“Man’s Place in Nature and T.H. Huxley’s Basis for Biology”
In this paper I will explore Thomas Huxley’s ideas of “biology”: what is it? What ground does it cover? In what sense Huxley’s ideas of humans’ place in nature was pivotal for his conception of life and of the science that investigates it? The problem relative to man’s place in nature operated as a common thread among several notions and theories formulated and debated in Victorian England. That was precisely the subject of Evidence as Man’s Place in Nature (1863), a book by Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) that became highly influential from the 1860s onwards. I will present the main conceptions underlying Huxley’s delimitation of biology as a field of inquiry, presenting an overlapping of ideas relative to zoological classification formulated at that period and appropriate comparison criteria required for accurate grading of living beings