414 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1962 



hopeful that we will ever establish communication with living beings 

 on other planets, even though there may well be many such on many 

 planets. But I do not say we should not try — just in case I am 

 wrong ! 



Some of you will no doubt be bothered by such a "materialistic" 

 concept of evolution. Ninety years ago in Edinburgh, Thomas Henry 

 Huxley faced this question of materialism in his famous lecture on 

 the physical basis of life. And it has been faced many times since — ■ 

 for example, a few years ago by Dean George Harrison of M.I.T. in 

 his book "What Man May Be." What Huxley said can be said today 

 with equal appropriateness. He said in effect that just because science 

 must by its very nature use the methodology of materialism, scientists 

 need not necessarily be materialists. A priest wears material clothes, 

 eats material food, and takes his text from a material book. This 

 does not make him a materialist. And so it need not with a scientist. 

 To illustrate, the concept I have attempted to present of the origin 

 of life and of subsequent evolution has nothing to do in principle 

 with the problem of ultimate creation. We have only shifted the 

 problem from the creation of man, as man, to the creation of a uni- 

 verse of hydrogen capable of evolving into man. We have not 

 changed the problem in any fimdamental way. And we are no closer 

 to — or further from — solving it than we ever were. 



