42 EVOLUTION MADE PLAIN 
and your great-great-grandfather a wiggletail 
but I claim for mine no such illustrious an¬ 
cestry.” 
Well, that settles it! To save our pride—or 
our vanity rather—I suppose we’ll have to shut 
our eyes to the evidences and reject evolution. 
After all, perhaps the world’s greatest thinkers 
have been following the wrong trail in the pur¬ 
suit of truth; instead of weighing the evidence 
for and against a theory they should have 
adopted the infinitely simpler plan of deciding 
it according to whether or not we like it! All 
anti-evolutionists find it necessary to appeal to 
our pride of ancestry to hold us to an ancient 
dogma. Even Mr. Bryan regards this appeal to 
petty personal vanity as legitimate argument 
against evolution. How they hate to give up 
the ennobling idea that we are the degraded 
descendants of a perfect, god-like pair! 
Are the lower animals so very inferior to 
man because, as my friend says, they cannot 
originate an idea? Lots of us higher animals 
could plead guilty to the same charge; and, 
what is worse, two or three generations must 
pass before the majority of us will even seri¬ 
ously consider an idea some one else originated 
—even when all the facts are for, and none 
against it. 
It is not necessary to bridge every gulf be¬ 
tween man and amoeba to prove evolution. If 
all gaps between species were filled with “links” 
as thick as down on a goose’s feather then all 
creatures from Shakespeare to angle worms 
would belong to the same species. In that 
