[2] In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, Compton, the school his mother had founded and run.

[2] In 1919, Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell.

[citation needed] His ashes are buried with his wife, son Anthony, parents and brother at the Huxley family grave in Watts Cemetery, Compton.

[8] At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier.

In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers).

His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.)

Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute.

Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft, "It will not be long before those planes are flying over England."

These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.

He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine.

Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts.

Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude.

In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy.

"[34] In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology.

[1][42]Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis.

[53][54] Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J.

The authorities cited 20 or more times are: Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.

The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.

[64]Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins[65] and Bernhard Rensch,[66] and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as "advanced" and another as 'primitive'.

[68] Huxley's humanism[69] came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics.

His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics.

He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which... largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change.

[citation needed] In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted: If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:...

Huxley advocated ensuring the lower classes have a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation: We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable.

[86]Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "...unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay ..."[87] and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.

[89] Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years.

In 1951, Huxley popularized the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.

[92] These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life.

Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned.

[96] In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets.