British biologist. Its work in comparative anatomy, paleontology and on the evolution of the species exerted a great influence on biology at the end of the XIXe century.
Surgeon as a second on the Rattlesnake frigate in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific (1845-1849), it made profitable this voyage to devote himself to many observations on the sea life, whose publication, on its return to London, was worth a great scientific notoriety to him.
In 1851, he was elected member of Royal Society and he entered as of the following year to the council of this institution; he was thus, as of the 26 years age, recognized like an eminent member of the British scientific community. Professor at the School of the mines, Member of the national geological Commission, his studies on skull of vertebrate contributed to introduce the deductive method into the comparative studies.
He became acquainted with Darwin in 1851, and tied with him friendly relations which were never contradicted. Initially in favor of a sight creationist of the species, Huxley was convinced by the arguments of Darwin in favor of the evolution and consequently became one of the most active defenders and popularizers of the theory of the transformism.
Liking the controversy and frightening debattor, it engaged in innumerable polemics with the anti-evolutionists. Its adversaries counted in their rows of the influential personalities, such as the duke of Argyll, William Gladstone and the Richard Owen anatomist, but it is with the representatives of the Church of England, within which recruited the sourest contradictors of the Darwinian theory, that Huxley had his controversies more the sharp; those culminated in a public debate remained famous, organized in Oxford by British Association with the bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1860), on the questions of the evolution and the origin of the man. Itself agnostic (word that it created during this polemic), Huxley continued this controversy by the publication of Obviousness ace to Man' S Place in Nature (the Place of the man in nature, 1863), work in which it develops the thesis that the anthropoid monkeys are close relatives of the man.
Being interested in pedagogy (he was in particular member of the council for the State education and directing of the famous college of Eton), author of many works as well scientific as of popularization, he worked for the development of female teaching and the equal rights of the American Blacks.