Maech 5, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



337 



to know himself. The message of science to 

 mankind has ever been the message of 

 intellectual enlightenment and liberty, 

 "Ye shall know the truth and the truth 

 shall make you free." 



The greatest contribution of biology to 

 intellectual emancipation has been the doc- 

 trine of evolution, that great theory which 

 has revolutionized all our thinking regard- 

 ing man and nature. And evolution is the 

 distinctive contribution of biology to civil- 

 ization, for it was in the living world and 

 especially in the human realm that the 

 doctrine of evolution came as the great 

 emancipator from superstition and igno- 

 rance. The greatest theme of evolution is 

 not the origin of species, nor even the origin 

 of living things, but rather the oneness of 

 all life. This is indeed the greatest prin- 

 ciple of biology, namely, that through all 

 the endless diversity of the living world 

 there runs this fundamental similarity and 

 unity. We also are living things and aU 

 that concerns other forms of life is of 

 direct interest to us. In the lower organ- 

 isms we see ourselves in simpler and more 

 primitive form ; we see man from the stand- 

 point of the whole living world, as superior 

 beings in another planet might look upon us, 

 and as a result we have ceased to a large 

 extent to regard the universe as existing 

 merely for us. In this intellectual revolu- 

 tion we have ceased to occupy a position 

 of solitary grandeur in a little human uni- 

 verse; we have not grown less, but nature 

 has become so much greater that man's 

 relative position in nature has changed. 



Contrast the old view of creation, that 

 the universe was made in six literal days, 

 with the revelations of science as to the 

 immensity and eternity of natural proc- 

 esses. Contrast the old view that all organ- 

 isms arose suddenly by divine fiat with the 

 view that animals and plants and the world 

 Itself are the result of an immensely long 



process of evolution. Contrast the old 

 anthropocentric view of nature and of 

 man with the new bioeentrie view which 

 evolution has revealed; the old notion that 

 man was absolutely distinct from aU other 

 creatures with the new conception of the 

 oneness of life. As Darwin so beautifully 

 says. 



There is grandeur in this view of life with its 

 several powers having been breathed by the Cre- 

 ator into a few forms or into one, and that whilst 

 this planet has gone cycling on according to the 

 first law of gravity from so simple a beginning 

 endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful 

 have been and are being evolved. 



Biology has changed our whole point of 

 view as to nature and man and has thus 

 contributed more than any other science to 

 the intellectual emancipation of mankind. 



Edwin G. Conkun 



Princeton University 



THE VALUE OF SCIENTIFIC GENEALOGY 

 From out of the middle ages when learn- 

 ing was treasured by encloistered scholastics 

 has come the tradition that science is neces- 

 sarily esoteric; and that pure science has 

 little or nothing to do with human affairs ; 

 and thus is to be contrasted sharply with 

 the humanities. During the past half cen- 

 tury anthropology, social as weU as phys- 

 ical psychology and psychiatry, and medi- 

 cine have developed into well-recognized 

 sciences proceeding by methods as objective 

 and experimental as physics or chemistry 

 and contributing to our knowledge of the 

 field lying between the sciences of biology 

 and chemistry; and of behavior and mor- 

 phology. To-day the man of science is quite 

 willing not only to apply to the human 

 species the laws that have been determined 

 by the study of other organisms, but he is 

 recognizing that man himself is as good 

 material to use in getting at scientific prin- 

 ciples as any other species; and that in 

 certain subjects man affords the best mate- 



