Biodiversity--the genetic variety of life--is an exuberant product of the evolutionary past, a vast human-supportive resource (aesthetic, intellectual, and material) of the present, and a rich legacy to cherish and preserve for the future. Two urgent challenges, and opportunities, for 21st-century science are to gain deeper insights into the evolutionary processes that foster biotic diversity, and to translate that understanding into workable solutions for the regional and global crises that biodiversity currently faces. A grasp of evolutionary principles and processes is important in other societal arenas as well, such as education, medicine, sociology, and other applied fields including agriculture, pharmacology, and biotechnology. The ramifications of evolutionary thought also extend into learned realms traditionally reserved for philosophy and religion.
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Although most of In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation and Conflict is about the new topics that are being treated as part of social evolution, such as genes, microbes, and medicine, the old fundamental subjects still matter and remain the object of vigorous research. The first four chapters revisit some of these standard arenas, including social insects, cooperatively breeding birds, mutualisms, and how to model social evolution.
Memory can sometimes interpret events more accurately than present experience. It sees them in their true proportion, as the traveller sees the higher Alps in their real grandeur, not from the valley at their feet, but from the distant plain. In those forty days the disciples of Christ would have understood the meaning of their Master's life better than when they were with Him day after day in the villages and fields of Galilee. And now that He was preparing for His triumphal departure they would have discerned with increasing clearness, as to-day's Collect says, that He had been given by the Eternal Father, not merely to die as a Sacrifice for sin, but also to live as an Ensample of Godly life, a model of what human life should be. They would have anticipated St. Paul's desire to "grow up unto Him in all things, which is the Head, even Christ," and the prayer which we have offered to-day "that we may daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of His most holy life."
Now, the most obvious truths are often the most overlooked. They do not provoke opposition and the defence which opposition calls forth, and as a consequence they are apt to be less before the minds of men than other truths which are much more disputable. If this were not the case it would be unnecessary to observe that the first requisite for all good work is a good model. If a model does not exist, it must be projected by the artist before he touches his brush, or his chisel. He must have clearly placed before his mind's eye, and perhaps outlined in pencil, or shaped in clay, the conception to which he hopes to give a lasting embodiment. Not to, have a model is to waste time, skill, temper, material, in efforts which have no promise of even moderate success, or of anything other or better than pathetic failure and confusion. Even the Almighty Artist when He made the worlds beheld the archetypal forms of things to which He was giving existence, traced out in His co-equal wisdom, or Word, or Son. And no human workman, be he on a higher or a lower level in the school of production, can dispense with this first requisite--a model of that which he desires to achieve. When from this it is inferred that the moral or [40/41] spiritual artist needs a. model no less than the architect or painter, or sculptor, it will perhaps be objected that moral or spiritual success is a matter not of workmanship so much as of growth. Each tree keeps close to the type of its species. The elm as it grows up has no model elm before it, and yet it does not wander away from its type into that of the oak, or the beech: it grows, and lives, and dies an elm, and this not in obedience to any outward model but by the spontaneous prompting from within and the law of its life.
And the Apostle in the very words before us speaks of the Christian life also as a growth--a comparison which at first sight might appear to do away with the need of an external model. No metaphor, my brethren, can be pressed with impunity to warrant any conclusions beyond its immediate purpose, and when St. Paul speaks of the Christian life as a growth, he does not forget that man is much more than a tree, that he is a being with a free, self-determining will. This will of man, both for good and evil, can very largely modify the growth, whether of natural character and propensities, or of spiritual powers and endowments within him. Undoubtedly the natural character which we inherit from our parents goes for a great deal.
Much is said in our day, and with a large measure of substantial truth, about heredity, the transmission of a type of body and mind and character from father to son, from one to another generation of a race; but this transmission is always subject to modifications on the part of the individual. Each separate will may mould into new varieties the type of life which has come down from the parent stock; and it is the sense of this liability to variation--possibly in a large number of cases for the worse--which makes each nation instinctively fix upon certain men who are held most perfectly to represent all that is best in it as models for the imitation of those who are just entering on their share in its life.
