December, 1927 



EVOLUTION 



Page Nine. 



SCIENCE WILL BE FREE 



By Horace J. Bridges 



"INFIDELITY," said Thomas Paine, 

 "does not consist in believing, 

 or in disbelieving; it consists in pro- 

 fessing to believe what one does not 

 believe." 



This real sort of infidelity is in- 

 stantly betrayed by those who seek 

 to suppress, by legal prohibitions and 

 penalties, the doctrines to which they 

 are opposed. Professing their own 

 faith, they betray their iinfaith — 

 iheir secret lack of real confidence in 

 their doctrines — by the very means 

 they adopt to safeguard them. For 

 when a man is really sure, he is 

 terene; he knows that truth, as Mil- 

 ton said, can never be put to the 

 worse in a fair encounter; he is 

 eager for the justification that must 

 come to a true belief after the ut- 

 most skill and energy of its op- 

 ponents have been exerted to de- 

 molish it. 



The campaign against evolution 

 offers an inmiense premium to 

 hypocrisy and insincerity. If a 

 teacher believes in evolution, but is 

 willing to enact the lie of silence, 

 and pretend that he does not, and 

 to teach what he does not believe, 

 then, in States that pass anti-evolu- 

 tion laws, his job and his pay are 

 safe, and promotion awaits him. But 

 if he is determined to be honest and 

 truthful, he is penalized and cast 

 out. 



Can anybody believe that the 

 Fundamentalists would have resorted 

 to this policy of the Inquisition, this 

 revival of Dominican methods, if 

 they had seen the slightest chance of 

 the masters of science ever aban- 

 doning evolution? Can anybody be- 

 lieve they would have sought to but- 

 tress their dogmas by penal laws if 

 they were really convinced that those 

 dogmas could be effectively defended 

 by appeal to facts and reasoned ar- 

 guments? Who ever heard of laws 

 being invoked in the interest of 

 mathematics, or physical science, or 

 philosophy? 



Let the issue be joined then. "We 

 are in earnest — we will not equivo- 

 cate — we will not excuse — we will 

 not retreat a single inch — and we 

 will be heard." 



Whatsoever science discovers, the 

 schools shall be free to teach. The- 

 ories shall be called theories, and 

 hypotheses hypotheses. The facts 

 that suggest them shall be exactly 

 set forth, and our young men and 

 women invited to let their minds play 





i'blJ'Tfei 



New Umbrella, Mister? 



freely upon them. And established 

 laws — that is, theories found to ac- 

 cord with all the known facts, and 

 accepted by the consensus of the 

 competent — shall be taught as laws, 

 no matter what traditional doctrines 

 they traverse or displace. 



Evolution is one of these laws; 

 and we stand for it, and shall fight 

 for it, because loyalty to truth de- 

 mands this, and no other loyalty can 

 be permitted to come into conflict 

 with that supreme one. 



ENVIRONMENT'S THE THING 

 "p'OSSILS many millions of years 

 more ancient than the oldest fos- 

 sils previously known have recently 

 been found in eastern Finland and 

 sent to the British Museum. They are 

 fossil algae, a primitive form of 

 life which may still be found in one 

 form or another all over the world. 

 This calls to mind the question 

 often sprung by the anti-evolutionist, 

 "If all the animals are supposed to 

 have evolved from primitive forms 



like this, how does it happen that 

 there are any of these primitive forms 

 left?" — a perfectly logical question. 

 Logic often leads astray, however. 

 All the higher organisms did evolve 

 from such ancestors, but not all the 

 ancestors evolved into higher organ- 

 isms. Some of the forms were thrust 

 into environments that put them to 

 it for a living. LInder adversity — - 

 not too great — they evolved. Others- 

 met litle adversity and stayed "as 

 was" all down through the geologic 

 eras. 



The same "logic" is often applied 

 by the antis to monkeys: "How is 

 it all these ancestral monkeys of the 

 early Tertiary Period didn't become 

 human beings, so that there would 

 be no monkeys left today?" A little 

 homily will illustrate: If you take 

 a monkey, surround him with con- 

 ditions under which he has to scratch 

 pretty hard for a living, you make a 

 man of him. Take a man. give him 

 everything he wants, deprive him of 

 the incentive to work, and vou make 

 a monkey of him. A. G. L 



