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This chapter explores the ideas of honoring ancestors and self in the classroom, along the borders. To begin this exploration, it focuses on some aspects of the borders of black lives in the United States. The borders of education is the focus in the next section of the book. The idea of honoring ancestors is related to the course, “Womanist Spiritual Autobiography”; and honoring self is discussed in relation to the course “Womanist Theology and Literature”.

Richard Dawkins is a public intellectual and the best-selling author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Ancestor’s Tale, The God Delusion, and many other books. Dawkins, known as an evolutionist and materialist, is also well known for being an atheist and anti-religious. He has become an outspoken foe of religion, using science to discredit religious beliefs. Many serious theologians find Dawkins’ reaction to religion naïve, unfounded, and puzzling in terms of both its ferocity and its origins. Dawkins remains active as an important cultural voice, but his vision of both science and religion is one that many find inadequate and unsettling, strangely archaic in a post-modern world.

The first section of the chapter describes the main features of the original society of the vory-v-zakone – thieves-with-a-code-of-honour – the criminal fraternity that flourished in the Soviet labour camps between the 1920s and the 1950s, and re-emerged in the 1970s. The account given is based on archival data that have not been presented before, and describes the rituals and practices involved, the vory code of behaviour, vory activities outside prison, and punishment in vory courts. The second section addresses the question of the origins of the vory-v-zakone society, namely, whether it was a Soviet or pre-Revolutionary phenomenon. It is concluded that the fraternity most likely evolved from pre-Revolutionary criminal nineteenth-century arteli (guilds) of ordinary thieves.

This chapter considers the question of the responsibility that present day generations bear as a result of the actions of their ancestors. Is it morally significant that we share a national identity with those responsible for the perpetration of historic injustice? The chapter argues that we can be guilty of wrongdoing stemming from past wrongdoing if we are members of nations that are responsible for an ongoing failure to fulfil rectificatory duties. This rests upon three claims: that the failure to fulfil rectificatory duties is unjust; that nations can bear collective responsibility for the actions of their leaders; and that nations are comprised of overlapping generations rather than successive generations. The claim that present day parties should apologise for historic injustice is then considered, and it is argued that such an apology is best understood in relation to an ongoing failure to fulfil rectificatory duties.

This chapter discusses how Deuteronomistic redactor (Dtr) has shaped the narrative of Jehu (2 Kgs. 9-10) to portray the ruler favourably. Since Dtr's positive perspective is seen most clearly in the righteous regnal evaluation of Jehu, it is discussed first, despite its location toward the end of the narrative (2 Kgs. 10: 30). The chapter then goes on to investigate Jehu's ancestry in both Hebrew and Assyrian sources. Jehu's anointing and divine election are mentioned at the beginning of the narrative (2 Kgs. 9: 1-13) and therefore they are analyzed next in the chapter. The following two sections discuss Jehu's violent rebellion, which dominates the narrative (2 Kgs. 9: 14-10: 27), and Jehu's contracting borders, which is limited to a few verses (2 Kgs. 10: 32-3). Jehu's Assyrian tribute is then discussed (2.7) before the findings of the chapter are summarized.

Halevi justifies his journey to himself and others in four poems. In the first poem, he reproaches himself for worldliness and urges himself to put his ideas of trust in God to the test. In the second poem, he disputes the contention that the Holy Land has lost its sacredness since the Jews were exiled by asserting that it will be the locus of resurrection of the dead and by unleashing his famous tirade against Greek philosophy. The third poem is a reply to someone who attempted to persuade him to stay in Egypt on the grounds that it, too, was the site of miracles for the Jewish people. The last poem is a long internal monologue in which he responds to friends who objected not only to his pilgrimage but to his whole turn from worldliness to piety.

A truism of ethnology is that death rituals and related practices are oriented more toward the living than the dead; that they seek to re-organize social relationships that have been damaged by the death of a loved one. This chapter shows how Garhwali beliefs and practices relating to death, ghosts, and exorcism accomplish this task. Fundamentally, they do so by transforming the ambivalent, dangerous ghost into a beneficent, auspicious ancestor.

The modern human is a product of six million years of evolution wherein it is assumed that the ancestor of man resembles that of a chimpanzee. This assumption is based on the similarities of the ape-like brain size and post-cranial characteristics of the earliest hominid species to chimpanzees. Whilst it is unclear whether chimpanzees share the same foresight and contemplation of alternatives as with humans, it is nevertheless clear that chimpanzees lack creative imagination — an aspect of modern human imagination that sets humanity apart from its hominid ancestors. Creative imagination pertains to the ability to combine different forms of knowledge and ways of thinking to form creative and novel ideas. This chapter discusses seven critical steps in the evolution of the human imagination. These steps provide a clear picture of the gradual emergence of creative imagination in humans from their primitive origins as Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago. This chronological evolution of the imaginative mind of humans involves both biological and cultural change that began soon after the divergence of the two lineages that led to modern humans and African apes.

