DARWIN RECALLED 



feel ashamed to be descended from an ape, but that he would 

 be very ashamed to be related to a man who misused his 

 great intellectual gifts to disguise the truth. 



The emotional and almost hysterical atmosphere of the time 

 is manifested in the titles of books and articles attacking the 

 theory of evolution, such titles as, "The Menace of Darwin- 

 ism," "The Case against Evolution," "God — or Gorilla," 

 "The Bankruptcy of Evolution," "Essays on Un-Natural 

 History," "The Comedy of Evolution," and "War against 

 Evolution." And to make matters worse, materialists like 

 Haeckel and Voght employed the theory of evolution to 

 attack religion, fiaeckel, for instance, stated: "With one 

 stroke Darwin has annihilated the dogma of creation." This 

 arrogant statement is as one-sided as the literal interpretation 

 of Book Genesis in the sense of creationism. For the rejection 

 of creation cannot be found anywhere in the premises of 

 biological evolution, but it is implied in the dogmatic 

 materialism of Haeckel. The controversy was not between the 

 theory of evolution and the theory of creation, but between 

 evolutionism, or evolution without creation on the one hand, 

 and creationism, or creation without evolution on the other. 

 And evidently they could not have any ground in common. 

 Evolution was wrongly identified with evolutionism and 

 creation with creationism, and, of course, these extreme posi- 

 tions appeared to be irreconcilable. 



This situation reminds us of the times of Galileo Galilei, 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Galileo's Dialogues 

 on the Two Main Systems of the World was condemned 

 because it subverted the geocentric universe on which some 

 theological opinions of the time were based. Man's dwelling 

 place was no longer the center of the universe. A colleague of 

 Galileo refused even "to look through Galileo's telescope for 

 fear of finding that Aristotle's physics were wrong." Thus 

 Darwin's The Origin of Species and his The Descent o[ 

 Man subverted the anthropocentric universe of the nineteenth 

 century. Man in his entirety was no longer honored by an act 

 of special creation that set him apart from the animal kingdom. 

 At least in so far as his body was concerned, he seemed to 

 be the end-product of a long evolution, and had to call some 

 anthropoid apes his immediate ancestors. This, of course, was 



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