# Julian Huxley

*1887–1975*

**Julian Sorell Huxley (1887–1975)** was a British biologist, philosopher, and humanist who coined the word “transhumanism” and gave the movement its first systematic articulation—making him, by any measure, one of the intellectual founders of the tradition the Mormon Transhumanist Association inhabits.

Huxley came from one of Britain’s most distinguished intellectual families—grandson of T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s great defender, and brother of novelist Aldous Huxley—and built a career of remarkable scope. He was the first Director-General of UNESCO (1946–1948), a founding figure of the World Wildlife Fund, a prolific science communicator, and a pioneer of the Modern Synthesis that unified Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics. His scientific work spanned experimental embryology, ethology, and evolutionary biology, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1938.

But Huxley’s most consequential contribution may be conceptual. In his 1957 essay “Transhumanism,” he argued that the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not merely through occasional individuals but as a whole, through the deliberate application of knowledge, technology, and moral aspiration. He called this “transhumanism” and framed it as the next stage of evolutionary self-understanding: humanity taking conscious responsibility for its own development. His vision was secular in idiom but unmistakably teleological in structure—a species discovering its vocation to become more than it currently is.

That teleological structure resonates naturally with Mormon theology’s insistence on eternal progression and theosis. Where Huxley grounded his vision in evolutionary biology and humanist ethics, Mormon Transhumanism adds theological depth: the process Huxley described is, in that reading, participation in the divine creative work that Joseph Smith called the purpose of existence. Huxley did not share that theological frame, but he shared the moral conviction underneath it—that intelligence, creativity, and compassion are not incidental features of the universe but its most important products, and that developing them further is our most serious obligation.

## Quotations

- The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself…