 Thank you, Richard. It is my pleasure to introduce Gordon Kaufman, Edward Malenka Jr. Emeritus Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. Professor Kaufman was born in 1925 and raised in a Kansas Mennonite community. And he has borne witness to this profound faith in all facets of his life. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector, and after returning from his service, he completed his BA degree at Bethel College in 1947 with a double major in philosophy and social sciences. He completed his MA in sociology at Northwestern University in 1948. He then entered Yale Divinity School where he completed a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951 and his PhD in philosophical theology in 1955. He started his teaching career at Pomona College and then moved to Vanderbilt Divinity School in 1958 as associate professor of theology. In 1963, Gordon Kaufman joined the faculty of Harvard Divinity School as professor of theology and remained there until his retirement in June of 1995. Gordon Kaufman and his wife and lifelong partner, Dorothy, have traveled and studied for extended periods in England, Bangalore, Japan, South Africa, and Hong Kong. With this background, we see that the Kaufmans bring to us the breadth and depth of interactions with religious traditions that span our planet. The Kaufmans serve as models for promoting global understanding among all peoples. Gordon Kaufman has become one of our most respected Christian theologians today. He has written 11 books and numerous articles and reviews that reveal his conception of theology and its place in our lives today. His imaginative world picture presented in his last two books in the face of mystery and God mystery and diversity take into account contemporary concerns about our human biohistorical existence. He challenges all of us to join in conversation on the deepest issues facing humans today. It is this background that Gordon Kaufman brings to us today as he addresses the topic, the human niche in Earth's ecological order. Would you welcome Gordon Kaufman? Thank you very much, Professor Fuller. I'm very pleased to have been invited to this Nobel conference focused on the study of primates. I must confess right away, though, that though I'm quite interested in the study of apes, I have no special expertise in this subject, and I am as much a learner at this conference as any of the rest of you. I assume, however, that I've been invited to address you not because I might have some new insights to bring on hominoids, but rather because I am a theologian and a humanist who might have some suggestions to make about the larger context into which the questions we are dealing with here may be placed. A major question raised by primate studies for all of us, I suspect, is what they can teach us about our own humanness. In the two lectures we've already heard by Professors Rumbau and Deval, we heard fascinating discussions of the analogies to human linguistic and human moral behavior among other primates. What can these sorts of studies tell us about ourselves? In dealing with this issue, it is important to ask ourselves what sort of conceptual framework is most appropriate for thinking through questions about the comparison and the connection of humans and apes to each other. The general framework, which I presume all the speakers at this conference are working, is the theory of evolution, a sweeping conception that brings into interconnection and interdependence all forms of life that have appeared on planet Earth. Interconnections based largely on developments in time over some billions of years. Life has evolved down many different lines on one of which mammals appeared and eventually primates, including homo sapiens, us humans. Because in this conceptual scheme the other primates are all our biological cousins, genetically very closely related to us, the study of apes should teach us much about ourselves. I want to emphasize right away that I see no good reason on theological or philosophical grounds, certainly not on biological grounds, to call into question this overall conceptual framework. And I do not propose therefore to take up issues about evolution raised by so-called creationists. Rather, I want to take most of my time today examining some features of this framework as it bears on the understanding of human existence, in particular on the understanding of our human niche in the natural order. I hope my remarks will throw some light not only on what we humans are but also on how humans ought to live and on some of the major goals humanity should set for itself today. I will thus be focusing more definitely on certain features of human existence, not so much on apes as has been true in the preceding lectures. I want to, as I say, look not only at what we humans are but also on how humans ought to live and on some of the major goals humanity must set for itself today. These are no longer matters that can be dealt with simply in terms of the needs and values of individuals or even of whole societies or cultures. We live within a rapidly deteriorating environment brought about in many respects by human activity. It is a time of prospective exhaustion of such basic natural resources for ongoing life as clean water and air, a time of an exploding world population, a time in which one or another out of nuclear catastrophe is possible. Each of these matters being greatly complicated in many ways by global, economic, and political problems that no one knows how to address. It is essential that we learn to think about our human existence and its predicaments in ways that will provide us humans, provide humankind as a whole with proper orientation in our world. Orientation enabling us to clearly identify and to effectively address the major issues that we as a species now confront. If we can find a way to think more clearly about the place that human existence has in the overall economy of life on planet Earth, what niche humankind can properly occupy within Earth's ecological order, we may be able to begin bringing these complicated issues into clearer focus. I will be very interested to hear from the primatologists here later on in what respects they think their studies throw light on the set of issues that I propose to raise. I shall propose what I call a biohistorical understanding of human being, a biohistorical understanding of human being as a useful way to think about these matters. That is, an understanding that emphasizes and holds together in one both the biological grounding of our human existence and the historical, cultural dimensions of human life. Current evolutionary biological theory and what it can tell us about the place of humans among the primates obviously must be one of the major contributors to our thinking about these questions. It does not, however, as I shall argue, supply us with the full answer to the question about our niche in the natural order. An adequate conception of the human niche will be qualitatively different in some important respects from that of any other form of life. We humans want to know, need to know as much as we can about our place in the overall network of life because we have become aware largely in this century that unless we live and act within the constraints which life's ecological order places upon us unless we successfully fit our activities, our ways of living and acting into the environmental contexts that supports and sustains us we will not much longer survive. No other form of life. Trees, dogs, other primates needs this kind of information or would be able to make any use of it. We humans alone have available to ourselves technologies and knowledges that give us the power to destroy ourselves and much of the rest of life on planet Earth and in fact, we are already engaged in such highly destructive activity. We humans alone are able to envision the enormity of these matters to understand what all of this means not only for ourselves but for other species as well and we alone are able to deliberately set ourselves to amend our ways in respects that may bring us into better harmony with the overall ecology of planet Earth. For us, thus, in contrast with every other species gaining insight into our own niche within the web of life has become a matter of life and death not only for ourselves but for much other life as well. Now the facts just reviewed well known to all of us are the basis for my claim that the conception of the human niche in Earth's ecology will necessarily be qualitatively different from that of any other species. It must help us understand not only how human existence that is this form of life which is sufficiently conscious of itself and its own powers to enable it to imagine alternative futures that it might bring into being and which can in significant respect then deliberately determine toward which of these futures it would like to move it must help us to understand not only how this human existence of ours has come into the world but also what is required if it is to continue to survive and flourish in this world. Our conception must, that is to say give us humans a distinct species self-understanding an understanding that includes how in broad outlines we must comport ourselves in life how we must live and act for it is only understanding of this sort that will put us into a position to discern clearly the place within Earth's natural order that we humans can properly occupy and discernment of that sort is prerequisite to our moving more effectively into and living within our proper place. A conception of the human niche that did not include species self-understanding of this kind would not in fact be adequate for the kind of beings we humans actually are today. The picture or conception of the human place in Earth's ecological order that I will present in this lecture will, if adopted, a, help orient us with respect to major issues now demanding our most urgent attention and b, help motivate and energize us to address these issues. In the past, this sort of double function indispensable for self-conscious beings like us capable of acting purposively and taking responsibility for our actions. In the past, this sort of double function has been performed largely by the religio-moral symbol systems produced in human cultures everywhere. The various religions have presented quite diverse construals of the ultimate mystery within which human existence transpires but they have generally succeeded in setting out pictures sufficiently intelligible and meaningful to enable women and men to come to some understanding of themselves in relation to the context in which they lived and to live out their lives more or less fruitfully and meaningfully within that context. It was their religion, as Durkheim saw, that gave a people its sense of solidarity as a group uniting them in common cause and common sense of meaning. For many today, however, our traditional religious world pictures no longer provide this indispensable orienting function for human life. When we seek now to sketch the proper niche for humans within the ecological order of planet Earth, we are in fact exploring one more way of construing human existence in the world. That ancient and profound mystery to which the religions have all addressed themselves. Like the traditional religions, this vision will, we hope, illuminate the situation of us humans today with our wide range of knowledges and technologies and our enormous ecological, political, social, psychological, moral and religious problems. Let us begin with the general evolutionary proposition that humankind has emerged out of less complex or, as some would say, lower forms of life in the course of evolutionary developments on planet Earth over many millennia, and that we cannot exist apart from this living web that continues to nourish and sustain us. This proposition is, however, too general as it stands for our project here. For it tells us nothing about the way in which within this evolutionary setting the way in which what I shall call the uniquely historical features that is the distinctive sociocultural features of human existence are to be understood. The natural order is, no doubt, the wider context within which human history has emerged. But it has been especially through our historical sociocultural development over many millennia, not simply our biological evolution, that we humans have acquired many of our most distinctive characteristics, our increasingly comprehensive knowledge about this natural world in which we live, for example, and about our human constitution and its possibilities has provided us with very considerable powers over our immediate environment and over the physical and biological as well as sociocultural and psychological conditions of our existence, powers that go far beyond those of any other animals, including all other primates. We human beings and the further course of human history are no longer completely at the disposal of the natural order and of the natural powers which brought us into being in the way we were, say, 10 millennia ago. In the course of history, we humans have gained in and through our various knowledges some measure of transcendence over the nature of which we are part. And with our developing practices and skills growing in modernity into enormously powerful technologies, we have utterly transformed the face of the Earth and are beginning to push on into outer space. How should we understand, in connection with our evolutionary story, these features of our humanity that have emerged largely in human history? I would like to state the issue that I want us to consider in this way. It appears to be quite our development into being shaped in many respects by historical cultural processes that is humanly created, not merely natural biological processes. It is because we have been shaped largely by so largely by historical cultural processes that we humans have gained these increasing measures of control over the natural order of which we are part, as well as over the onward movement of history. In significant respects, thus, our historicity, as we may call it, is a distinctive mark of our humanness. How should we understand now, within its context in nature, our historicity, that we are beings shaped decisively by a history that has given us power ourselves to shape future history in significant ways? On the one hand, in our transcendence of the natural order within which we emerge through our creation of complex cultures, we humans, as we know ourselves today, appear to be radically different from any other living beings. On the other hand, in our absolute dependence on the web of life, from which and within which we emerged, we humans are at one with every other species. How should we understand this peculiarity of our sort of being, that we are beings with historicity, with this great creative and destructive power within the natural order? And how does this bear on our understanding of our niche within the natural order? The in-building of culturally created dimensions and processes into our human nature in the highly developed form in which we today are aware of ourselves means that human history has been as indispensable a factor in bringing today's humanity into being as biology. Even the biological aspects of the organism that has finally emerged as human are, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has pointed out, both a cultural and a biological product. And our present biological organisms, if left simply to themselves, would be so seriously deficient that they could not function. As Geertz sums up the matter, we are incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture, and not through culture in general, but through highly particular forms of it, Dobuin and Javanese, Hopi and Italian, upper-class academic and commercial, and so on. The growth of human cultures which increasingly came to include flexible and complex languages, a great variety of forms of differentiated social organization, the development of skills of many different sorts, the creation of innumerable kinds of artifacts, including especially tools which extend human powers in many new directions, and so on. The growth of human cultures and correspondingly of human symbolic behavior has affected significantly the actual biological development of the predecessors of today's Homo sapiens. It has had particularly strong effects on the evolution of the human brain, as Terence Deacon has recently argued. We are, then, all the way down to the deepest roots of our distinctly human existence, not simply biological beings, animals. We are bio-historical beings, as I argued in my recent book In Face of Mystery. Please note, I'm not claiming that other primates or other animals are not also, in some respect, or others, bio-historical. I am saying that it is above all our peculiar human historicity that has grown up in history that gives our existence its most distinctly human character. Only because of our historicity, to take a pointed example, are we able to ask the sort of questions being considered at this conference. Apart from our historicity and the symbol-creating and symbol-using powers with which it has endowed us, we could not engage in the activity of asking such questions as these at all. To think intelligently about our niche within the evolutionary development on planet Earth, then, and about the many enormous problems that we today face, all of them being historical, in significant respects, we must think in bio-historical, not simply physical and or biological terms. If our account is to provide us with some sense of our proper niche within the natural order on Earth, thus helping us address the complicated problems we humans today face, the complex interrelation of the historical with the bio, both in ourselves as human and in nature as a whole, must be given its due. We will not, for example, be able to deal effectively with our enormous environmental problems unless we simultaneously find ways to come to terms with the complex of political, social, economic, cultural, and religious matters, that is, with the historical issues with which these problems are interconnected. These historical issues, it should be noted, are not only affairs internal to each nation or society, they are international and multi-cultural as well. We must therefore find ways to think politically, economically, culturally, religiously in global terms, global terms which are, moreover, simultaneously pluralistic terms, or they will not in fact be truly global, for human history has, from very early times, been thoroughly pluralized. And there is no reason to expect this condition to disappear in the foreseeable future. Our conception of the human and of the human niche on Earth must be capacious enough to appreciate and accommodate enormous cultural and religious diversity, including, for example, adequate space for those who thoroughly disagree with the basic evolutionary and historical premises on which my interpretation here of the human niche is itself based. Only to the extent that our evolutionary understanding of human being is framed so as to help orient us with respect to historical issues of this complex sort as well as to the pertinent physical and biological questions, that is, only to the extent that it is a thoroughly bio-historical understanding will it help us identify our actual present position or better put, perhaps, present positions in Earth's ecological order. It is clear, I think, that given our extraordinary human creativity and powers, as well as the exceedingly diverse ways in which we have exercised that creativity in those powers, if there is any appropriate niche for modern, postmodern homo sapiens on planet Earth, it will be significantly distinctive. Humans are the only animals able to ask about the appropriateness of their present niche and the only ones capable of deliberately reshaping both that niche and themselves as well so that they and their distinctive and potentially quite destructive abilities fit better into the natural world that is their home. Our conception of the human niche must thus concern itself not only with the human place in Earth's past and present. It must also take into account the various possible futures that may result from our present activities, a very weighty complication indeed. What kind of moves is it possible for us humans to make when confronted with questions of this scope that go well beyond all established knowledges? Our religious traditions have long understood that it is only in and through moves of what they called faith that we can address these deep but unavoidable mysteries that are connected with our distinctive human powers as self-conscious agents, as beings who must act, as beings who must take responsibility for ourselves even though the future may be inscrutable, beings with historicity. That is, we can commit ourselves to this or that construal of the mystery that confronts us and we can live and act in faithfulness to this commitment. But we must recognize that all such commitments go beyond the knowledges at our disposal. Human life is able to go on in face of profound bafflements of this sort only because of our will to believe what William James called it. Because of deep-seated attitudes of faith and trust and loyalty that enable us to continue moving forward into an uncertain future even though adequate pertinent knowledge is simply unavailable. It may be useful at this point to look briefly at certain aspects of the religious framework that contributed to the birth of Western culture and which subsequently has continued to nourish our culture at least to some extent. Unlike most other religious traditions, the basic form of the Hebraic cosmic vision to which our Western religiousness is largely heir is that of a temporal historical process. The biblical picture portrays human life as in a created world, a world that began at a particular point in time, a world that developed in important ways through time because of God's continuing activity within it. This human story includes both a fall away from God and the emergence of diverse human languages and cultures and religious practices and beliefs. And it culminates in God's expected overcoming of the sin and evil that humanity had brought into the world, thus bringing it to the perfection originally intended. Now, although many of the details of the evolutionary conception on which we are focusing here today differ sharply from the biblical story, the overall form of these two accounts is much the same. In both, human life is understood within the context of a larger cosmic, temporal, historical evolutionary development. The biblical account, however, in contrast with the evolutionary story, as usually presented, is able to give this developmental process profound human meaning. It displays, A, the human dimension of the story, human history as possessing an overall unity from beginning to end, a unity brought about by God's continuing presence and activity throughout. And activity, B, believed to be creatively and redemptively moving humankind toward the full realization of God's original loving purposes for humanity. That is, in this story, it was the ongoing presence and humanizing activity of God that brought the past, present, and future of the world, and of humankind within the world, together into a coherent whole of profound human meaning. Basic orientation for women and men was found us in relation to God, God's purposes, God's ongoing activity, God's will for humankind. Motivation for humans to orient themselves in accordance with this vision was encouraged by the hope it offered of ultimate human realization and redemption as God's purposes were consummated. The connection between how things are in the world and which things really matter for humans, what is truly of importance to humans, was brought about and secured by the central role in the story and the specific character of God, whose activity bound the human and cosmic past, present, and future together into a single, coherent, and humanly meaningful account. Is there any way now, in connection with the bio-historical evolutionary story with which we are here working, that the past, present, and future of human existence generally and our lives in particular can be situated within a similar unity of development? I would like to make a proposal on this matter. I shall introduce two concepts that I think bring out certain humanizing dimensions implicit in the bio-historical evolutionary process with which we are here concerned. When our evolutionary picture is articulated in terms of these concepts, it becomes a vehicle that can help orient present human life and actions in ways appropriate to our niche in Earth's ecological order. A vehicle, moreover, which encourages motivation and commitment to live and to act in accord with this orientation. First, I want to call attention to what I call the serendipitous creativity manifest throughout the universe. That is, the coming into being through time of the new and the novel. Whether this leads to what appear from human and humane perspectives to be horrifying evils or great goods. Second, since the idea of a powerful teleological movement, God's purpose of activity, underlying and ordering all cosmic and historical processes has become quite problematical. In 20th century thinking about evolution and history, I propose to replace it with a more modest conception. A conception of what I call directional movements or trajectories that spontaneously emerge in the course of evolutionary and historical developments. This more open, even random notion of serendipitous creativity manifesting itself in evolutionary and historical trajectories of various sorts fits in with but amplifies in important ways today's thinking about cosmic processes. It is a notion that can be used to interpret the enormous expansion and complexification of the physical universe from the big bang onward, as well as the evolution of life here on Earth and the gradual emergence of human historical existence. This whole vast cosmic process manifests in varying degrees, I suggest, serendipitous creativity, the coming into being through time of new modes of reality. It is a process that has frequently produced much more than would have been expected given previously prevailing circumstances. Indeed, more than might have seemed possible, even moving eventually along one of its lines into the creation of us human beings with our distinctive history and historicity. There are, of course, other plausible ways to view today's universe. Taking up such a position as this, therefore, calls for a step of faith. What does