EVOLUTION THROUGH SEX
Sir,-It is amusing to watch an evolutionary biologist pontificating with easy assurance on the most difficult problems. "Life," N. J. Berrill tells us, "justifies its own existence." Poets and philosophers have wrestled mightily with that problem-Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Kant and a host of others. But it is no trouble at all to N. J. Berrill. You see, he knows about Evolution with a capital E. And nothing is a problem to Evolution. Invertebrates turn into vertebrates; man leaves the sea and is transformed from a cold-blooded denizen of the deep into a warm-blooded dweller on land. No one has the faintest idea of how these changes were effected. What does that matter when we can invoke Evolution? The same easy assurance marks J. D. McD.’s diagnosis of our modern ills. "The basic flaw in the organisation of modern society," he declares is that "a sexually mature person is maintained in an infant status in society." In natural conditions, it would not be so, "Natural conditions," for these biologists, are the conditions that obtain in the world of nhature---among shrimps, barnacles, spiders and the rest, For them, man is simply a part of Nature and in his sexual behaviour should act actordingly. May it not be that one cause of juvenile delinquency is the purely naturalistic outlook on life which many of our chil--dren derive from their contact with evolutionary biolovists?
G.H.
D.
(Palmerston North).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 804, 17 December 1954, Page 5
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239EVOLUTION THROUGH SEX New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 804, 17 December 1954, Page 5
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