Every country in Europe, and England not less than others, has its representative men, its heroes, some of them numbered with the dead, some of them still tarrying among us, though their day of active labour may have passed; and as we direct the attention of boys and of young men to these great Englishmen, we say: "There, and there, and there, is a model which in your measure, in your circumstances, [41/42] according to your abilities, you should try to copy. Keep it before you, study the temper and the characteristics which it offers, and you will not disgrace the country which has produced it, the England which is also your own."
Indeed most of us do for ourselves practically feel the need of a model, and the natural thing for a well-disposed boy is to make a model of his father. His father, he assumes-, is a sample of what a man should be, a model ready made and placed by God's providence in his way, so that he should have daily and hourly opportunities of studying it. A generous son will see nothing but what is good in his father, will admit no deficiencies in him if he can possibly help. Some forty years ago some friends were talking in the presence of John Keble, the poet, of the evils which pluralism--the holding by clergymen of more benefices than one at a time--had in bygone generations inflicted on the Church of England. "I don't know," observed Mr. Keble somewhat briskly, "my father was a pluralist, and he was not a bad sort of person," the fact being that the old clergyman had at one time in his life held two very small benefices at no great distance from each other. Certainly pluralism of that kind was no great harm. But what a serious consideration have we here for thoughtful parents; that a bad, or even a defective example on their part may do mischief in the exact ratio of the trustfulness and dutifulness of their children! Have we not lately had one terrible example of this brought home in the course of public justice to every one in the country, showing, on even a tragical scale, that where a home is not ruled by love, where a father's life presents nothing to his children that can win their affections or that can command their respect, deeds are possible which make ordinary murder seem by comparison tame and almost venial, deeds which even the heathen world would brand as the worst--since parricide most violently outrages the better feelings of unassisted human, nature--that it is within the compass of human opportunity to achieve.
There is, indeed, a profound law of our nature which alone explains the immense importance of a pattern or model in life. Whether we will or not, we men do become like that which we admire. If our heroes should be men of ability, but not men of principle, more intent upon personal credit or success than upon the public advantage, more [42/43] anxious to outwit opposition than to secure the triumph of what is right and true, we shall insensibly but surely become like them too. And if they are men whose first idea is to promote, so far as they can, the reign of righteousness in themselves and among other men, amid whatever failures, and with whatever mistakes in detail, as to what righteousness may imply or mean, we shall become in our measure, but to our great and lasting gain, like them too. In this matter we may adapt, from another and a much more solemn connection, those words of the Apostle: "As is the earthy such are they also that are earthy, and as the heavenly such are they also that are heavenly."
A model, then, is a necessity in man's moral as well as in his artistic activities, and there are at least as many models as there are races of men, nations, callings in life, kinds of occupation. Is there any one model higher than these, supreme, archetypal, a model not for the men of one trade or art, but for the men of all, not for one age, or country, or racer but for all, a model not only for Englishmen, or Frenchmen, for Europeans, or Asiatics, for the men of the old, or of the modern world, but for all, a model for man as man, in gazing on whom, in admiring whom, in striving to imitate whom, man makes the very best he can of his manhood, gives scope and play to all in it that is highest and noblest, and carries it forward to those heights of excellence at which its real place in the universe, moral as well as material, is most clearly discerned? Yes, the Apostle says, there is such a Model, Jesus Christ our Lord. He is the ideal Man. His excellence is dwarfed by none of the limitations which make all other models less than universal in their value. Although a Jew, He belongs plainly to all the races of the world, although a peasant He offers that which the greatest monarchs may do well to imitate, although untrained in school or university, His majestic intelligence dwarfs down the wisdom of other men to the relative rank of crude guesses, or of scarcely disguised nonsense, although living in the world eighteen centuries and more ago, He is not less a Model for the men of our day than for the men of His own. 2ff7e9595c
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