EVOLUTION OF MAN-AND THE UNIVERSE

Northern Advocate, 24 October 1936, Page 2

EVOLUTION OF MAN-AND THE UNIVERSE

? It is. a common fallacy that natural S- selection must always be for the good | of the species or of life in general, |„declajred Dr. Ji*lian Huxley, deliver-* imSff- the -presidential address to the the British, Association I last month. j Research disposed of the notion of ■ ririilitarists and laisser-faire economists ? that all man needed for further prof gressiye evolution was to" adopt the most thorough-going competition. » “Natural selection, in fact, though > likedhe,mills of God .in grinding slow- | ly arid grinding small, has few other . attributes that a civilised religion < would call divine.-^ I “It is efficient in its way—at the / price of extrerrie slowness and exr treme cruelty, but it is, blind and I- mechanical; and accordingly its prO- | ducts are just as likely to be aesthep. tically, morally, or intellectually rei pulsive to us as they are .to be attrac- : tive or worthy of imitation.” g - Dr. Huxley held that if we adopted - some system for using a few highlyendowed individuals to produce all the ; next generation, air kinds; of new 1 possibilities would emerge. A new theory of the origin of the ; universe was announced to the mathematics and physics section by Sir James Jeans, Professor of Astronomy | * in' the Royal Institution. The new theory comes from Dr. Harold Jeffreys, who is University ; Reader in Geophysics at Cambridge j University and a Fellow of St. John’s ; College. Dr. Jeffreys is 45. ; Sir James Jeans evplained that the ' theory of Dr. Jeffreys supplants his : own theory, advanced in 1916. Sit James’ theory was that a passing star raised tides of great height in the I sun, and the whole structure became unstable. A long filament of gas was shot out " towards the passing star and thus ul- ! timately condensed into planets. At the: time this theory seemed to Sir James proof against mathematical I criticism, but Dr. Jeffreys had recently pointed out that the theory could not account for the rapid rotations of ; the outer planets. These had short and strangely uniform periods of ; about 10 hours. “Jeffreys,” said Sir James, “has proposed replacing distant tidal action by an actual collision of a grazing kind. “The gas at the sun’s surface is then : , twirled round between the upper and I. nether millstones formed by the ,sun 3 and the second star, and all goes well.” .'