A00432 - Book of the Month for the Month of July 2025: The Origin of Man's Ethical Behavior by Ernest Everett Just and Hedwig Schnetzler Just: Part Two

 "The foundation of religion is faith, its essential quality resting in a belief from which it never departs.  It is a purely spiritual manifestation, without body or the use of body, projecting itself into the future, the soul's inquiry after first and final causes. Thus, as do art and science, religion has its roots in feeling, although the feeling is more vague.  Belief preceded reason.  Man was religious before he was philosophical as he was philosophical before he was scientific, before he had a scientific interpretation of nature, he had fears and superstitions whence arose his interpretations of life and of natural phenomena.  Stripped of fears and superstitions, his religion, be it belief in God, in nature or in humanity, remains an imperative and that still has power to lead the world.  However much we intermingle religion with art."  (pg. 144)


"Morality, ethical behavior in broadest sense, is conduct, and conduct means action, premeditated or not, conscious and unconscious.  Action in ethics differs from that which portrays art and that which builds the foundations for science.  Ethical behavior involves the whole corporeal being.  Codified, it is the collective experiences of the species, hence it resembles all other biological problems that have an historical aspect always to be considered.  Although also a spiritual manifestation like religion, it is less a belief than the shadow of a memory; it lies less in tomorrow's expected sun and more in the indistinct haze of vanished yesterdays.  In other respects, it differs from the remaining spiritual manifestations: art endeavors to reveal relationship, science expresses relationships, and religion is a projected relationship. Ethics is relationship.  The problem of ethics thus lies in that domain of biology whose subject matter is the relation to the surroundings that is necessary for the organism's continued existence and perpetuation of its kind." (pg. 146).

"Members of any species are more closely related to each other than to any outside the species by virtue of similar, even identical, dependence on the environment.  Human morality is that intangible intra-specific bond arising out of common dependence; for mankind, a single species, is no less dependent upon his outside world than any other animal species.  Morality, defined as fellowship, fraternity, and equality, embodying whatever imperatives of justice, equity and of duty apply to the whole of humanity. No lesser application of morality is admissible." (pg. 166)

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Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Class of 1975
September 28, 2025  

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com>
To: Everett Jenkins <skipjen2865@aol.com>
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2025 at 12:41:18 AM PDT
Subject: The Book of the Month for the Month of July 2025; The Origin of Man's Ethical Behavior by Ernest Everett Just and Hedwig Schnetzler Just

"The abundance of animals and plants is one of the marvels of nature.  Everywhere on land and in water this planet teems with life  No less marvellous is the reproductive power of living things.  And it is not to be wondered at that men awed by this fact have become frightened by the possibility of a supersaturation by one or another species, man included, predicting dire consequences therefrom. The fear thus expressed by Malthus stimulated Wallace and Darwin, both students of the geographical distribution of animals, independently to put forward theories of a check to overpopulation." (pg  62)

"Having no singly localized substratum, mind has no special definition.  It knows no here and there. Having no moment, it encompasses all time.  It recognizes no now and then.  Space and time have limits because beyond these are yet unexplored regions of mind.  We create nothing only find out what there is.  When we have reached finality, when we have exhausted all mind, the universe will come to its end.  For mind is the mirror of eternity wherein we see in part the image of all nature, past, present and what is yet to be.  And when this image floods full the glass, so that we see stark truth in its entirety, the sun of our soul will be no more in our shrunken, shriveled universe." (pg. 141) 

"The activities of man's mind express themselves to various forms of spiritual endeavor; art, science, religion, ethics.  But mind, not being an entity, in the meaning of a concrete phenomenon, these modalities of expression as depositions of its diffuseness are never quite pure but intermingled with each other.  There is no art wholly free from science, just as there is no real science that lacks the quality of art." (pgs. 141-142)

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Class of 1975
August 15, 2025

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com>
To: Everett Jenkins <skipjen2865@aol.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 3, 2025 at 03:58:22 AM PDT
Subject: The Book of the Month for the Month of July 2025; The Origin of Man's Ethical Behavior by Ernest Everett Just and Hedwig Schnetzler Just

As I prepare to resume my compilation of biographical information on the Black Alumni of Amherst College, I note with additional interest the recent publication of a book authored, in part, by the father of Highwarden Just, Ernest Everett Just.  Entitled The Origin of Man's Ethical Behavior, Just and his wife Hedwig Schnetzler Just posit that there is a biological basis for man's ethical behavior and that as man evolves man's ethical behavior improves. 


