the first religion devoted to evolution

io9 |  Huxley's genteel progressivism seems at odds with the popular image of eugenics. While many eugenics enthusiasts were racists on the the far right of the political spectrum, Huxley was part of a "reform eugenics" movement which was popular among British socialists like H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.

For these reform eugenicists, social equality was a necessary prerequisite for identifying genetic inequality. And that's where Huxley's notion of evolutionary humanism came in. He wrote that evolutionary humanism elevated this mission to a religious quest:

The lineaments of the new religion ... will arise to serve the needs of the coming era... Instead of worshipping supernatural rulers, it will sanctify the higher manifestations of human nature, in art and love, in intellectual comprehension and aspiring adoration, and will emphasize the fuller realization of life's possibilities as a sacred trust.

The key to achieving these aims was to educate the public, enabling them to think in evolutionary terms. In Huxley's mind, a widespread acceptance of an evolutionary worldview represented the process of evolution "reaching self-consciousness [and] becoming aware of itself."

In order to make sense of evolutionary humanism as a religion, however, you also have to understand Huxley's somewhat idiosyncratic approach to evolution itself. Biologists generally define evolution in terms of allele frequencies, mutations, selection, and drift. For Huxley, this was just a small part of a much broader picture. He radically expanded the concept so that all directional change was evolution. In Huxley's view, "the whole sum of reality is, in a perfectly legitimate sense, evolution." It was also, for Huxley, inherently progressive. Evolution necessarily moved towards "higher," or more complex, states of being.

Huxley broke this universal process of evolution down into three stages: cosmic, biological, and psychosocial. Cosmic evolution was the slow development of complex structures through physical and chemical processes; the formation of stars and production of heavier elements, the gradual formation of planets, and the emergence of simple organic chemistry. Biological evolution was more or less what we think of by the word "evolution" today, although Huxley believed that most biological progress ended roughly five million years ago, and that only minor improvements, especially among early hominids, had occurred since. Progress was the whole point of evolution, but had only just gotten started in the last, psychosocial stage.