such a step of faith involve? What does it mean to think of the overarching context of human life, the universe, as a serendipitously creative process or movement? We can begin to answer these questions if we take note of some important features of cosmic and especially biological evolution. Movement in and through time as traced today through the long history of the universe and particularly through the evolution of life on Earth appears to be movement eventuating in unprecedented developments, ever-new forms, not simply repetition of patterns that forever repeat themselves. Moreover, these novel developments to the extent they involve appearance of new evolutionary lines, for example, new species, each have specific potentialities for developing further in some directions but not in others. Such tendencies, as biologist Ernst Meyer says, are the necessary consequence of the unity of the genotype, which greatly constrains evolutionary potential. Ever more complex species have emerged along some evolutionary lines and we can discern trajectories of a sort eventuating in these new forms. These trajectories are visible, however, only to the retrospective or backward-looking view that we necessarily take up whenever we survey the past and there is no reason from a biological standpoint, for example, to suppose that the process of evolution has actually been directed somehow toward this or that specific goal or toward any goal whatsoever. The processes of natural selection, it appears, themselves bring about the directional momentums that emerge along the various lines down which life has evolved. On one line, our own, as we have noted, what may be regarded as a new order of reality, history, has emerged. The order of history with its high development of cultures and modes of social organization is the only context so far as we know within which beings with freedom, creativity, self-consciousness and responsible agency have appeared. It is not that the evolution of life has been a sort of straight-line movement up from the primeval slime to humanity with its historicity and its complex histories. Not at all. Evolutionary developments have obviously gone in many directions. Moreover, it is not evident that the human form is as biologically viable as there are many other forms. So from a strictly biological point of view, with its emphasis on survival and perpetuation of the species, there is little reason to think that human life is the most successful or important product of the evolutionary process. However, we are not confining ourselves here to strictly biological considerations. The principal concern at this moment is with our distinctly human need as biohistorical beings to find a way to orient ourselves in this evolutionary world. As we have noted, fully human beings, beings with great symbolic facility, beings with historicity, did not appear simply as the last stage of a long, strictly biological process. It was only after many millennia of distinctly historical developments in concert with continuing biological evolution that human existence, as we presently think of it, came on the scene. Moreover, only with the emergence of the particular historical standpoint of late modernity has this biological historical movement eventuating in contemporary humankind come into view. Only in late modernity could we tell this story. As we humans today look back at the gradually accumulating evolutionary and historical development that produced us, however, outlines of a cosmic trajectory issuing in the creation of beings with historicity become discernible. There are no doubt many other cosmic trajectories as well, moving in quite different directions. But from where we humans stand, with our specifically human needs and interests, and our contemporary human values, the emergence of this particular trajectory is obviously of great importance. For this manifestation of the serendipitous creativity in the cosmos has given us men and women our very existence, and it quite properly evokes from us both awe and gratitude. Let me make myself clear. I am not claiming, I am not claiming that we humans are the best or the highest or the most important of all species of life. I am claiming that because of our great knowledge and power, especially our power to destroy so much of life, the question of our proper place in the ecological order on Earth is an extraordinarily complex one, unlike that of any other species. I emphasize, as I have just been doing, the connection of our distinctly human existence, our humanness, our historicity, with the creativity in the ultimate nature of things, the ultimate mystery, clearly involves an act of faith of much greater specificity and much greater human significance than our earlier general affirmation of pervasive creativity in the universe, a type of faith. It is a sort of faith, however, not as uncommon among intellectuals these days as might at first be supposed. All speculation about and search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe appears to presuppose some elemental dynamism in the cosmos that can issue in the emergence in diverse locations of what we have here been calling historicity, human-like reality, a presupposition that gives rise to the hope that we may, if we search long enough and carefully enough, eventually uncover signs of such highly complex forms of life in regions far removed from planet Earth. Where the particular trajectory that brought human existence into being on our planet will move in the future, we do not, of course, know. Perhaps toward the opening of ever-new possibilities for human beings as we increasingly take responsibility for our lives and our future. Perhaps going beyond humanity and historicity altogether, however difficult it may be to image what that might be, perhaps coming to an end in the total destruction of human life. This basic two-fold idea, the notion of A, cosmic serendipitous creativity, which B, manifests itself through trajectories of various sorts, working themselves out in longer and shorter stretches of time. An idea consonant with modern evolutionary thinking, though not necessary to it, can help us define our appropriate place within the evolutionary cosmos that is our home. Our human existence, its purposiveness, its social, moral, cultural, religious values and meanings, its glorious creativity and its horrible failures and gross evils, its historicity, has, as can now be seen, a significantly distinctive position within the vast, otherwise seemingly impersonal cosmic order. With the emergence of historical modes of being, human being, explicitly purposive or teleological patterns have appeared in the universe as human