Nick Matzke weighs in.
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This is sad stuff. Huxley was an amazing individual with exceptional talent in the study of nature and in advocacy. He was, of course, a man of his times and he did say a few things that are awful by modern standards but he was more decent and humane on issues of race and sex than the great majority of his contemporaries. His defense of reason in the face of ecclesiastical opposition was brilliant; the volume of essays he exchanged with Henry Wace through the pages of The Nineteenth Century on Agnosticism is practically a textbook of the art of advocacy, and his humiliation of Wace stands as a great triumph of the use of reason and evidence over the clownish forms of religion which were then nearly universal.
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