May, 1922 common misconceptions of evolution 185 



his own foot-rule. Yet aside from his high nervous organization 

 it would seem that man has little to be proud of. Certainly, 

 in many other systems, he is not to be compared in the per- 

 fection of his adaptations with multitudes of other animals. 

 Bertrand Russell has facetiously remarked, "Organic life, we 

 are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the 

 philosopher, and this development, we are assured is indubitably 

 an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the 

 protozoon, who gives us this assurance, and we can have no 

 security that the impartial outsider would agree with the 

 philosopher's self-complacent assumption." 



Some one has referred to the results of selection as "the 

 survival of the adapted," and adaptation means merely the 

 ability to meet the conditions of existence in one way or another. 

 All organisms that continue to exist, must therefore be adapted, 

 and the supposedly lower organization of the protozoan may 

 be just as effective as the more complex structure of the 

 mammal. If the only proof of fitness is continued existence, 

 then the Foraminifera, which have had a long and continuous 

 career from the Cambrian period, at least, are far better 

 organisms than were the Dinosaurs, which lasted only through 

 a few millions of years in the Mesozoic and found continued 

 existence impossible. Man, who has been on the earth only 

 a mere half million years or so, has scarcely been given a fair 

 trial to prove his fitness, and the probabilities are that the 

 Foraminifera will continue to flourish long after man has 

 definitely proved his inability to cope with changing conditions. 

 We should, therefore, in justice to our logic, define carefully 

 what we mean by "higher," for higher specialization does not 

 imply higher adaptability. 



A mistaken notion of evolution which has caused great 

 concern to the uninitiated is that it is a theory about the origin 

 of man from a monkey. Just why this idea should be so repellent 

 to a large class of people is difficult to see, for after all monkeys 

 are very respectable in comparison with some humans and, 

 furthermore, they are very high in the scale of animal organiza- 

 tion. We will all agree that they are incomparably higher 

 than the "dust of the earth," which many persons seem to 

 prefer for their ancestral stock. 



But, of course, in thus speaking of the origin of man, no 

 evolutionist has the modern anthropoid ape in mind any more 



