Word: osborn
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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President Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, also a paleontologist, was to talk next for 15 minutes on his hypothesis that the organs of an animal have their own struggle for existence. That is why animals of the same general family have different characteristics. Example: the shovel tusked mastodon developed its lower jaw to scoop food from swamps. The African elephant developed its upper tusks to uproot trees for their tender top leaves. This Osborn theory opposes the Darwinian theory that new types develop from accidental variations of which only those survive which are best adapted...
President Osborn, however, delayed presenting his theory, to challenge President Merriam. Said he: "In pure races, such as the Swedes, evolution is undoubtedly going on at the regular rate. But we are a hybrid race. ... I think it is very doubtful that under present conditions of civilization large, mixed communities such as ours are evolving. . . . Hybrid animals cease to evolve. . . . Members of the mouse family ceased evolving at least 1.000,000 years...
...President Osborn sat down, Curator Ales Hrdlicka (pronounced hurdlitchka) of the U. S. National Museum, an anthropologist, rose to rebut: "There is endless chance for further evolution and it is going on. To assume that the evolution of man is ended blocks every road to the future. . . . There is that [Biblical] belief that man was created and not evolved. Sometimes it is subconscious. But it has its effect...
Ambitions Excited. Had President Osborn desired, he might have shunted this discussion aside and set his colleagues' ambitions galloping. Waiting in Manhattan was his veiled announcement that on Jan. i, 1933 he would resign the presidency of the American Museum of Natural History. He will have been president 25 years, an official 42. The way he told of his retiring was to conclude his annual report with the hope that by that date the third generation of museum trustees, whose remaining lifetime "may be estimated at 20 years . . . will be able to step into the boots of the president...
Maecenases. The late John Pierpont Morgan was a first generation trustee. The present John Pierpont Morgan is a second generation. His son Junius Spencer Morgan Jr., already cooperating with President Osborn on the Museum Endowment Committee, is obviously of the museum's third generation...