DARWINIAN THEORY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22010, 17 January 1935, Page 9

DARWINIAN THEORY

VIGOROUS CHALLENGE EVOLUTION OF MAN LONDON, J an . 15 Sir John Ambrose Fleming, in his presidential address to the Victoria Institute and Philosophical Society, vigorously challenged the whole Darwinian theory of evolution. The speaker declared that the hypothesis that man was evolved over a vast period of time, from a common parent with the anthropoid ape, was a product of the imagination not based on indisputable evidence. If prehistoric man had anything like the rate of increase to be expected from a single pair of human beings, in 9000 years his progeny would . became 1,000,000,000. They would thus fill \ip the whole known world, yet the only discoveries were a few dozen skeletons in isolated and separate places. All the facts were much more consistent with the Biblical version of the post-glacial creation of mankind. Adherence to the doctrine of evolution was entirely inconsistent with belief in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. It was deplorable that so many clergymen accepted as proof the mere unconfirmed speculations of materialistic anthropology, or denied lSWacles. Those who had examined the evidence of miracles most closely agreed that the bodily resurrection of Christ was one of the most certainly attested facts in human history. This certified all previous Biblical miracles. The Daily Telegraph pays a tribute to Sir John for liis ( services to science, but argues that the fundamental meaning of the evolutionary principle is that living organisms and the universe itself have come to be what they are by a process of continuous change which is still progressing; in this there is no denial of divine creation.