DARWINS ACHIEVEMENT 100 YEARS AGO

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28702, 27 September 1958, Page 10

DARWINS ACHIEVEMENT 100 YEARS AGO

“Point Of No Return In Human Thought”

LONDON. 3jf ANY broadcasts in the 8.8.C.’s domestic and overseas services have been devoted recently to the subject of evolution and to the enormous contribution to thought made by Charles Darwin and A. R. Wallace, who 100 years ago—in July, 1858—put forward in a joint paper to the Linnean Society their theory on evolution and natural selection. Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was published the following year. Speaking in the 8.8.C.’s General Overseas Service, Sir Julian Huxley, F.R.S., said: “Tne publication of Charles Darwin’s

‘Origin of Species’ almost 100 years ago marked a point of no return in human thought. After 1859 it was no longer possible to maintain that all the fantastic variety of animals and plant had been diversely created once and for all in their present forms. It was not possible any longer to believe that life had existed on earth for only a few thousand years; or, alternatively, that it had persisted through an indefinite number of recurring cycles.”

Two-Fold Achievement Darwin’s positive achievement had been two-fold, Sir Julian Huxley said. First, he had amassed an enormous volume of evidence showing that species were not immutable —in other words, that evolution must have occurred. This idea had been suggested before, but no-one had proved it. Secondly, he had discovered a scientifically satisfying mechanism by which it could have occurred—in the shape of what he called . natural selection. “Natural selection works by the differential survival of favourable inherited variation,” Sir Julian Huxley explained. “If variation A, for instance, has a 1 per cent, advantage over B—that is to say. if on the average 100 of A survive against 99 of B—then in a biologically quite brief space of time A will supplant B as the normal type of the species.” From this principle of natural selection. Darwin had been able to draw the most far-reaching Conclusions. Sir Julian Huxley said. Natural selection inevitably promoted biological improvement —relative to the conditions of existence at the time. Such improvement might be in respect of detailed adaptation, such as better camouflage patterns in defenceless insects; in the gradual perfection of structure and behaviour for a particular way of life, as in the webbed feet of water birds; or in the development of a new and more efficient type on a higher level of general organisation—for instance, in the evolution of mammals from some ancestral reptile. The irreversible one-way trend towards the emergence of ever more efficient and more highly organised types had been abund-

antly confirmed-by evidence from fossils.

Darwin had also deduced successfully that natural selection would give rise to an increasing diversification of life. Also, he had seen clearly that evolution by natural selection was bound to be gradual and demanded enormous periods of time. Today it was possible to estimate the age of various rocks by studying the radio-activity of certain minerals, . and thus assess* time taken by evolution in general, from the first appearance on earth of living matter to the appearance of modern man, at the stupendous figure of two thousand million years. “Darwin also quite rightly deduced that mind, that is to say the mental and psychological characters and organisms, must have evolved just as much as the body,” Sir Julian Huxley said. “His book on ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’ laid the foundation for the whole modern science of behaviour.”

Darwin had seen man as the highest form of life at the present summit of evolution—a new kind of animal owing his evolutionary success to his unique properties of mind which had provided him with a new method of evolving This had led to what might be called cultural evolution by means of cumulative tradition instead of only biological evolution by natural selection. New Phase In this really new phase, operating by minds working in societies. Sir Julian Huxley said evolution was no longer primarily biological, depending on the transmission and variation of genes, but cultural, depending on the transmission and variation of ideas or their results. Manlike creatures had been in existence for a good deal less than a million years, and settled human life for

less than 10.000 years, yet in that comparatively little time “cultural evolution has produced great cities, works of art. religion, modern science, and much else that is new and quite extraordinary. So we begin to see something of what man’s role in the universe really is. It is to be the agent for the further evolution of this planet, with aTI the opportunities for good or evil that this implies.

. . This idea was little more than hinted at by Darwin, but it was implicit in his great work —*The Origin of Species’ opened the door to a new, a truer, and a nobler view of human destiny than any which had been previously enjoyed by man.”

Kaniere at Nelson.— H.M.N.Z.S. Kaniere made a ceremonial entry into the Port of Nelson on Thursday. to take part in the city’s centennial celebrations during the next three days.—(PA.) /XC ■