Too Far to the Left?Author(s): P. H. YanceySource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Oct., 1951), p. 274Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20351 .

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LETTERS

THE FOUR IMMORTALS Lingula, Lingula, little tongue of time, speaking to us now from Ordovician stone, standing on your sand tube in bilious tidal slime, clearly comes your signal on the cosmic dial tone.

Sphenodon, Sphenodon, with greenish catlike eyes, with spiny intimations of stegosaurian pride, with double thymus promise of Mesozoic size, you give a Permian echo: the world and time are wide.

Ostrea, Ostrea, benthonic hatchet-foot, pellucid luscious morsel, sessile margarite, you bring Triassic tidings and on our table put the pure molluscan blessing, the gourmet's dear delight.

Didelphis, Didelphis, with pouch and grasping tail, and grasping hallux, too (surely, kin of man!), our dim Cretaceous cousin behind the unrent veil. How mighty are the modest in the geologic span!

Sapiens, Sapiens, the self-observing beast, the Pleistocenic mammal with four immortal friends: perhaps he may continue while sunlight is released- but none will note his passing when his sojourn ends.

READ BAIN Miami University Oxf ord, Ohio

TOO FAR TO THE LEFT? As you said in the July issue when you headed the

letter of a correspondent regarding the education con- troversy, "Editors are human." So I do not blame you for the, to me, extremely leftist slant of two articles in

the same issue, namely, Albrecht-Carrie's "Of Science and Stewart's "Human Adjustment to Social Law." You had in mind, no doubt, the enlivening of the journal by getting away from strictly scientific papers.

Of course, as usual, the authors disclaim any such tinge. Thus Stewart says (p. 59), "It may be thought that this is advocating 'socialism,' but there is danger in the acceptance of any set formula of this sort." How- ever, throughout the article he constantly apologizes for the Russian and Communist opposition to us as due to our attitude toward them. His attack on the "autism that dominates the press" sounds very much like what the Communists had to say about the American press during the Oatis trial.

Albrecht-Carrie is entirely wrong when he tries to make it appear (as the left-wingers and fellow-travelers do to lull the unwary into complacency with Com- munism) that Marxism is nothing but an economic theory. He writes, "There was no need of Marx to con- vince us of the importance of economics, better named political economy; in a sense we are all Marxists nowa- days (italics mine).... What this reflects is the changed nature of the modern world or, as it has been put, Marxism (meaning the economic interpretation of his- tory) (italics mine) is truer today that it used to be." Marxism means a great deal more than an economic interpretation of history. It means, as is only too evident today, a complete subjugation of the individual to the state. 'I'his includes scientists, as witness the genetics debacle in Russia.

P. H. YANCEY Department of Biology Spring Hill College Mobile, Alabama

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274 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

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