EVOLUTION v. PROHIBITION.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XVIII, Issue 1859, 8 September 1923, Page 5

EVOLUTION v. PROHIBITION.

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —As in the past, so in our own day, men have arisen in the might of their zeal to denounce discovery arid innovation as contrary to current opinion and therefore to bel rejected. For instance, a few months ago we read in the Press how certain reformers trounced Evolution as an "Atheist invention,' a "contravention of historical Scripture," etc. In spite of the fact that Evolution is a matter of daily perception to those who will stop to consider, as our horse, from the ancestral hipparion; the cow, in its many sizes and qualities, from the wild auroch; the dog, from the wolf; and so, down the long domestic catalogue of beasts to man's service have evolved from a prior less-dev.eloped ancestry. And as with the beasts of the field, so with the social creature Man and his various emotions. We are more mentally keen and perceptive than our forefathers. Stop ,by step up the golden stair of knowledge man has climbed and is still climbing. But the progress is cautious and slow. Nature takes no extravagant leaps _in the dark. Each advance is the child of its parent, and, with its parent's added experience, each generation makes heavier the weight of its wisdom. Nature permits no wide gaps, hers is no improvement by bounds, but by incredibly sure and visible merger. Man is under that same domination. With a noted essayist I believe that man today is more sensitive; more what we call "human," as the result of his Evolution, and such by the merger of slow but insistent education—of discarding the husks our forefathers gathered up in the knowing no better—and retaining the grain. I believe with the essayist that the universal pulse of humanity, beating through ages of barbaric strife and war, serfdom and ignorance, disease and distresses, has a nobler efficiency for good than all the rituals and creeds, than all the pietish commands, than all the exhorts of salaried reformers! It is the slow, sure push ot : Evolution—of unquenchable curiosity to know whether that thing beyond there be not the better—that urges humanity on. Here also Nature's actions arc slow and must conform to her laws. She is no jerrybuilder, each layer of the structure as it rises must have time to set and harden. The zealot's hastily built huts she ruthlessly kicks from her path. But she permits bridgings and stagings of compromise, or lessening an evil by degrees, instead of a violent pluck up by the roots. Her plan is to strangle and wither the herbs she wants to kill by surrounding it_ with those of healthier vigour and growth. She nowhere "prohibits." She punishes. She knows that sudden forcible prohibition sets up disobedience and sulk, and that it makes a criminal where it would manufacture a saint.—,t am, etc., W. 8., Otorohanga.