According to Adler . . .

On the campus of the University of Chicago, Dr. Mortimer J. (the Great Books) Adler is known as "the activity that supplanted football." Last week "the Great Bookie" lived up to his reputation. Squaring off in the "Defense of Man Against Darwin," Adler delivered one of his favorite lectures and promptly started an intellectual battle royal.

Sponsored by the University's Roman Catholic Calvert Club, Adler faced a capacity crowd that jammed into Kent Hall, piled up in the aisles and overflowed into every available space. Then, for the next hour, he ripped into great chunks of Darwinian theory. Though he conceded that the Origin of Species (one of the Great Books) might properly describe the evolution of plants and animals, he flatly challenged Darwin's later hypothesis relating men to apes.

Man & Ape. Despite anatomical similarities, said Adler, men and apes differ "essentially in kind," not in degree. Only man "makes artistically," only men "machinofacture," only men "communicate ideas," and "only human society is constitutional or political." Men and apes, he argued, are as far apart "as a square and a triangle. There can be no intermediates--no 31-sided figure." And since there are no intermediate forms (no missing link), there can be no common ancestor.

Having rejected Darwin's hypothesis, Dr. Adler proposed two alternatives: 1) a theory of "emergent evolution," in which a higher species "evolves" from a lower with no intermediate forms; 2) the possibility of man's special creation by God in His Own Image.

Child & Pig. The fireworks began in the discussion period that followed the lecture. After the first tentative queries, student after student flung up his hand and demanded to be heard. Was not man's ability to think rationally only the result of his large brain? "The nervous system and brain are part of the body's sensory system," snapped Adler. "They have nothing to do with rationality." To another persistent questioner, he cracked: "Sometimes the difference between a child and a pig is not very noticeable, but the child grows up to be a man and the pig seldom does."

An hour later, the question period officially over, the discussion moved out across the campus, soon moved out across the country. A Harvard professor called the lecture "the kind of statement Bryan used to make in the Bible belt." At Fordham, an anthropologist countered with the flat assertion that the "old story about man being nothing better than an educated ape is completely false."

Frankly delighted with all the ruckus, Adler hopefully suggests that the violence of the reaction is just a repetition of the shock and bewilderment which Darwin himself caused a hundred years ago. Says Adler: "The reversal suggests that in our universities today scientific hypotheses have the status of religious dogmas."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.