intentions, consciousness and actions began to become effective. We can say then that a cosmic trajectory which had its origins in what seemed to have been mere physical movement or vibration has, in this particular instance, gradually developed increasing directionality, ultimately creating a context, a niche within which deliberate, purposive action could emerge and flourish. We are here beginning to gain some orientation in the universe as we think of the universe today. Let us take note of five points in this connection. First, this approach provides us with a frame within which we can characterize quite accurately and can unify into an overall vision what seems actually to have happened so far as we know in the course of cosmic evolution and history. Second, this approach gives a significant but not dominant place and meaning to the distinctly biohistorical character of human life and history within this cosmic process. And in so doing, it identifies the niche that humankind occupies within this process as itself, necessarily a biohistorical one. Such a biohistorical niche can be properly defined and described as we have seen only by specifying carefully not only the physical and biological features required for human life to go on but the importance of certain historical features as well. It is, for example, only in sociocultural contexts in which conditions of justice, freedom, order, and mutual respect sufficiently prevail and in which distribution of the goods of life, food, shelter, health, education, economic opportunity, and so on is sufficiently equitable only in such contexts that most children in each new generation can be expected to have a reasonable chance of maturing into responsible and productive adult men and women. Men and women, that is to say, who can take the sword of responsibility for their society and for planet Earth that is now demanded of human beings worldwide. Thus third, the biohistorical character of our human ecological niche itself gives us a framework that can assist communities and individuals to develop notions of value and meaning that will enable them to understand better and assess more fully both the adequacy of the biological context of their lives and the import of the historical sociocultural developments through which they are living. Thus enabling them to take up more responsible roles with respect to these contexts and developments. Fourth, because this approach highlights the linkage of serendipitous cosmic creativity with our humanness and the humane value so important to us as well as with our ecological niche it can support hope but not certainty hope for the future of our human world. It is a hope about the overall direction of future human history. Hope for truly creative movement toward ecologically and morally responsible though still quite pluralistic human existence. Finally fifth, a hope such as this grounded on the creativity manifest throughout the cosmos a creativity that on our trajectory works in part through the creativity of our own powers even though carrying much less assurance than traditional religious expectation of the coming of God's kingdom can help to motivate us men and women to devote our lives to bringing about this more humane and ecologically rightly ordered world to which we all aspire. Thus our human past, present and future are drawn together in this overall vision of the ongoing biohistorical process in which we are situated our niche within the ecology of planet Earth a vision moreover that will help us identify and address the problems in today's world most urgently demanding our attention. This frame of orientation and vision of reality is not of course in any way forced upon us. It can be appropriated as I have suggested only by means of our own personal and collective decisions our own acts of faith. This is a frame with sufficient richness and specification to provide significant orientation for our time but it can accomplish this only if we decide to commit ourselves to it ordering our lives and building our futures in the terms it prescribes. Acceptance of this vision can help women and men in our world not only those who think of themselves as religious in some more or less traditional sense but also modern, post-modern women and men of other quite different persuasions to gain some sense of identity some sense of who we humans are and what we ought to be doing with our lives and the hope that our biohistorical trajectory may move forward creatively toward a more humane and ecologically well-ordered world can help motivate us men and women to give ourselves in strong commitment to its continuing growth and development. Now I have deliberately refrained in this lecture from connecting the ideas of serendipitous creativity and of evolutionary and historical trajectories with the more traditional notions of God and God's activity. It has seemed to me important that the question about the appropriateness and the usefulness of these ideas should be considered in their own right as suggestive interpretations of the evolutionary universe in which we today take ourselves to be living whatever may be their specifically theological significance. But I would like to point out now in bringing my remarks to a conclusion that this world picture can, without great difficulty be brought into connection with faith in God provided one does not insist on conceiving God in overly traditional terms. Indeed, this overall world picture may seem considerably more persuasive at least to some if the ultimate point of reference to which it directs us is named God employing thus the most comprehensive and profound symbol in our western cultures and languages rather than named serendipitous creativity a much vaguer and less familiar notion. It is not overly difficult to set out the main outlines of this picture in terms of a theocentric indeed a specifically Christian vision of the cosmos and human life. In my book, In Face of Mystery as some of you may know, I have attempted to do just this. The world I've been suggesting in this lecture can best be understood today as a serendipitous process constituted by a variety of trajectories. On one of these, in due course the order of primates came into being and in a further development along one of the primate lines which may be continuing on in further creativity the historical order emerged. This trajectory including its biohistorical extension on which we humans find ourselves represents at least one significant direction in which the cosmic process has been moving in our region of the universe a direction which if and as it becomes increasingly attuned to the overall ecological order on planet