AMERICA AND EVOLUTION

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 40, 15 August 1925, Page 16

AMERICA AND EVOLUTION

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S OPINION

OF RECENT TRIAL.

America's fundamentalist controversy is a natural aftermath of the wart emotional fervour, according to Professor Julian S. Huxley, senior demonstrator in zoology at Oxford and one of the brilliant British scientists, states : a London correspondent of the "Kangas City - Post." Professor Huxley knows the United States. He is familiar with the fundamentalist controversy there and the issues of the' Dayton, Term., evolution trial. He was found in the zoology museum at ancient Oxford University surrounded by skeletons of animals which had 'been buried in the earth, according to biologists, for hundreds of centuries before the fnndamentalist creation.

"War hysteria, I believe, has played some part in bringing about the present bities of emotional feeling about eyolution," Huxley began. "Let us remember and admit how young America is. The bulk of the United States wag not settled until the middle of the last century. Until recent decadei, America, excluding the eastern seaboard, was a land of scattered farms, with people living in great isolation from the world and its work, and following the ways and beliefs of their forefathers. People were occupied with other things .than theories of scienoe. They were taming Nature; bringing great areas under cultivation, building cities, creating industries.

"Then came the war. America worked itself into a great pitch of emotional ' fervour and the war ended before the fervour was.dissipated. The emotion had to be got rid of, and other outlets were found. People in the isolated sections of the United States looked about them at the world and awoke suddenly to find that other people did not believe as they did. Naturally they received a shock. And they obtained the outlet for their war fervour.

. "The campaign against Bolshevism in the United States, for instance, was pushed to a great length; it was much more heated than ours, although we were nearer to Bolshevism. That campaign was a post-war intensification of the inherent conservatism of the isolated Americans; and that, too, I believe, partly was religious. Now cornea fundamentalism. Over here the shock of e?o----htion had been sustained, and people had recovered from it, decades ago. America, busy about its affairs, had no time to realise the truth and significance of evolution and to get over the first natural resentment to it."