Try as I might, I am finding it difficult to get this concept out of my head.  So instead of fighting it, I have decided to explore it.  Accordingly, for the Month of July 2025, I will be reading The Origin of Man's Ethical Behavior. I invite you to come along for the ride.

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Class of 1975

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The ORIGIN OF MAN'S ETHICAL BEHAVIOR (1941) by Ernest Everett Just & Hedwig Schnetzler Just: A Moorland-Spingarn archival transcription created by Theodore Walker Jr. & Lillie R. Jenkins Kindle Edition

by Theodore Walker Jr. (Author), Lillie R. Jenkins (Author), W. Malcolm Byrnes (Author), & 4 more  Format: Kindle Edition
“The Origin of Man’s Ethical Behavior” (Unpublished book manuscript, 1941) was co-authored by biologist Ernest Everett Just and research-associate-philosopher-spouse Hedwig A. Schnetzler Just.

In the opening chapter, “The Problem Stated,” they reject the idea that moral theory (theory of ethics) should be restricted to religion and philosophy. Just and Just say: “… we intend to treat ethics as a problem in biology … It is within the field of biology, then, that we locate human ethics, or better to say, man’s ethical behavior” (Just and Just 1941: 2-3 [also 4, 91, 146]).

Here, theory of evolution is enriched and advanced by linking
(1) primitive cellular origins and subsequent evolution of physical structures and functions
to
(2) primitive cellular origins and subsequent evolution of spiritual influences and ethical behaviors.
The origin and evolution of organic physicality is mutually dependent upon the origin and evolution of ethical spirituality.

-----
"... the efficacy of any theory of the cause of organic evolution is measured by the degree to which it is capable of sustaining the superstructure of a theory of the origin and evolution of man's ethical behavior" (Just and Just 1941: 16).
-----

Governed by a comprehensive “law of environmental dependence” upon cooperative interactivity with others and with the living environment, and in tandem with the evolution of organic structures and functions, ethical behavior “evolved” from our “very most primitive fore-runner” (Just and Just 1941: 12 [also 17]), from cells to humans.

And with appreciation for evolution as a continuing process,
and contrary to E. E. Just’s life-long experiences with Anglo-American anti-black racism and his August 1940 internment and September 1940 dramatic escape from Nazi-occupied France,
Ernest and Hedwig Just conceived that humanity is “on the threshold” of further evolution in ethical behavior, including relations to "the whole animal world" (Just and Just 1941: 176).

Tragically, E. E. Just died (from pancreatic cancer in October 1941) before finding a publisher willing to print a book connecting biology to ethics and environmental dependence. Before Just's death, several publishers had declined to print this book. In additional to Anglo-American scientific resistance to blacks doing science, especially at the level of theory, Just's work (during the 1920s and 1930s) came decades before bioethics and environmental relations were popular concerns. The 1941 manuscript was lost to the public.

Fortunately, nearly 77 years later, among the collected papers of Ernest Everett Just at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, pages and copies of pages from this unpublished manuscript (onion-skin and carbon copies of typed pages, plus typed and handwritten pages; minus annotated bibliography, lab notes, graphics, and final pages of chapter 9) were found, identified, reassembled, and transcribed from ink-on-paper to Word documents created by Theodore Walker Jr. and Lillie R. Jenkins during the spring and summer of 2018. And through 2019-2020, there was further transcribing (plus adding final pages of chapter 9 from deciphering and transcribing previously discovered, by Kenneth R. Manning, handwritten drafts) and co-editing by Walker, Jenkins, and W. Malcolm Byrnes; in consultation with Stuart Newman, Kenneth R. Manning, Charles H. Long, and Moorland-Spingarn curator of manuscripts Joellen ElBashir.