Earth may eventuate in the creation of a biohistorical niche that can sustain human being through a long future. We humans are today being drawn beyond our present condition and order of life by creative impulses in this trajectory suggesting some new movements now required of us. If we fail to respond appropriately to these historical and ecological forces impinging upon us today, however, we may not even survive. Are we willing to commit ourselves to live and to act in accord with the imperatives laid upon us by the biohistorical situation in which we find ourselves in the hope that our action will be supported and enhanced by cosmic serendipitously creative developments? No other primates must face this sort of question. In my view, however, it is to precisely this kind of hope and faith and commitment to which the biohistorical trajectory that brought us into being now calls us. Thank you. Would you say that? I'll open up and then... Thank you, Gordon. Over there, I just can't hear what you said. Are you having some difficulty hearing up here at the table, one another? Yes, it's very bad. Ladies and gentlemen, please, there are some cards for you and questions. We are having some difficulty hearing one another here at the table, Pat, if you can help us. Richard, I sat down in your chair and gave you mine so that I could open this conversation. Dr. Kaufman, I am... You are our discontinuity in a conference on continuity. God bless you. All of the other, the bonobos, the chimpanzees, the orangutans and the gorillas, apparently, although related primates, members of the family, they do not have history. These are not historical, social, cultural families or cultures. These are not historical cultures, although there's a suggestion everywhere in the literature that recent literature that they are. But I have even a more difficult time imagining when does historicity emerge in the Homo sapiens, in the human evolutionary timetable? It seems to me as if there are humans before there is history of the type of your definition. The history that you're talking about, do the Neanderthals have it? Are the Neanderthals historical beings or is it an invention of 19th century German romantics? So where does the historical order emerge in the evolutionary aligned timetable of Homo sapiens, sapiens, which is I won't put numbers on it. There are other people here who are better at that. Well, I'm not... Let me just say a couple of things. One is what I was trying to say is that history and humanness are so interconnected, interwoven with each other that you can't say... It's kind of a chicken egg problem. You can't say first there was history and then there were human beings or the other way around. And like any other kind of evolutionary development, this has happened in very small steps. But it surely goes back farther than Neanderthal man, the beginning of tool using. And I gather if what some of the claims made, I don't know anything about this, but what I read in the papers, you know, if it is the case that the development of the large brain we have was partly in response to cultural developments and so on, then it must go back a very long time. I wouldn't want to put a number on it. Do we have any way of identifying that? I think some of the people here would be much better qualified to answer that, and I would be most interested in how they would talk about that question. Would you make a comment? Have we asked you on the way up to the Bonobos have history? There's this book by a philosopher called The World on Paper and he talks about how our current concept of history came about as we were able to write things down. And, you know, each generation, the younger individuals think, boy, those older guys don't know what they're doing and the older guys think, well, those youngsters aren't learning anything. You know, it kind of happens over and over. Right now, with modern technology, it's very easy to look back and say, oh, primitive man lived a nasty, brutish life. It was short and he didn't have all these comforts we had and he didn't keep good historical records and now we have this great life and now we understand our history and the crusades we've gone out and saved the world for God and we've done a lot of great things and look where we've come and now we're able to go to the moon and now we've got to save planet Earth. We've got to think about ecology. But, you know, you can look at some of the groups of Australian Aborigines. You can look at some primitive hunting-gathering groups and those people, because I've lived among them, have a tremendous sense of self-dignity. They know who they are. They know where they're going. They have ways of medicine that are derived from the forest that in some cases are more powerful than anything I've ever seen. They have a tremendous life that is part and parcel of the web of life. And they didn't go through the sense of history, the bio-historical kind of thing that you're talking about to get that. And I just have to ask, is it not... this need to somehow view where we are as good and it's come from some place that was bad and now it's good and we have to make it better. If you look back at what we were, maybe it's better than what we have now. Maybe we had before we developed modern technology the kind of thing that you're seeking. And maybe Bonobos and other apes in the wild have it already. It's an assumption that they don't have any history. It's an assumption that they don't have any language. Just as the way it was an assumption that primitive man had a primitive mind and his culture needed to be destroyed. I'm sorry. I have not expressed at all well what I intended to express. I did not intend to say anything about things used to be terrible and now how good they are. In fact, I intended to say that we may be coming to the end now and now we have the power to do it and to be us who are doing it. Which is a kind of situation, not of our goodness, but of how dangerous we have become in the world. I also did not mean to say that to have a sense of history is better than not to have a sense of history. I meant to say that the Australian Aborigines culture also grew up in a developing process. Their sense of who they are and what they should do and how they should live in their environment was also a historical development of some kind. It was that that gave them that historical development out of which they came and in which they lived that gave them their sense of who they are just as our understanding of our modern history complicated by also modern biological evolutionary theory and all the rest gives us some sense of how we should understand ourselves in the world. I did not