SCIENTISTS & EVOLUTION

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17609, 27 October 1931, Page 11

SCIENTISTS & EVOLUTION

DARWINIAN AND CREATIVE GROUPS „ LONDON, Sept. 25. New battles over evolution shook the meeting ot' the British Association for the Advancement of Science, before which Darwin and Huxley expounded their discoveries more than half a century ago. lpstead of evolution itself being pitagainst the theory \>t Divine creation, however, the proponents of pure Darwinian evolution took issue > with those scientists who now support a new conception of ‘'creative evolution.” In a sense, it was the old combat of fundamentalism versus modernism. On the fundamental side stood the staunch Darwinians, led by Prof. Edward B. Poulton of Oxford. Opposing them were Prof. Julian S. Huxley, grandson of the famous scientist, and Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborii, of New York. The basis of their argument,' was that Darwin failed to tell the Whole story and that natural selection could not explain all the- phenomena, of evolution. ((’hough they did not dispute the truth of Darwin’s reasoning, the‘‘modernists” insisted tjfcm.t he lived too- early to have known the whole of the story that lie uncovered. Later discoveries, they contended, have proven that characters may be accounted for by certain correlated processes of growth—that' natural selection is only a partial explanation of adaptation.' Prof. Osborn listed nine new principles of evolution which l)iirwin never knew and which were discovered only after his death.