Darwin, himself, regarded his views of human descent as mere theories, useful for biological purposes. “Many of the views which have been [here] advanced,” he wrote[107] “are highly speculative, and some no doubt will prove erroneous.” Had the modesty of the great scientist been emulated by his disciples, we would have had no Scopes trial, and few of us would ever have heard of Evolution. Even now that we have heard so much, few of us seem willing to take the trouble to find out what it is, or even to learn to distinguish between the theory of evolution in general and that particular theory of evolution which Darwin advocated. Considered broadly, evolution is merely the idea that living things--and even things which we do not ordinarily call living, including, perhaps, intangible things, like thoughts and feelings--appeared on earth in a certain order, the lower and simpler ones first. This idea is as old as the hills, and was fully set forth in Moses’ account of creation. Moses held further that the upward climb was interrupted at a certain point, and that another cycle, another upward climb, then began. But as neither the Fall nor Redemption are supposed to be biological, this line of thought does not concern us here. A more narrow view of evolution regards the resemblances to be noted among things as the resemblance of children to parents. According to this theory, the tie which binds the universe together is the tie of heredity. Nebulæ give birth to suns, suns to planets, planets to the lower forms of life, the lower forms to the higher. The notion is not so popular among astronomers as it used to be, but it is still dominant among scientists in general and biologists in particular. Nor can there be any doubt that evolution in this sense has been the supreme hypothesis of modern times. Curiously enough, the most extreme Darwinians among our literary scientists usually balk at it, holding that while man certainly must have had an ape for ancestor, thoughts, customs and sentiments can be generated spontaneously. They trace their brains straight back to the amœba, but claim to have minds which are brand new. They scorn any philosophy which cannot prove that it was born yesterday--or at least since the present period of prosperity began in the United States--and born out of nothing. “Men,” says Albert Edward Wiggam, in “The New Decalogue of Science,”[108] “have never been really righteous because they did not know how.” Meaning, of course, that they didn’t know how until the “New Decalogue” was published, which was in 1922.