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Evolution. Three speakers, although guests in Tennessee, spoke their minds on evolution.
Said Dr. Arthur Amos Noyes, director of the Gates Chemical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and incoming president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "While even less can be said today of the processes by which evolution takes place than was thought to be known fifty years ago, the fact that evolution has been going on and that many animal types have gone through definite stages of development can only be doubted by an individual who, like an ostrich, buries his head in the sand out of a vague dread that he may see something shocking.
"These advances in science have greatly influenced the philosophic and religious thinking of the scientific man, for it is a great mistake to think the tendency of advancing science is toward materialism. Just the opposite. The repeated discoveries of new and unexpected types of phenomena in the physical world make us realize more than ever the limitations of our understanding and lead us to feel with the poet that 'As knowledge grows, from more to more will reverence in us dwell.' "
Dr. William, Emerson Ritter, University of California zoologist and president of Science Service, declared: "When the idea of emergence is applied to racial as well as to individual development, there is left no trace of doubt about the adequacy of the creative power of the natural order to produce man, not only with all his physical, but with all his spiritual attributes."
And Dr. Forest Ray Moulton, professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, added: "This is the doctrine of evolution: that the universe is orderly in time as well as in space. It is naïve and provincial to think of evolution as a term applicable only to changes in living organisms. It applies equally to stars and systems of stars, to the earth, to the creatures living on the earth, to the mind of man. Sometimes these changes will be toward what we regard as perfection; sometimes in the opposite direction, but always orderly. Is there anything in this to corrupt the mind of youth?
"My opinion is that the religions of men, their yearnings for higher things, differ as much as their theologies differ. If this conclusion is correct, anything that modifies man modifies his theology."
Officers. As many scientific bodies do, the American Association for the Advancement of Science elects a president a year before he is to take office. Thus Dr. Arthur Amos Noyes of the California Institute of Technology who presided over last week's sessions was elected a year ago. And Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who was made president-elect last week, takes office twelve months hence. Dr. Osborn is president of the American Museum of Natural History.
AT BATTLE CREEK, MICH.
Race Betterment. From Nashville, President Clarence Cook Little of the University of Michigan and many another took train for Battle Creek, Mich., where, as guests of bustling Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, they attended the Third Race Betterment Conference. Dr. Little presided over the informal discourses of more than 50 men and women who sought less to present new facts in genetics or any other science than to show how the special sciences might apply to the problems of race improvement.
AT COLUMBUS, OHIO