AMERICA AND EVOLUTION

Evening Star, Issue 19026, 22 August 1925, Page 17

AMERICA AND EVOLUTION

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S OPiHiGH OF RECENT TRIAL America’s fundamentalist controversy is a natural aftermath of the war's emotional fervor, according to Professor Julian S. Iluxley, senior demonstrator hi zoology at Oxford, and one of the brilliant British scientists, states a London correspondent of the \Kansas City ‘ Post.’ Professor Iluxley knows the United States. He is familiar with the fundamentalist controversy there and the issues of the Dayton, Tonn.. evolution trial. He was found in the zoology museum at ancient Oxford University surrounded by skeletons of animals which had, been buried in th'o earth, according to biologists, for hundreds of centuries before the fundamentalist creation. “ War hysteria, I believe, has played some part in bringing about the present reaction of emotional feeling about evolution,” Huxley began. “Let us remember and admit how young America is. The bulk of the United States was not settled until the middle of the last century. Until recent decades, 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 science. 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 fervor, and the war ended before the fervor 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 fervor. “ The campaign against Bolshevism in the United States, for instance, was pushed to a groat 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 comes fundamentalism. Over here the shock of evolution had been sustained, and people had recovered from it, decades ago. _ America. busy about its affairs, bad no time to realise the truth and significance- of evolution' and to get over the first natural resentment to it.”