The Rice Institute’s Extension Lectures, a series of lectures available to the public, began soon after the founding of the Institute, as President Lovett believed it was an essential part of Rice’s engagement with the community and could help spread academic knowledge beyond the walls of Rice. While Huxley had initially been asked to deliver a series of extension lectures in 1914 when he came to Rice, he had to turn them down, citing mental health concerns. However, when President Lovett again suggested that he deliver three of these lectures, he enthusiastically requested to prepare six as Huxley felt he had so much to discuss. Titling the series "Biology and Man," Huxley would later deliver these popular lectures to the Houston community.

There were a total of six lectures in this series:

1. The Evolutionary Point of View
2. Biology and Mind
3. Biology and Sex
4. Biology, the Individual and the State
5. Biology and War
6. Biology and Religion

Huxley’s first lecture of the series was “The Evolutionary Point of View,” which he delivered in the Physics Amphitheater (now known as Herzstein Amphitheater). The first lecture appears to have been well received. It was so popular among the general public that his later lectures were moved downtown to increase accessibility.

In this lecture, Huxley tried to convey to the Houston public just how vital understanding evolution was, explaining that with Darwin, mankind has experienced a massive paradigm shift. Evolution—symbolizing knowledge, faith, and humility—had prompted a reexamination of man’s relationship with nature. Concluding that a “Man without a knowledge of Evolution is a statesman ignorant of all History,” Huxley makes the case that a proper understanding of evolution is necessary for the progress and survival of mankind.

In his fifth lecture, Huxley spoke on a somewhat contentious viewpoint by modern-day standards. Delivered amid World War I, Huxley in this lecture argued that to abolish all war, one should not emphasize the dislike for and bloodshed associated with war, nor by means highlighting economic waste or “good intentions” that might be behind it because everyone knows “war is hell.” Instead, Huxley explains that war appears to act in the “reversal of the normal process of selection,” in which “[t]he best are taken” and the “worst left to breed and be the fathers of the race.” Essentially, Huxley is arguing that those unfit or unwilling to participate in war will be the ones to survive, while “the men of the finest character and ideals [who] were the first to enlist” will die.

This lecture undoubtedly holds eugenical themes, characteristic of British eugenics at the time. British eugenics held increasing class-oriented concerns, which is evident in Huxley’s lecture when he points out that Oxford was essentially empty as everyone had enlisted in the war. Huxley expressed his concern with the dysgenic effects of war by joining the British Eugenics Society, even being elected Vice President in 1937 and President in 1959.

A few of Huxley’s lectures were also somewhat contentious at the time. Of course, Huxley’s lecture on Biology and Religion did not go without controversy in early 20th-century Texas. Published shortly after Huxley’s lecture, S.M. Provence of Huntsville wrote a piece for the Houston Chronicle in the “The Battle-ground of Public Opinion” section, attacking Huxley for stepping “out of his laboratory” into a field that he is not qualified to talk about—religion. Province asserted that Huxley’s belief in evolution is unfounded, as evolutionary theory itself only existed to be an attack on religion rather than exist as a pure science. He writes:

For the most part, advocates of the Darwinian theory (which Mr. Darwin repudiated on his deathbed) have concealed their attack upon spiritual religion. The theory broke down almost at the start, in the failure to evolve living organisms, and a number of scientific investigators refused to accept it and exposed its weakness.

In response, Huxley noted that Provence had misunderstood his point: rather than throw religion away, Huxley argued: “the more we adopt the purely biological point of view, the more we see the necessity of some form of religion.” Therefore, Huxley writes that Provence just saw the words “Evolution” and “Darwin” and felt compelled to attack him without thoroughly reading his argument.

While Huxley never published his lectures at Rice, they were no doubt influential as they helped him sort through ideas that he would later expand upon:

As he would later explain in this letter to G. C. Wheeler, who had inquired when the lectures might see the light of day, Huxley noted:

I never published the lectures I gave at Rice; but I am writing a good deal just now, and the pains I took with them were far from wasted—I thought out then many problems which are the basis of my present ideas.

Hence, many similar ideas and arguments in these lectures can be seen in his book Essays of a Biologist (1923) and The Stream of Life (1927).

Click here for to learn more about Huxley's time at Rice.