The Humanist Frame

London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1961. First edition, stated.

HUMANISM AND EVOLUTION--SIGNED FIRST EDITION COLLECTION OF ESSAYS BY 20TH CENTURY LUMINARIES ASSEMBLED BY JULIAN HUXLEY.

9 1/2 inches tall hardcover, black cloth binding with publisher's gilt logo to cover, gilt title to spine, decorative endpapers, signed on title page, "Julian Huxley/ Cleveland/ May 10, 1962", 432 pp. Faint water stain bottom edge of endpapers, otherwise very good, no dust jacket, in archival mylar cover.

FROM PREFACE: "This book is an attempt to present Humanism as a comprehensive system of ideas. It is no sudden venture, but the natural outcome of a long process of gestation and development, begun more than half a century ago in an attempt to reconcile or integrate various aspects of my life- my biological training, my twin loves of nature and poetry, my wrestlings with the problems of morality and belief, and continued in the effort to extend the concept of evolution over the widest possible range of phenomena. The gist of the book can be summed up in a few sentences. There have been two critical points in the past of evolution, points at which the process transcended itself by passing from an old state to a fresh one with quite new properties. The first was marked by the passage from the inorganic phase to the biological, the second by that from the biological to the psychosocial. Now we are on the threshold of a third. As the bubbles in a cauldron on the boil mark the onset of the critical passage of water from the liquid to the gaseous state, so the ebullition of humanist ideas in the cauldron of present-day thought marks the onset of the passage from the psychosocial to the consciously purposive phase of evolution. A prerequisite for the safe passage of this critical threshold, and for the efficient working of the evolutionary process in its new self-conscious State, will be the emergence of a new comprehensive pattern or system of ideas, beliefs and guiding principles which are of general validity for the entire human community. I hope that this book will help in indicating the outline of that pattern and in laying foundations on which that system can later be erected."
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SIR JULIAN HUXLEY (1887 - 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis. He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935-1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund and the first President of the British Humanist Association.

WALTER RUSSELL BRAIN (1895 - 1966) was a British neurologist. He was principal author of the standard work of neurology, Brain's Diseases of the Nervous System, and longtime editor of the homonymous neurological medical journal titled Brain. He is also eponymised with "Brain's reflex", a reflex exhibited by humans when assuming the quadrupedian position.

CONRAD HAL WADDINGTON (1905 - 1975) was a British developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, embryologist and philosopher who laid the foundations for systems biology. He had wide interests that included poetry and painting, as well as left-wing political leanings. In his book The Scientific Attitude (1941), he touched on political topics such as central planning and praised marxism as a "profound scientific philosophy".

JACOB BRONOWSKI (1908 - 1974) was a British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. He is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book.

EDWARD FRANCIS WILLIAMS (1903 - 1970) was a British newspaper editor. He worked on the Bootle Times and then the Liverpool Courier, and was convinced of socialism by the conditions he saw. He then moved to London to take up a post as a financial journalist on the Evening Standard, but soon moved to the Daily Herald, a paper with views closer to his own. In 1936, he accepted the editorship of the Daily Herald, serving until 1940. In 1941, he became Controller of Press Censorship and News at the Ministry of Information, and for his work he was awarded a CBE in 1945. He then became the public relations advisor to Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee for two years. From 1951 to 1952, he was a governor of the BBC. Williams served as Regents' Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961, and Kemper Knapp Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin from 1967 until his death.

MORRIS GINSGERG (1889 - 1970) was a British sociologist, who played a key role in the development of the discipline. He served as editor of The Sociological Review in the 1930s and later became the founding chairman of the British Sociological Association in 1951 and its first President (1955-1957). He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1942 to 1943, and helped draft the UNESCO 1950 statement titled The Race Question.

HAROLD JOHN BLACKHAM (1903 - 2009) was a leading British humanist philosopher, writer and educationalist. He has been described as the "progenitor of modern humanism in Britain". Joining the Ethical Union, Blackham drew the organisation further away from religious forms and played an important part in its formation into the British Humanist Association, becoming the BHA's first Executive Director in 1963. He was also a founding member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), IHEU secretary (1952-1966), and received the IHEU's International Humanist Award in 1974, and the Special Award for Service to World Humanism in 1978. In addition he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. His book, Six Existentialist Thinkers, became a popular university textbook.

ERIK HOMBURGER ERIKSON (1902 - 1994) was a German-born American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychosocial development of human beings. He may be most famous for coining the phrase identity crisis. His son, Kai T. Erikson, is a noted American sociologist. Although Erikson lacked even a bachelor's degree, he served as a professor at prominent institutions such as Harvard and Yale. Erikson is also credited with being one of the originators of Ego psychology, which stressed the role of the ego as being more than a servant of the id. According to Erikson, the environment in which a child lived was crucial to providing growth, adjustment, a source of self-awareness and identity.

FRANCIS HUXLEY (1923 - 2016). A botanist, he was the son of the biologist Sir Julian Sorell Huxley, nephew of the writer Aldous Huxley, half-nephew of the Nobel laureate Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley, grandson of the writer Leonard Huxley and great-grandson of "Darwin's bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley and the literary professor Thomas Arnold the Younger. He traveled widely, particularly in the Americas, as an anthropologist working for various universities and institutions. He undertook major field work among a tribe of Brazilian Indians, exploring 17,000 miles of the Amazon basin and studying its native populations; he did early work with Humphrey Osmond in Canada, has reported on the use of psychedelic snuff by Yanomamo Indians, and documented the early use of LSD in the West and in the third world.

MORTON HUNT (1920-2016 ) was a science writer who has notably written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Harper's. Educated at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania, he worked as a freelance writer from 1949, specializing in the social and behavioral sciences; he wrote at least 18 books and more than 450 articles.

