Stimulation, Exertion

In 1831, a few months before the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, David Brewster wrote to John Phillips: "The principal object of the Society would be to make the cultivators of science acquainted with each other, to stimulate one another to new exertions, and to bring the objects of science more before the public eye, and to take measures for advancing its interests and accelerating its progress."

Last week in Nottingham, Sir Edward Bagnall Poulton, D. Sc., LL. D., F. R. S., distinguished zoology professor at Oxford, this year's president of the B. A. A. S., said: "The British Association provides a very favorable field for the discussion of many-sided subjects. . . ."

British scientists as a class are less afraid of their colleagues' opinion than U. S. scientists, and at their meetings they adhere less to the orthodox line of matter-of-fact reporting. In his presidential address Sir Edward, who is 81, indulged an old man's privilege of reminiscing at will. He has been going to B. A. A. S. meetings for 56 years and he remembers the shifting course of B. A. A. S. opinion about organic evolution. That was what he talked about last week.

There still exists a good deal of controversy about how evolution works, but even old Sir Edward cannot remember back to the time when the evolution process itself was attacked by reputable scientists. However, smoke from the old battle of Lamarckism v. Natural Selection has not yet finally cleared. Lamarckism is the theory that acquired characteristics can be inherited, that some profit from experience can be passed on to succeeding generations as a sort of protoplasmal memory. Natural Selection holds that accidental variations which happen to be favorable to the organism will be preserved by the survival of the fittest. Lamarckism is in general disrepute for the simple reason that evidence for it is scanty and dubious. The grosser physical aspects of it have long been disproved, notably by the classic experiment of Weismann who cut off the tails of generation after generation of mice without stopping the next generation from being born with full-length tails. But a few Lamarckists still insist that imponderables like acquired habits and tendencies can be inherited.

Last week Dr. Poulton brought into court certain characteristics which could not possibly have been developed by inherited experience, since the experience in question is fatal. Example: protective coloring in insects. If the coloring is defective and the insect is detected and devoured by preying birds, it cannot profit by the experience of being eaten or pass on any profit to any offspring. Only alternative is the neo-Darwinist conclusion that the insects which happen to have the most protective coloring will live longest and pass on their advantages to large numbers of offspring.

Wells. Writer Herbert George Wells, who believes that a Utopian world is not only desirable but possible if human beings would only behave sensibly, used to scorn the B. A. A. S. because it paid too little attention to Science's obligation to Society. Lately the B. A. A. S. has reversed its attitude, lends a much more attentive ear to social problems than the corresponding body in the U. S., and last year Writer Wells turned up at the Blackpool meeting, was enrolled as a B. A. A. S. member. This year he was at Nottingham not only as a member but as president of the section on educational science, delivered an address on a subject about which he probably makes more sense than any other living man. Excerpts from "The Informative Content of Education":

"Most young children are ready to learn a great deal more than most teachers can give them about animals. I think we might easily turn the bear, the wolf, the tiger and the ape from holy terrors and nightmare material into sympathetic creatures, if we brought some realization of how these creatures live, what their real excitements are, how they are sometimes timid, into the teaching. I don't think that descriptive botany is very suitable for young children. Flowers and leaves and berries are bright and attractive, a factor in aesthetic education, but I doubt if, in itself, vegetation can hold the attention of the young. . . .

Unpleasant Stuff. "I do not see either the charm or the educational benefit of making an important subject of the criminal history of royalty, the murder of the Princes in the Tower, the wives of Henry the Eighth, the families of Edward and James I, the mistresses of Charles II, Sweet Nell of Old Drury, and all the rest of it. I suggest that the sooner we get all that unpleasant stuff out of schools, and the sooner that we forget the border bickerings of England, France, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Bannockburn, Flodden, Crecy and Agincourt, the nearer our world will be to a sane outlook upon life.

"But I am not proposing to eliminate history from education--far from it.

"I believe that the crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilization today is very largely begotten by the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress in their history lessons. They take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism. I think we underrate the formative effect of this perpetual reiteration of how we won, how our Empire grew and how relatively splendid we have been in every department of life. . . . Equally mischievous is the furtive anti-patriotism of the leftish teacher. I suggest that we take on our history from the simple descriptive anthropology of the elementary stage to the story of the early civilizations. We are dealing here with material that was not even available for the schoolmasters and mistresses who taught our fathers. It did not exist. But now we have the most lovely stuff to hand, far more exciting and far more valuable than the quarrels of Henry II and a Becket or the peculiar unpleasantnesses of King James or King John. Archaeologists have been piecing together a record of the growth of the primary civilizations and the developing roles of priest, king, farmer, warrior, the succession of stone and copper and iron, the appearance of horse and road and shipping in the expansions of those primordial communities. It is a far finer story to tell a boy or girl and there is no reason why it should not be told.

Unimportant Region. "And I have to suggest another exclusion. We are telling our young people about the real past, the majestic expansion of terrestrial events. In these events the little region of Palestine is no more than a part of the highway between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Is there any real reason nowadays for exaggerating its importance in the past? Nothing began there, nothing was worked out there. . . . We were all brought up to believe in the magnificence of Solomon's Temple and it is a startling thing for most of us to read the account of its decorations over again and turn its cubits into feet. It was smaller than most barns. . . .

Unpainted Teachers. "Everything I am saying now implies a demand for more and better teachers--with better equipment. And these teachers will have to be kept fresh. It is stipulated in most leases that we should paint our houses outside every three years and inside every seven years, but nobody ever thinks of doing up a school teacher. There are teachers at work in this country who haven't been painted inside for fifty years. They must be damp and rotten. Two-thirds of the teaching profession now is in urgent need of being either reconditioned or superannuated. In this advancing world the reconditioning of both the medical and the scholastic practitioner is becoming a very urgent problem indeed."

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