CUMULATIVE EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION
By Horatio Hackett Newman
Professor of Zoölogy in the University of Chicago
No greater mistake about evolution could well be made than to limit its application to living organisms. There has undoubtedly been as real an evolution of the Cosmos, of the solar systems, of the earth and other planets, of the molecules, and of the atoms as there has been of organisms. All of these have much in common. In none of them is there any fixity or stability; in all of them there is rhythmic and orderly change. In none of them does the course of change proceed steadily in one direction. On the contrary, it commonly seems to proceed from states of less complexity to states of greater complexity and then to revert to states of less complexity. For example, according to the latest theory, a sun such as our own—and there are hundreds of millions of these in our own galaxy alone—is believed to have had many vicissitudes during its lifetime of quintillions of years. In the course of its wanderings through space it may come relatively close to another passing sun and during this passage give birth to a family of planets, each of which is its child. As one would expect of a sun’s child, each planet has a long period of growth, a period that lasts for billions of years. Sooner or later, however, our sin may come again within the gravitational reach of another sun, the calculated average interval between such approaches being, in round numbers, a billion times a billion years. When this happens, the first family of
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