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Evolutionary Bioethics Advanced By Ernest Everett Just: Implications For Biology, Ethics, And Theology, Theodore Walker
Evolutionary Bioethics Advanced By Ernest Everett Just: Implications For Biology, Ethics, And Theology, Theodore Walker
Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events
Ernest Everett Just (1883-1941) is an acknowledged “pioneer” in biology, being honored with a Black Heritage postage stamp in 1996. Here we discover that Just also made pioneering contributions to general evolutionary bioethics (distinct from special medical bioethics) by advancing a cell-biology-rooted theory of the origin and continuing evolution of ethical behavior influenced by the “law of environmental dependence.”
See especially “The Origin of Man’s Ethical Behavior (1941, unpublished book manuscript) by Ernest Everett Just and Hedwig Schnetzler Just, discovered in 2018 among the collected papers of E.E. Just at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University.
Accordingly, evolution is …
Bioethics In The Work Of Ernest Everett Just: + Missing - Some 400 Pages, Theodore Walker
Bioethics In The Work Of Ernest Everett Just: + Missing - Some 400 Pages, Theodore Walker
Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events
Biology + ethics = bioethics. Here we see that Howard University biologist Ernest Everett Just (born 1883, died 1941) connected biology to ethics.
According to Just, various forms of specific biology (including especially cell biology) plus “general biology” are necessary for explaining adequately the origin of ethical behaviors. Social ethical behaviors, especially mutual aid and cooperative interactions with others and the environment, are essential to evolutionary advances among living creatures, ranging from humans to cells. Accordingly, theory of ethics (moral theory) should have roots in biology.
Also, Just wrote an unpublished book-length manuscript—“some 400 typed pages” (Just 1940)—on seeking the …