This book will be published soon (probably in 2021, with supplemental commentaries) under a gender inclusive title and subtitle: “The Biological Origin[s] and Evolution of Ethical Behavior: From Cells to Humans.”

Meanwhile, for research and referencing, this July 2020 transcription retains the original title, and original manuscript page breaks and numbers.

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The ORIGIN OF MAN’S ETHICAL BEHAVIOR (1941) by ERNEST EVERETT JUST & HEDWIG SCHNETZLER JUST: A Moorland-Spingarn archival transcription created by ... Byrnes, in consultation with Stuart Newman Paperback – July 4, 2020

“The Origin of Man’s Ethical Behavior” (unpublished manuscript, 1941) was co-authored by biologist Ernest Everett Just and research-associate-philosopher and spouse Hedwig A. Schnetzler Just.

In the opening chapter “The Problem Stated,” they reject the idea that moral theory (theory of ethics) should be restricted to religion and philosophy. Just and Just say:
“… we intend to treat ethics as a problem in biology … It is within the field of biology, then, that we locate human ethics, or better to say, man’s ethical behavior” (Just and Just 1941: 2-3 [also 4, 91, 146]).

Here, theory of evolution is profoundly enriched and advanced by linking
(a) primitive cellular origins and subsequent evolution of physical structures and functions to
(b) primitive cellular origins and subsequent evolution of spiritual relations and ethical behaviors.
The origin and evolution of human organic physicality is mutually dependent upon the origin and evolution of spirituality and ethics.

Theory of ethical behavior is essential to efficacious theory of organic evolution.
----
"... the efficacy of any theory of the cause of organic evolution is measured by the degree to which it is capable of sustaining the superstructure of a theory of the origin and evolution of man’s ethical behavior" (Just and Just 1941: 16).
----
Evolutionary biology and evolutionary ethics require each other.

Here also is a pioneering formulation of the law of environmental dependence.

Governed by a comprehensive law of environmental dependence (upon cooperative interactivity with others and with the living environment), and in tandem with the evolution of biophysical structures and functions, ethical behavior “evolved” from our “very most primitive fore-runner” (Just and Just 1941: 12 [also 17]), from cells to humans.

Evolutionary biology + evolutionary ethics = evolutionary bioethics.

And with appreciation for evolution as a continuing process, and despite E. E. Just’s life-long experiences with Anglo-American anti-black racism and his August 1940 internment and September 1940 dramatic escape from Nazi-occupied France, Just and Just conceived that humanity is “on the threshold” of further evolution in ethical behavior (Just and Just 1941: 176).

Tragically, E. E. Just died (from pancreatic cancer in October 1941) before finding a publisher willing to print a book connecting biology to ethics and environmental dependence (decades before bioethics and environmental relations were popular concerns). And the 1941 manuscript was lost to the public.

Fortunately, nearly 77 years later, among the collected papers of Ernest Everett Just at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, pages and copies of pages from this unpublished book manuscript (onion-skin and carbon copies of typed pages, plus typed and handwritten pages; minus annotated bibliography, lab notes, graphics, and final pages of chapter 9) were found, identified, reassembled, and transcribed from ink-on-paper to Word documents created by Theodore Walker Jr. and Lillie R. Jenkins during the spring and summer of 2018. And through 2019-2020, there was further transcribing (plus adding final pages of chapter 9 from previously discovered, by Kenneth R. Manning, handwritten drafts) and co-editing by Walker, Jenkins, and W. Malcolm Byrnes, in consultation with Stuart Newman, Kenneth R. Manning, Charles H. Long, and Moorland-Spingarn curator of manuscripts Joellen ElBashir.

This book is soon to be published with supplemental commentaries under a gender inclusive (and evolution inclusive) title and subtitle: The Biological Origin and Evolution of Ethical Behavior: From Cells to Humans (2020 or 2021). Meanwhile, this July 2020 archival edition retains the original title, and original manuscript page breaks and numbers.

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