July. 1929 



EVOLUTION 



Page Eleven 



plause.) I gave you a clear, intellectual outline of the 

 position of scientific men, not of one scientific man 

 here and there. I don't talk to you of the men of 

 twenty-five or thirty years ago. Thirty and forty years 

 ago there were certainly obscure points in science. 

 What is it to you to go back thirty or forty years ago 

 and discuss what differences there were between scien- 

 tific men of that time? 



The proposition I lay before you tonight is that 

 for the last twenty-five years at least all the scientific 

 men in the world are agreed upon the fact of evolu- 

 tion. Against those scientific men are only a few 

 ministers of religion, and I submit tonight that their 

 arguments are not even respectable. (Applause.) 



But, as our time is short — Dr. Riley wishes this de- 

 bate short, because he must go away tonight ; I was 

 hoping to have still another half an hour, but you 

 understand, he wishes to curtail this debate, and then 

 he will have twenty minutes for jokes, and I will have 

 five minutes to wind up the whole talk. 



Why could not Dr. Riley address himself intellec- 

 tually to the case that I put before you? Why not? 

 I put before you five lines of evidence on which all 

 the scientific men in the world are agreed. And I 

 most particularly want to know what is the meaning 

 of the convergence, the coincidence, of those five lines 

 of evidence? That from the scientific point of view 

 is one of the weightiest arguments that you could 

 possibly produce. Not one single word was said about 

 it from beginning to end. I take, therefore, just a few 

 points that Dr. Riley made. 



Remember what we are doing : In one scale are all 

 the scientific experts in the world ; in the other scale 

 are the jokes of Dr. Riley and the points which I am 

 going to examine. (Laughter.) First, he said all scien- 

 tific men in the world are not agreed. I was invited 

 into this country three years ago to lend a hand in 

 this evolution matter. I read the entire anti-evolution- 

 ary literature of America. From that I selected the 

 names of thirty scientific men who are being quoted 

 in those western and southwestern states as scientific 

 men who deny the fact of evolution. Where are those 

 thirty names tonight? Not a single one of them. I 

 debated with six leaders of the fundamentalists, those 

 who are telling Tennessee and Arkansas that scientists 

 are not agreed. I debated with Dr. Riley before. I 

 have no quarrel with any intelligent believer. I have 

 a quarrel with the man who will dupe and deceive on 

 the whole scientific question. 



Scientists are not agreed, he says. First, he men- 

 tioned Professor Austin Clark. There is no such pro- 

 fessor in America as Austin Clark. Mr. Austin Oark 

 is a young, scientific man who has made a life-study 

 of sea-urchins. Will Dr. Riley explain how a life- 

 study of sea-urchins makes a man an authority on the 

 evolution of man? Will Dr. Riley show me a paper 

 or any work of Mr. Clark in which he says that any 

 living thing on this earth was "created"? He is an 

 evolutionist. Everybody knows that he is an evolu- 

 tionist. He gives an opinion as to the mode of evolu- 

 tion, but I want to see his own words where he has 

 ever said that living things on this earth were created. 



Then Dr. Riley quoted La Conte, who not only died 

 about forty years ago, but was in his time the most 

 zealous evolutionist in this country. 



Then we had Professor Osborn, and I am sure 

 when the echo goes around tonight that he was quoted 

 in connection with this debate, you will hear a little 

 in your papers from Professor Osborn. Professor Os- 

 born, from whom I difl^er on many points, is the most 

 prominent evolutionist in this country. 



Where are the men, I ask Dr. Riley — remember 

 you are told explicitly scientific men — who are not 

 agreed about evolution? I know that they are not 

 agreed about the origin of life. I know that they are 

 not agreed about natural selection. But when did we 

 ever ask Dr. Riley to let us teach any particular theory 

 of natural selection or the origin of life in the schools 

 of America? No one ever asked that those particular 

 theories should be given to children. 



The issue before you tonight is this : Is the fact 

 of evolution true? Particular theories of evolution 

 do not matter to you. 



I repeat : All the living experts in the world are 

 agreed and have been agreed for twenty-five years on 

 the fact of evolution, and that is the fact that we want 

 taught in the schools of the world. (Applause.) 



I outlined five immense categories of evidence. Dr. 

 Riley complained that I did so slightly. What would 

 you expect in a twenty-minute speech but a slight out- 

 line of the massive evidence for evolution? (Laughter.) 

 What did he make of my evidence, first, as to the 

 geographical distribution? And, in particular, what 

 does he make of New Zealand and Australia and their 

 peculiar population? 



Why, he says, if your doctrine of evolution is true, 

 your higher forms ought to be evolved in those coun- 

 tries. Which shows that he does not understand even 

 the fundamental idea of evolution. (Applause.) That 

 doctrine of evolution is not that living things go on 

 evolving to higher forms. The doctrine of evolution 

 is that as long as the living thing is suited to its en- 

 vironment, there is no reason whatever why it should 

 change if the change would be no advantage to it. 

 Show me where the world is changing. Show me 

 where the environment is changing, and then ask me 

 for evolution. (Applause.) 



If, on the other hand. Genesis is true, all your lions 

 and tigers and elephants and men must have been in 

 New Zealand and Australia, but some great catas- 

 trophe occurred. Dr. Riley says, and very neatly des- 

 troyed the lions, reduced all just to that level of pop- 

 ulation, the kangaroo, which the evolutionist says 

 Australia had reached when it was cut off from the 

 rest of the world. Would Dr. Riley now care to tell 

 me why this mighty catastrophe wiped out all the an- 

 imals higher than the kangaroo and left precisely that 

 lower population? 



Then we come to the vestigial remains. I am not 

 going to argue about the Flood toni.ght. This is the 

 first time I have got any fundamentalist to tell me that 

 behind the whole case is the contention that all those 

 strata of rock, all those animal remains, are the out- 



