Asa Gray Quotes
I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.
Gray, Asa. Letters of Asa Gray. Edited by Jane Loring Gray, vol. 2, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1893.
The school board had been pressured by religious fundamentalists throughout the state of Georgia to affix these stickers to all textbooks as there were no textbooks that met curricular standards that did not teach evolution. As soon as they started this practice, a suit was filed in the Federal District Court which found the practice violated both the Federal and Georgia State Constitutions ({586989}). The only reason that the stickers had been used was to try and placate those religious fundamentalists of the community who were opposed to the teaching of evolution. See {586968} for a quote from the legal opinion.
The Bible contains two separate and somewhat contradictory versions of creation (Adam & Eve vs. the 6 day creation).
The Pope went on to state that Evolution was consistent with Roman Catholic doctrine, changing a position that had been taken by the Catholic Church and many fundamental protestant denominations. A few actually still reject evolution even after all the evidence and proof of the basic Darwinian theses. There is nothing in evolution that per se denies the existence of God or even that God created the universe and the mechanism of evolution. That is why the Catholic Church and so many Protestant Churches, Judaism, Buddhists, and so many other religions have no theological problem with evolution. Those religious groups who have difficulty with evolution are those fundamentalists (Protestants, Jewish and Muslims) who believe in the literal truth of Holy Scripture. They also assume that God designed each particular plant or animal species. Other religions hold that it was God who created the mechanism of evolution and that is how all the species developed and are developing today. Some religious evolutionists believe that evolution is God’s mechanism for perfecting man.
Darwin’s work had polarized England into two camps. Spencer was one of the major public supporters of Darwin. Tennyson expressed a similar intuitive view a decade earlier {627586}. Spencer reasoned that if an egg cell and a sperm cell could produce a human in 9 months, why was it not plausible that the cell could become a human in hunreds of millions of years.
Asa Gray is considered the most important American botanist of the 19th century. His Darwiniana was considered an important explanation of how religion and science were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Gray was adamant that a genetic connection must exist between all members of a species. He was also strongly opposed to the ideas of hybridization within one generation and special creation in the sense of its not allowing for evolution. He was a strong supporter of Darwin, although Gray's theistic evolution was guided by a Creator.
