GEOLOGY CONFIRMS EVOLUTION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22708, 22 October 1935, Page 10

GEOLOGY CONFIRMS EVOLUTION

“ Form, Drift and Rhythm of the Continents ” was the subject of Professor W. W. Watts in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His opening remarks dealt with the contribution of geology in support of the theory of evolution.

“Although definitely richer than when Darwin wrote, the geological record,” Professor Watts said, “still is, and must from its very nature remain, imperfect. Every major group of animal life but the vertebrates is represented in the Cambrian fauna, and the scant relics that have been recovered from earlier rocks give little idea of what had gone before, and no evidence whatever of the beginnings of life. But, from Cambrian time onwards, the chain of life is continuous and unbroken. Type after type has arisen, flourished and attained dominion. Some of them have met extinction in the heyday of their development; others have slowly dwindled away; others, again, have not finished their downhill journey, or arc still advancing to their climax. Surely of the succession of rocks and the organisms contained in them, in every case in which evidence is sufficiently abundant and particularly among the vertebrates and in the later stages of geological history, has novv revealed that the great majority of species show close affinities with those which preceded and with those which followed them; that, indeed, they have been derived from their predecessors and gave to their successors. We may now fairly claim that palaeontology has lifted the theory of evolution of organisms from the limbo of hypothesis into .. fact completely demonstrated by the integral chain of life which links the animals and plants of to-day with the earliest of their forerunners of the most remote past.”