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"Every biologist," he says, "knows that his science—the life-sciences—can extend the mental horizon, give better health, improve the economic status and promote the social understanding of any people or nation that will teach the subject adequately to its youth. The peoples of India or China are restrained far more by ignorance of simple biological truth than by unfamiliarity with letters, arithmetic or the rules of trade."
Because the majority of young people do not get past high school, Dr. Riddle wants increased emphasis on science and particularly biology in the primary and secondary schools, where it is weakest and growing weaker.
He is exasperated because opposition to the teaching of evolution has not died out, although it is accepted as an ABC fact by every biologist of standing, and modern biology is unintelligible without it. As a horrendous example of pussyfooting, he quotes the declaration of a Philadelphia school principal:
"The old theory of evolutionists as to whether man is descended from the monkey has been over these many years.* Such teaching is discredited and is not representative of science and so will not be found in our textbooks. The public schools teach biology. In this study, the difference of the species is indicated."
As a result of such attitudes as this, says Dr. Riddle, "an eviscerated straw man is set up in place of the reality. . . . Many millions of our present and future citizens are robbed of a biological outlook, or they get one that is warped and unrecognizable."
After three decades of research on the heredity mechanism of the genes and chromosomes he has a strong opinion on the first thing that biology should teach humanity: "All men are created unequal. No politics or poetry or dogma in this; just a straight clean fact of prime importance to decent thinking on human social problems; and possibly a fact that must be learned, digested and assimilated . . . before unreason ceases to be a threat to all forms of democratic government."
* The relation of living things to one another and to their environment.
*Consensus of anthropologists is that man is descended from a generalized type of Dryopithecus, an extinct ape whose fossil remains have been widely found.