, systematics, palaeontology, cytology, and mathematical analysis of biology, and assumed that evolution would proceed differently in different groups of organisms according to how their genetic material was organised and their strategies for reproduction, leading to progressive but varying evolutionary trends.<ref name=Lamm/> His vision was of an "evolutionary humanism",<ref name=Smocovitis138/> with a system of ethics and a meaningful place for "Man" in the world grounded in a unified theory of evolution which would demonstrate progress leading to humanity at its summit. Natural selection was in his view a "fact of nature capable of verification by observation and experiment", while the "period of synthesis" of the 1920s and 1930s had formed a "more unified science",<ref name=Smocovitis138/> rivalling physics and enabling the "rebirth of Darwinism".<ref name=Smocovitis138>{{harvnb|Smocovitis|1996|pp=138–153}}</ref>

However, the book was not the research text that it appeared to be. In the view of the philosopher of science [[Michael Ruse]], and in Huxley's own opinion, Huxley was "a generalist, a synthesizer of ideas, rather than a specialist".<ref name=Ruse>{{harvnb|Ruse|1996|pp=328–338}}</ref> Ruse observes that Huxley wrote as if he were adding empirical evidence to the mathematical framework established by Fisher and the population geneticists, but that this was not so. Huxley avoided mathematics, for instance not even mentioning [[Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection]]. Instead, Huxley used a mass of examples to demonstrate that natural selection is powerful and that it works on Mendelian genes. The book was successful in its goal of persuading readers of the reality of evolution, effectively illustrating topics such as [[island biogeography]], [[speciation]], and competition. Huxley further showed that the appearance of long-term [[orthogenesis|orthogenetic trends]] – predictable directions for evolution – in the fossil record were readily explained as [[allometry|allometric growth]] (since parts are interconnected). All the same, Huxley did not reject orthogenesis out of hand, but maintained a belief in progress all his life, with ''[[Homo sapiens]]'' as the endpoint, and he had since 1912 been influenced by the [[vitalism|vitalist]] philosopher [[Henri Bergson]], though in public he maintained an atheistic position on evolution.<ref name=Ruse/> Huxley's belief in progress within evolution and evolutionary humanism was shared in various forms by Dobzhansky, Mayr, Simpson and Stebbins, all of them writing about "the future of Mankind". Both Huxley and Dobzhansky admired the palaeontologist priest [[Pierre Teilhard de Chardin]], Huxley writing the introduction to Teilhard's 1955 book on orthogenesis, ''[[The Phenomenon of Man]]''. This vision required evolution to be seen as the central and guiding principle of biology.<ref name=Smocovitis138/>