STATEMENT ON EVOLUTION-SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION- 1925

During 1925, perhaps as a result of the Scopes trial, a statment on evolution was prepared by Smithsonian Institution Assistant Secretaries C. G. Abbot and A. Wetmore. The context in which it was found, an attachment to a forwarding letter, suggests this was designed as a standard piece to be sent to all public inquiries concerned with evolution. The three-page statment notes that the Smithsonian, Bureau of American Ethnology and Zoo all collect objects "to increase the knowledge of the public." "The Institution makes no preference between rival religions or rival theories in its collections and exhibitions of objects illustrating facts." In regard to human evolution "the opinions of those [of the staff] best qualified to judge unanimously support that theory . . ." The statment then list 11 lines of evidence. Those of most interest in geological context are: increase in brain size through times; similarity in structure to other mammals; "every order of life shos similar evidences of development . . ."; fossils show a "progressive change" with man in the youngest strata; sequences of rock indicate the long expanse of geologic time; radio-activity further expands that time sequence; evolution in stars suggests "that evolution is a universal process to which man is no exception. The statement ends by noting that a belief in organic evolution is not "exclusive and destructive of religious belief . . ."