Poor ape!
Media
Part of Panorama
- Title
- Poor ape!
- Language
- English
- Source
- Volume XV (Issue No.7) July 1963
- Year
- 1963
- Subject
- Wit and humor
- Rights
-
- Fulltext
- the conditions of the world to day. I am convinced that they could serve as an inspiration and a guide in our present en deavor to promote world peace through the rule of law. Writers and historians have characterized different histo rical periods by the outstand ing events occurring in each. There were, for example, the age of faith, the age of feud alism, the period of geogra phical discoveries, the revi val of learning, the indus trial revolution, the age of global wars, the atomic age, and the age of outer space exploration. May the last quarter of the present cen tury go down in history as the age of international law and may this conference mark the real beginning of that age. For this event, there is no better site than Athens the place of origin of those intellectual ideas and aesthe tic sentiments which have made possible the flowering of modern civilization. (Speech delivered at a panel discussion of the Interna tional Conference for World Peace Through Law in Athens, Greece.) POOR APEI The most famous of debates over a theory of modern science took place in 1860 when Bishop Wil berforce shared a platform with Thomas Henry Hux ley. The Bishop concluded his attack on evolution by asking Huxley whether his descent from the ape was on his father’s or his mother’s side. Huxley’s crushing reply, from his own account in a recently discovered letter, was: “If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere pur pose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion — I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.’ July 13