WILLIAM GRAHAM HOLFORD (1907 - 1975) was a British architect and town planner. Holford was heavily involved with the development of post-World War II British town planning and was largely responsible for drafting the Town and Country Planning Act 1947.

SIR MICHAEL KEMP TIPPETT (1905 - 1998) was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime he was sometimes ranked with his contemporary Benjamin Britten as one of the leading British composers of the 20th century. Among his best-known works are the oratorio A Child of Our Time, the orchestral Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, and the opera The Midsummer Marriage. Having briefly embraced communism in the 1930s, Tippett avoided identifying with any political party. A pacifist after 1940, he was imprisoned in 1943 for refusing to carry out war-related duties required by his military exemption.

SIR STEPHEN HAROLD SPENDER (1909 - 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work. He was appointed the seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965. In 1936 he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Harry Pollitt, head of the CPGB invited him to write for the Daily Worker on the Moscow Trials. In 1937, during the Spanish civil war, they sent him to Spain. His mission was to observe and report on the Soviet ship Komsomol, which had sunk while carrying Soviet weapons to the Second Spanish Republic.

OLIVER LESLIE REISER (1895 - 1974) was an American philosopher known for his pseudoscientific views on evolution. Reiser is most well known in humanist groups because of his book Promise of Scientific Humanism (1940). He also founded the International Committee on Scientific Humanism in the 1950s. Reiser had used the term "Cosmic humanism" influenced by the work of Albert Einstein to define what he termed a pantheist philosophy of science. The main belief of Reiser was that geomagnetic forces were directing evolution of species based on a very specific complex cyclical process. He also advocated the view that a "memory field" existed around the earth which could also influence the evolution of organisms, he called this field the "psychosphere".

PATRICK MEREDITH (1904- ) was a physicist, mathematician and psychologist. His liffe-long interests were astronomy and language.

HERBERT LIONEL ELVIN (1905 - 2005) was an eminent educationist. Elvin was the son of Herbert Henry Elvin, General Secretary of the National Union of Clerks, and brother of George, who became General Secretary of the Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians.

MICHAEL YOUNG (1915 - 2002) was a British sociologist, social activist and politician who coined the term "meritocracy". Young served under the Labour Party government led by Clement Attlee, but left in 1950. He began studying for a PhD at the London School of Economics in 1952.

ROBIN MARRIS (1924-2012) worked closely with the Labor party, and when in 1964 Harold Wilson's incoming government established a Ministry of Overseas Development, Robin was recruited to advise its first two ministers, Barbara Castle and Anthony Greenwood. Robin was best known to economists for his major contribution to our understanding of corporations.

SUDHIR SEN (1916-1989). was an economist who specialized in agricultural development and rural electrification in India and on behalf of the United Nations. From 1947 to 1954, Dr. Sen was the chief executive officer of the Damodar Valley Corporation, a dam builder in India. From 1956 to 1966 he served as United Nations residential representative in Ghana and Yugoslavia and as a director in the United Nations Development Program. He was also a director of the Great Eastern Shipping Company in Bombay, a visiting economics professor of Brown University and the New York correspondent of the Economic Times of India.

HARRY KALVEN, JR. (1914 - 1974) was an American jurist, regarded as one of the preeminent legal scholars of the 20th century. He was the Harry A. Bigelow Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Kalven is the coauthor of "The Contemporary Function of the Class Suit," one of the most heavily cited articles in the history of American law, and widely considered to be the foundation of the modern class action lawsuit.

HANS ZEISEL (1905-1992). A sociologist and lawyer, Hans Zeisel was a pioneer in social science research and in the empirical study of legal institutions. His most famous works focused on juries, capital punishment, and survey techniques, often ingeniously using what he termed "half a loaf" methods-study designs that were, perforce, less than ideal, but well adapted to cope with the constraints encountered in studying the law in operation.

BARBARA WOOTTON (1897 - 1988) was a British sociologist and criminologist. She was one of the first four life peers appointed under the Life Peerages Act 1958. She was President of the British Sociological Association 1959-1964. Ethically, she was a supporter of utilitarianism. She supported an "Incurable Patients Bill" in the 1970s which would have allowed doctor-assisted suicide. Her views on abortion which were pro-life but without any religious basis led her to be removed from her position as Vice-President of the British Humanist Association.

ROBERT PLATT (1900-1978), was a British physician. His research was on kidney diseases, but he is remembered for the 1940-1950s Platt vs. Pickering debate with George White Pickering over the nature of hypertension. Though Platt's view was favored during his lifetime, Pickering's view ultimately dominated and is the basis of current understanding and treatment policies. Platt held the salaried position of head of the Central Manchester Health Authority, and he later (1957-1962) became the president of the Royal College of Physicians.

G. COLIN L. BERTRAM (1911-2001) father or modern sirenology--published on Arctic and Antarctic seals.

EDWARD MAX NICHOLSON (1904 - 2003) was a pioneering environmentalist, ornithologist and internationalist, and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund. In 1947-1948, with the then director general of the United Nations' scientific and education organisation UNESCO, Julian Huxley, he was involved in forming the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN) (now International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)).

HERMANN JOSEPH MULLER (1890 - 1967) was an American geneticist, educator, and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation (X-ray mutagenesis) as well as his outspoken political beliefs. Muller frequently warned of the long-term dangers of radioactive fallout from nuclear war and nuclear testing, helping to raise public awareness in this area.

ALDOUS LEONARD HUXLEY (1894 - 1963) was an English writer, philosopher and a prominent member of the Huxley family. He was best known for his novels including Brave New World, and for non-fiction books, such as The Doors of Perception, which recalls experiences when taking a psychedelic drug, and a wide-ranging output of essays. Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.