FREEDOM OF THE AIR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 328, 5 October 1945, Page 25

FREEDOM OF THE AIR

Sir-yYour correspondents Messrs. Hulbert and Bromell are barking up the wrong tree, for the preacher whom they criticise made it clear that he was not attacking every theory of evolution, but the atheistic theory, or as he called it, "the theory of Atheistic Evolutionism." This is a philosophical theory according to which God does not exist and the whole of reality, including man, can be adequately explained in terms of a process of evolution. It could be summed up: "There is no God but Evolution." Even Bishop Barnes would, I think, xeject this theory. Frequently, however, "Evolution" signifies the scientific theory that all living forms have sprung from one of a few primitive stocks. This is presumably the theory which Dr. Barnes describes as a "firmly established principle’ and Mr. Bromell. as a "well established truth," and which in the opinion of Rev. Prof. Henslow "now stands on an irrefragable basis’. . . so that any alternative at the present day is unthinkable." Unfortu-ately-for Mr. Bromell and his clerical camp followers of "Science," an increasing number of scientists are following the lead given by Berg and Vialleton twenty years ago and rejecting this theory of evolution as untenable. Thus Prof. Lemoine, summing up as editor-in-chief of the two volumes on "Life" (IV-V) in the recent (1937) edition of the Encyclopedie Francaise, writes as follows: "Volume IV of this Encyclopaedia will certainly rank as. an; important event in the history of our ideas on evolution: to read it is to be convinced that this theory seems on the eve of being abandoned. ... From all that has been written above it is clear that the theory of evolution is impossible. Appearances to the contrary not~withstanding, no one really believes in it any more.... We have then to admit, with the majority of zoologists, that evolutionism, whatever be the form it takes; no longer satisfies our intellect. . This volume of the Encyclopaedia, I thought must prove a triumphant vindication of the evolutionary theories, now on the contrary seems to me to sound their death-knell." Lemoine was Director of the National Museum of Natural History and twice President of the Geological Society of France, and the articles in these two volumes of the Encyclopaedia were contributed by thirty savants from the leading universities and museums of France, ‘men of the calibre of Cuenot, Caullery, Guyenot, Arambourg, Carpentier — specialists of the first rank in their several departments of biological science. Further er evidence that this theory is on its last Tegs is provided by such books

as J.B. S. Haldane’s The Causes of Evolution and J. S. Huxley’s Evolution, the Modern Synthesis. Both these authors reject Lamarck’s theory and the Mutationism of de Vries, and they contradict Darwin on almost every point; and on the other hand, they propound no coherent theory of evolution themselves. They do indeed still affirm the "fact" of evolution, but the scientific evidence against this "fact" is now so strong that even this bare assertion will ultimately have to be abandoned.

G. H.

D.

(Greenmeadows).