(1) The Earth Speaks to Bryan (2) Concerning Evolution (3) Evolution in the Light of Modern Knowledge

Abstract

(1) THE present widespread interest in evolution, largely due to recent events in the United States, manifests itself in the number of books addressed to the general reader which deal with evolutionary topics. “The Earth Speaks to Bryan” comprises five articles written for American newspapers and reviews apropos of the Tennessee anti-evolution trial. There is little doubt that, as Osborn believes, the trial has been a good thing for America. It has brought the chronic disease to a head and made the common people think about the whole issue. But in one respect it has had results which, to some at least, are not so desirable. So bibliolatrous is the general temper of many"American States, and so anxious have some American men of science been to show that the teaching of evolution is not, as Mr. Bryan amazingly put it, essentially atheistic and. immoral, that they have gone to the opposite extreme and tried to reconcile evolution and the Bible in every particular, and to gloss over the real differences which are inevitable between the supernaturalism of a revealed religion and the naturalism of modern science. Osborn seems to be in this category. He confuses religion with theism and apparently with Christianity, and belief in the soul as a psychological tenet with a belief in “the reality of moral and spiritual values.” He goes so far as to say that the “proof,” which he asserts has been furnished by paleontology, of the non-fortuitous nature of variation (as to which proof most biologists would be in disagreement with him) brings us back to find Paley's argument for the existence of God “just as strong as ever it was” in pre-Darwinian days. He, of course, asserts that “God used evolution as his plan,” as if this were self-evident; and actually states that the Bible is an “infallible (sic) source of spiritual and moral knowledge.”

(1) The Earth Speaks to Bryan.

By Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn. Pp. vii + 91. (New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.) 1 dollar.

(2) Concerning Evolution.

By Prof. J. Arthur Thomson. Pp. x + 245. (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1925.) 11s. 6d. net.

(3) Evolution in the Light of Modern Knowledge.

A Collective Work. Pp. xv + 528 + 4 plates. (London, Glasgow and Bombay: Blackie and Son, Ltd., 1925.) 21s. net.