A SCIENTIFIC ASPECT OF ZIONISM
ONE of the contributions of evolution to the principles of Science, is the demonstration of the unity of scientific law in all fields of knowledge. The great truths of Biology or the relations of the animal to the physical environment, hold in sociology in the relations of communities to their psychical environment. By the scientific methods of accidental variations and the survival of the fittest, Nature carrries on her vast experiments even as the research worker in his laboratory works by elimination and addition of factors and proportional variation.
One of the basic facts in Biology is that any change in one factor of the environment, is inevitably followed by one of three results: the adaptation of the animal organism, physical migration out of its newly unfavorable environment, or the death of the species. The classic example which illustrates this law, is the case of the long-haired English sheep, which were transported to Cuba. Some developed short hair to suit the new environment, some died, the remainder were taken back to England. Those that died succumbed to their inurement to a fixed physical environment.
If Science has demonstrated profound unities of natural law, so also has it supplied us with trenchant dissimilarities. Corresponding to the difference between mineral matter and living matter—namely, irritability, or response to stimuli, is the distinction between the animal and man, namely, self activity, or the power to set up ends and goals and to shape the environment to accomplish them. The first supplied the means of physical and animal evolution, the second the method of human evolution in its social aspects. Chronologically, the second method of progress is very short and recent. Historically social progress by self activity is but as a last minute in the years of the earth's story.
Yet its shortness is exceeded only by the rapidity of the changes involved and the multiplicity of the data registered by the passing races and nations. The progress achieved through self activity in this short period exceeds in human significance the slow adjustment of the aeons that preceded.
History rightly interpreted, becomes merely a series of grand experiments carried on in this planetary laboratory by races of men in their march to ultimate perfection as conceived and appointed by the Infinite and Omniscient God. To later generations is revealed the progress recorded by their forebears, and thus is it vouchsafed them to get a glimpse of this upward striving toward a perfect social morality, based on a pure and clean individual life.
In this destiny of all children of God, the seed of Abraham must needs play the part that history imposes upon them. The great truth of evolution is, that the past contains the germs of the future. There are no