APPENDIX 



THE MESSAGE OF THE BIOLOGIST 1 



IT is eminently fitting that we biologists, like virile swarm spores, should 

 periodically come together in a holiday spirit of mutual exchange, and after 

 giving and receiving our messages, go back to our life work, reinvigorated 

 and reoriented, to prepare for another brief period of social conjugation. 



The messages we send to one another will have little carrying power, 

 and little influence on the receiver, if they are not specific in content, limited 

 in scope, and securely wrapped up in the precise technical terms of our 

 own familiar code. 



On the other hand, the biologist would be wholly lacking in social 

 instincts if he failed to recognize that he also has a more comprehensive 

 message for the layman, who is largely dependent on the biologist for his 

 working knowledge of the great domain of nature-life, and by whom the 

 biologist is provided with the necessary means of existence. 



This larger message must have a different vehicle. It must first be 

 summarized, digested and metabolized into the vernacular, before it can 

 circulate through the body of social life, reach its terminals, and there 

 accomplish its strengthening and rectifying purpose. 



We may well ask ourselves whether we have such a message to give, 

 and if so, what it is, and who, or what, is our authority. And by "we," I 

 now mean all of us, not merely the biologist, but the astronomer, geologist, 

 chemist, physicist and psychologist, for we are what we are to-day because 

 of the underlying community of our methods and purposes, and because, in 

 our concept of evolution, we acknowledge the same mental sovereignty. 



This concept, of which we are the trustees, initiated in man a veritable 

 intellectual mutation, which is now rapidly expressing itself in new phases 

 of social action, and in the emergence, like the parts of a growing embryo, 

 of new types of social architecure. It is our duty to interpret this concept, 

 and to see to it that its real significance is understood, and rightly used 

 in social growth. 



The social metamorphosis which historians call the renaissance was 

 largely due to organic improvements in the system of educational circula- 

 tion and the transmission of mental possessions from man to man. Learn- 

 ing was democratized by translating the bible and the classics into the 

 vernacular, and by this betterment in transmission across time and space, 

 the profits of a dead past were made to flow more freely into a living 

 future, making those profits in some measure the mental heritage of the 



1 Address of the vice-president and chairman of Section F, Zoology, 

 American Association for the Advancement of Science, St. Louis, January 

 31, 1919. "Science," N. S., Vol. LI, January 30, 1920. 



See also two other papers by the author, of earlier date, expressing simi- 

 lar views: 



The Evolution of Service by Union, Cooperation, Conservation and 

 Exchange. Popular Science, Oct., 1914. 



Cooperation as a Factor in Evolution: Proceedings of the American 

 Philosophical Society, Vol. XV. 1916. Read April 15, 1916. 



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