mean to say that there are non-historical peoples and historical peoples. Human being as such is historical, grew up historically in many diverse ways and it may well be that we are the first that are able to see all of this in some kind of holistic way partly because of biological theory which enables us to understand that process going back much farther than any kind of historical memory can relate. But I did not mean to be talking in terms of better or worse. I think we may be in the worst possible position that humans have ever been right now. Questions from, yes, Duane, Rumbaugh. I appreciated your presentation very much. It was very stimulating and beautifully presented. But I do have a question of pragmatics. If you are correct and I believe that you are that we have proven to be quite dangerous to our planet the question is how much time do we have and what can be done to buy us more time and believe more than anything we need more time. And in my thinking the answers to that are relatively few and on the table the first one being population control which is probably the very toughest one that we could ever begin to face. I have an impossible time being optimistic about the people of the world through any agency or any biological process saying that we will systematically reduce world population thereby cut down on consumption, cut down on pollution, cut down on power consumption and so on. The only other thing that might be a provider on this count is something like viruses. And when these appear the first thing we do is to set out to kill them which is fair game. How do we get the time? How do we go about this? Especially when you very properly appeal to the pluralistic perspective that must be there otherwise it can't work really. Well I wouldn't want to claim to have the answer or any very good answer to that question I think that's the most important question. I would say and I agree with you that a very important factor in this whole problem is the population explosion. But maybe though I am also very pessimistic about our prospects, China after all has begun to get its population expansion under some control. They've adopted measures that most Americans don't like very well. And India may be making some progress. I can't tell really what's happening. So it has to be gotten under control. I agree with that. I'm not any kind of an expert on these things and don't have any answer. I just hope the people that are working on these problems can address them. Yes, Professor Galdikas. I would like to ask, given this biohistorical approach that you've enunciated, how do you envision the nature of God and the role of God in a modern society where some of the functions of shamans and priests in traditional societies has been taken over by scientists and biologists? Well, as I suggested in these remarks, I don't continue to think of God as a kind of personal being who is supervising the whole show. But rather in terms of the notion of what I call serendipitous creativity, there is a kind of... The notion of God as creator, it seems to me, has an important germ in it about the coming into being of the new, being very important. And that was, at the time, that idea was developed. Thinking of that in personal terms, in terms of potters and pots and so on who were producing things, it's easy to understand why God would have been thought of as like a great potter. I don't think we can make much sense of that kind of thinking anymore. And that means also that we can't depend on God or expect God, so to speak, to solve all of our problems. We can hope for some creativity continuing to work here, but whether it's going to get there in time or not, who knows. So my conception of God is much looser than the more traditional conception. But I think the notion of creativity is one that is worth hanging on to. It means the universe is an open universe. And there are possibilities there that we can't foresee. And that we can maybe hope for and work toward. Here are a series of equally difficult questions from the audience. A couple of God questions. Do you believe that God was created by man during the course of his evolution? I'm sorry, say that again. Do you believe that God was created by man during the course of man's evolution? Well, from my response to the last question, it ought to be clear that I do not. I believe that the idea of God was created by man in the course of human beings in the course of their historical development in some cultures, not in all. But I do not believe that the, what I'm calling the creativity at work in the universe was created by human beings. It was what human beings themselves are partly, in part, a product of. From a theological perspective, what effect does the existence of the great ape species so similar to us and so many respects have on the notion of the soul? I would just like to briefly comment on that. And that is, I had a student, his name was Gary Shapiro, now Dr. Gary Shapiro, and he taught sign language to orangutans in the forest, and this is the only case that I know of where free-ranging great apes in the wild were taught symbolic communication of a type established by humans. And Gary got into some very heated debates with the local missionary who was a traditional Roman Catholic, and this priest was very concerned because he felt that if Gary was succeeded in teaching this great ape language, then he would give the great apes a soul, and then this Roman Catholic priest would be responsible for those souls. The Roman Catholic priest, and then he would have to convert them to Roman Catholicism. And this was a very serious issue. Sure. Well, Wade Lutherans would be willing to send missionaries to them. I wish again to thank Dr. Kaufman for a magnificent, large, complex address, and thank the panel. Please, there are a few tickets remaining for the Elling concert tonight. Kurt Elling was called by Dave Brubeck the best thing that's happened to jazz over the years. So he really is something very special. After that concert, we'll gather some of us in the dive for just a late cup of coffee or so and a little bit of conversation. There is an art exhibit. There is a film festival tonight. Now over in the Wallenberg Hall, that's in the Nobel Hall of Science, and the Wallenberg Hall has been completely redone, and I think at 7 o'clock, or 8 o'clock, films until midnight, and the films will be listed there. These are all films that were created in the last five, six years about the behavior and language of the Great Apes. And some of them feature people who are at this table. We will reconvene tomorrow for the lecture of Dr. Susave Drumbal at 10 o'clock in this house. Good night.