Page eighteen 



EVOLUTION 



February, 1931 



Fundamentalist Follies 



In this Monthly Feature Edwin Tenney Brewster 

 will refute all fundamentalist objections to evolution. 



THE ORDER OF CREATION 



The words of my text are to be found 

 almost anywhere in Fundamentalist 

 writings — for example, in the Bible 

 Champion, July, 1929, page 30. 



"The fact of the matter is, the evolu- 

 tionists first arranged the fossils accord- 

 ing to the evolution theory, and now 

 they turn about and claim that their ar- 

 bitrarily classified series proves evolution 

 — a clear case of arguing in a circle." 

 Interesting! Important! If true! 

 The fact of the matter really is that 

 the entire scheme of geologic ages, the 

 order, that is to say, in which fossil crea- 

 tures occur in the rocks, was not discov- 

 ered by "evolutionists" at all. The men 

 who did it believed, one and all, in spe- 

 cial creation. The main part of the job 

 was all finished off and done with dur- 

 ing the first half of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. Evolution does not appear on the 

 scientific map until the second half. 



Cuvier began it, and "Strata" Smith. 

 But Cuvier was the great apostle of 

 "Multiple Creation," whose opinion and 

 arguments discredited the dawning evo- 

 lutionism of his day. Smith was a Fun- 

 damentalist, who did not even agree with 

 the evolutionary geology of Lyell and 

 never heard of Darwin at all. 



Then came Sedgwick, Buckland. 

 Hugh Miller, and the rest of that group, 

 with Agassiz. Not one man in the entire 

 lot accepted evolution. Buckland and 

 Miller died before The Origin of Species 

 appeared; Sedgwick, though he had 

 taught Darwin geology, wrote against 

 him savagely and never accepted any of 

 his views. Agassiz, "last of the Crea- 

 tionists" wrote against evolution almost 

 the last thing he ever did. 



Even Lyell, the outstanding advocate of 

 evolutionary geology, did not accept the 

 evolution of animals and plants until his 

 epoch-making Principles of Geology had 

 gone through nine of its eleven editions. 

 So even Lyell, for most of his life, was 

 not an evolutionist. 



But all these men, creationists every 

 one, held to our present-day ideas as to 

 the order of succession of types of life 

 on earth — to precisely that order, in 

 short, that is now the most effective of 

 all evidences for organic evolution. Of 

 course they held to it: they were the peo- 

 ple who worked it out. 



In short, this oft-repeated statement 

 that evolutionists arranged the order of 

 events in geologic time is simply one 



whacking Fundamentalist Fib. In this, 

 present-day evolutionists have simply 

 taken what pre-Darwinian creationists 

 have given them, adding only corrobora- 

 tion and detail. 



A publication that does this sort of 

 thing right along, and evidently deliber- 

 ately, ought to rechristen itself. Bible 

 Champion indeed! Champion something 

 all right! But what? 



EVOLUTION AND THE 

 MURDER RATE 



"In England, a Bible land," writes Re- 

 vivalist Biederwolf in the most Funda- 

 mentalist of monthlies, the Bible Cham- 

 pion (Aug., 1929, p. 410) "there is only 

 one murder to every 178,000 inhabitants. 

 In Holland, a Bible country, there is 

 only one murder to every 100,000 of the 

 inhabitants. In Spain, where there is no 

 Bible, there is one murder for every 4,113 

 inhabitants." The Reverend Dr. Bieder- 

 wolf — as is the way with Fundamentalists 

 and their facts — gives no authority for 

 figures, but they seem correct thus far. 

 To put the same information in the 

 more usual form for all statistics, .in 

 England, on the average, out of every 

 hundred thousand persons, slightly more 

 than half of one person gets murdered 

 every year and in Holland just one flat, 

 while in Spain the homicide rate is 24 per 

 100,000. 



But alas for Dr. Biederwolf's reason- 

 ing — he stopped his figures much too 

 soon! There may be no Bible in Spain 

 in spite of unnumbered churches and 

 priests; but Tennessee, U. S. A., is so 

 much a Bible land that it was the first 

 community in the entire world to pass 

 laws against "unbiblical" Evolution — and 

 Memphis, Tennessee, where sat the very 

 first legislature that passed a "monkey- 

 bill," according to the official statistics 

 of the Prudential Insurance Company for 

 1928, 135 William Street, New York 

 City; released for publication, March 

 14, 1929, has a murder rate of 60.5! So 

 the metropolis of Fundamentalism and 

 Anti-evolution actually is more than twice 

 as murderous as Bibleless Spain, sixty 

 times more wicked than Bible-criticising 

 Holland, and 107 times more addicted to 

 smashing the chief of the Ten Command- 

 ments than the land of Darwin, Huxley, 

 and Spencer, where modern Evolution 

 was born! 



Moreover, the ten most criminal cities 

 of the United States, with an average 



murder rate of 38.6 per 100,000, or half 

 as much again as Bibleless Spain, all are 

 in the Bible Belt! Even Chicago scores 

 only 15.8, while New York, with its 6.7, 

 is getting well down to a tenth of the i 



murder rate of Bible-reading Memphis. 

 As for the great manufacturing cities 

 of New England, where half the popula- 

 tion is Roman Catholic and the rest 

 splits between infidel and "modernist", 

 where all educated persons for two gen- 

 erations have taken the ancestral monkey 

 as a matter of course, these run about 

 two annual murders per hundred thous- 

 sand persons. Cambridge, the seat of 

 Harvard University, where Evolution 

 first entered the United States, scores 

 1.6; the Yale district, where they have 

 lately opened a new museum devoted to 

 proofs for Evolution, is down to 1.1. 

 Several of these big cities do not appear 

 in the Prudential statistics at all, because 

 they had no murders in 1928. All these 

 "teach evolution in the public schools" 

 along with the multiplication table. But 

 Memphis, where they do not teach Evolu- 

 tion, had that same year 115 murders, 

 and Birmingham, Alabama, 122. 



In short, the oft-repeated formula of 

 the Anti-evolutionist, "Tell a man that 

 he is the offspring of a brute and he will 

 behave like one," works out actually — 

 but just backwards. It is precisely the * 

 persons who think they were monkeys 

 once who take special pains not to act 

 like monkeys now. England. Holland, 

 France, Germany, and the non-Funda- 

 mentalist parts of the United States aver- 

 age about one murder to the hundred 

 thousand inhabitants, and below one per 

 cent illiteracy. But in Fundamentalist 

 districts, where "monkey-bills" just miss 

 passing or go through with a rush, illiter- 

 acy runs 10 and 20 per cent; even some 

 preachers — Anti-evolutionists to a man — 

 cannot read or write; and the murder 

 rate, highest anywhere on earth, is four, 

 five and six times that average for even 

 these murderous United States! 



"By their fruits ye shall know them." 



Who He Was 



AT least a dozen EVOLUTION 

 readers have informed us regarding 

 the "Dr. Etheridge of the British Muse- 

 um" who is constantly quoted by funda- 

 mentalists as a renowned world authority 

 and about whom we asked in our last 

 issue. _ 



He was an assistant in the Geology 

 Department of the British Museum from 

 1881 ot 1891, forty vears ago, and died 

 in Australia at the age of 84 in 1903. 

 Truly, it must be tough to have to go 

 back that far to find a backer. 



