EVOLUTIONISM AND MANS HOPE 



of Darwin's contemporaries and still seems to a lew of ours. A 

 theory of the evolutionary origin of man was implicit in Dar- 

 win's On the Origin of Species published in 1859, and it was 

 made explicit in 1871, in The Descent of Man. Far from being 

 the center of the cosmos, man is merely one of more than a mil- 

 lion biological species which inhabit the earth. What seemed 

 to some people especially hard to put up with was, curiously 

 enough, that man's nearest relatives in the animal kingdom 

 turned out to be apes and monkeys, beasts held in so low an 

 esteem in the folklore that they seemed unworthy of a place 

 next to man even in the zoological system. 



This feeling, that the possession of relatives apparently so 

 disreputable as monkeys constitutes a derogation of human dig- 

 nity, a biologist finds hard to understand. An hypothesis re- 

 garded as likely by many evolutionists is that all life is mono- 

 phyletic, descended ultimately from a common ancestor who 

 bridged the gap between the animate and the inanimate nature. 

 Anything that lives is therefore our kin, and it deserves that 

 reverence for life which Albert Schweitzer expresses: "The 

 fundamental idea of our conscience, to which we come back 

 each time we want to reach comprehension of ourselves and of 

 our situation in the world, is: I am life wanting to live, sur- 

 rounded by life wanting to live. Meditating upon life, I feel 

 the obligation to respect any will-to-live around me as equal to 

 mine and as having a mysterious value. A fundamental idea 

 of good then consists in preserving life, in favoring it, in want- 

 ing to raise it to its highest value, and evil consists in annihilat- 

 ing life, injuring it, and impeding its growth." 3 



1. Progress in Evolution 



The history of life is a long succession of cycles of births, re- 

 productions, and deaths. But this is not simply an endless re- 

 currence of the same eternal forms. Darwin showed that the 

 history of life consisted of more than futile repetitions. In the 

 perspective of time, individual life cycles are seen to cohere in 

 spirals; evolution has involved changes, and these changes were 

 on the whole progressive. The immense complexity and the 



S A. Schweitzer, An Anthology (Boston, 1947). 



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