C. E. Ayres's Reliance on T. H. Huxley: Did Darwin's Bulldog Bite?

In David Seckler's Thorstein Veblen and the Institutionalists, the proposition is advanced that “Ayres out-Veblens Veblen and out Deweys Dewey”. This commonly held view of the intellectual orientation of the prominent American institutional economist, Clarence Edwin Ayres, places him as an intellectual descendent of philosopher John Dewey's pragmatism, and economist Thorstein B, Veblen's institutionalist economics. Certainly such an outlook is not incorrect, but it is also not adequate if one is to achieve an understanding of Ayres. A careful check of the indexes of Ayres's major works shows that his references preponderantly go not to Dewey and to Veblen, but to Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, Moreover, it is to the latter that Ayres turned in his effort to overturn the former. However, Ayres in interpreting Darwin relied not upon Dewey and Veblen, but rather upon Thomas Henry Huxley, the British physician turned scientist, who because of his outspoken advocacy of Darwin's evolutionary biology became known as “Darwin's bulldog.”