Situating the Story: The Early Years of Evolution on the Wireless

Beginning with the first national radio broadcast on evolution in the UK in 1925, this chapter outlines how the biologist and science populariser, Julian Huxley, and early BBC science producers embedded early broadcasts with a progressive evolutionary narrative. Influenced by many external pressures—including nineteenth-century popular science, belief in radio’s power to educate and personal eugenicist ideology—the chapter shows how …