The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Man, Nature and Professor Krutch One reason I like Joseph Wood Krutch is that, as I read along, I come every now and then across something which I have thought...
...The great procession upward from the amoeba has not been merely mechanical and not just accidental...
...His gift for translating technicalese into English places all his readers in his debt...
...Out at the University of Michigan more than fifty years ago, I sat at table with Dr...
...It was not until they were all in place and perfectly cooperating that the miracle of sight was achieved...
...Sometimes he is like Thoreau or Fabre...
...But it is silly to think of them as having been added one by one (as the early evolutionists supposed), for separately they would have been of no use whatever...
...Krutch faces up to in this book...
...As I recall, one of Bergson's points was that evolution is not exclusively a mechanical process, that progress is not brought about entirely by the accidental addition of this or that device which proves useful for purposes of survival...
...Most of us studied biology, physics and chemistry in college—and since then the sciences have gone on while our knowledge of them has either remained stationary or slithered away...
...This whole complex of mysteries, the beginning of life and the development of the myriad changing shapes of living creatures, Mr...
...To them joy seems to be more important and more accessible than it is to us...
...The human eye, for example, is able to see by virtue of the cooperation of a great number of mechanisms...
...It merely puts one word in the place of another...
...In his last book, The Great Chain of Life (Houghton Mifflin, 13.75), he is summing up and nailing down a set of ideas which have been floating about ever since I can remember...
...Almost always he starts as the mere entertaining observer of the birds, beasts and insects by which we are surrounded...
...When we tackle the mysterious leap from inorganic to organic —from the lifeless to the living—we stand speechless before one of the wonders of nature...
...He seems to come closer to understanding what the other sorts of animate creatures are driving at...
...In the case of the birds, he is especially successful...
...In a charmingly careless way he swings from character to character...
...But it seems to me that in some ways he does better and goes further than either of them...
...But they know at least one thing which we seem progressively to be forgetting and they have one capacity which we seem to be allowing to atrophy...
...Raymond Pearl, who afterward became a famous biologist...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Man, Nature and Professor Krutch One reason I like Joseph Wood Krutch is that, as I read along, I come every now and then across something which I have thought myself but which this ex-university professor, ex-drama critic, ex-cityman, ex-Easterner expresses better...
...Some principle other than the addition of accidental variations for the sake of their use in connection with survival must have been involved...
...My own robins and cardinals, the ones which flirt and chirp and parade before my window as I write, come closer to me and mean more because I read his books...
...He has done what a man can do to bridge the chasm which separates us from our fellow creatures...
...We have learned much that the animals do not know," he writes on his last page, "and developed many capacities which they do not have...
...The students who sat charmed by his style as well as his wisdom had no idea that the words which they were recording in their notebooks would later, as a volume entitled Creative Evolution, take their place in the history of philosophy...
...From there we would start a discussion as to which living creatures are superior from this point of view or that...
...After careful observation, he is convinced that many of them are not so different, not so walled off, not so unintelligible as many biologists would have us think...
...When our author gets round to summing up the scientists, I am less able to judge his achievement...
...A year or two later, I sat in one of those charming lecture halls of the University of Paris and listened to Henri Bergson as he made a philosopher's comment on the theory of evolution...
...Orthodox religious persons "explain" it all by saying that it is a miracle, a creation...
...His running fight with the more insistently unimaginative biologists furnishes much of the heat and humor of his chapters...
...But their explanation explains nothing...
...We would all humbly acknowledge that man is in many ways inferior to the wasps and the bees and that the meekest among the insects will probably inherit the earth billions of years after proud and boastful humans have been plowed under...
...In the end, the laughing biologist would have the better of the argument...
...Krutch does a good deal toward bringing his readers up to date in the various fields of biology...
...When conversation would bog down, Raymond could always count on reviving it by saying something like this: "It is becoming more and more clear that ants and cockroaches are superior to college professors...
...In making his argument, which seems to me overwhelmingly convincing, he has enriched our life...
Vol. 40 • March 1957 • No. 12