This book examines homology, the correspondence of characters from different species or even within the same organism, from a mechanistic perspective. Homology is explained by derivation from a common ancestor that had the same character or trait. This explanation applies at least to characters from different species. Accordingly, this concept has applications in many fields of biology by referring to morphological characters, behaviors, proteins and genes, gene regulatory networks, and developmental mechanisms and processes. The book considers one class of homology relationships, that between morphological characters, and describes the so-called character identity networks. It argues that the evolutionary origin of characters and body plans is the origin of those gene regulatory networks that underlie character identity.

The process of inferring the set of proteins that was likely encoded in the genome of an extinct organism is called Ancestral Proteome Reconstruction. This process usually involves the comparison of proteomes of extant species and the reconstruction of their ancestors by using different methods that range from parsimonius reconstruction over a species-phylogeny to the reconstruction and analysis of complete phylomes. Although still in its infancy, Ancestral Proteome Reconstruction has proven to be a very useful tool to test hypotheses on extant organisms and past evolutionary events. This chapter provides an overview of the methodology involved and surveys recent studies that deal with the origin and evolution of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), and eukaryotic organelles such as mitochondria and peroxisomes.

The last universal ancestor (LUA) represents a relatively accessible theoretical intermediary between extant cellular organisms and early, precellular ‘life’. In a previous study, the expectation-maximization (EM) approach was used to infer ancestral amino acid frequencies, where in each iteration expected counts were derived from posterior distributions at each site. Applying this approach to estimate the amino acid composition of 65 proteins in the LUA showed that composition was more similar to that of extant thermophiles than mesophiles. This chapter examines whether the previous result is robust with respect to the OGT of the taxa used to infer the amino acid composition of proteins in the LUA. It is shown that even if only mesophilic species are used to derive the estimated ancestral amino acid composition, that composition is most similar to that of thermophiles, as measured by Euclidean distance. The relative mean Euclidean distance between the amino acid composition in any one species and that of a set of mesophiles or thermophiles can be used unequivocally to classify it. Thus, the inferred amino acid composition in the LUA allows its classification as a thermophile.

Unlike most of our genes, mitochondrial DNA is transmitted solely by mothers; males are a dead-end for the mitochondria. Evolutionary biologists have determined that the most recent common ancestor of all mitochondrial genetic variants was a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. That we can trace back all mitochondrial DNA back to a single female (the mitochondrial Eve) is not a surprise. In fact, it is a simple consequence of population genetics. The location in time and place of this common ancestor does inform us about human demography and evolution. However, genetic recombination coupled with evolutionary forces will cause different genes to vary in their evolutionary histories. The mitochondrial “Eve” did not know the common ancestor of Y chromosomes, “Adam”. In fact, it is likely that the Y-chromosome Adam lived tens of thousands of years after the mitochondrial Eve.

Leaving Ningbo, Tanxu visits Beitang, the village where he grew up. Although none of his relatives live there any longer, he makes offerings at his parents’ graves, and in so doing illustrates the tensions between traditional Confucian values and the solitary life of a Buddhist monk. In a culture that cherished large families and extended genealogies, Tanxu’s decision jeopardized an entire lineage. Even more affected was Tanxu’s former wife, whom he visited next, in Yingkou. Tanxu’s painful encounter with the mother of his children reminds the reader of the costs that accompanied Tanxu’s career choice, and make clear the human element of a religious vocation usually described in otherworldly terms.

Chapter 3 continues to trace religion’s evolutionary history by identifying three “primitive” traits of religion: ancestor worship, animism, and shamanism. It is argued that these are religion’s oldest known traits and that each represents a “supernaturalization” of human social life. In other words, each trait is fully integrated into the human social world, thus representing an extension of that world into a supernatural realm. Archaeological evidence is reviewed supporting the notion that these traits trace back to at least the Upper Paleolithic (35,000 years ago). Some evidence suggests that shamanism is likely even older.

This chapter places Cicero's use of ironic history within its cultural context. Several different areas of Roman approaches to the past are discussed: the use of historical exempla, the use of funeral masks and the veneration of ancestors, and the Annalistic tradition of historical record-keeping. These are brought together in a discussion of Cicero's attitude to memory, and the intersection between memory and identity. The evidence from Cicero suggests an awareness of the symbolic power of history over its factual basis. The Roman interest in historical revival is explored. The chapter concludes that Cicero's use of history to explore rather than reinforce identity was characteristic of his times. His philosophical tendencies prompted him to exploit history's flexibility.

Over 600 million years ago, the first multicellular metazoans evolved from their single celled ancestors. Although not recorded in the fossil record, the earliest events in metazoan evolution can be inferred by integrating findings from phylogenetics, genomics, and cell biology. Comparisons of choanoflagellate — microeukaryote relatives of metazoans, with sponges (the earliest known metazoans) — reveal genetic innovations associated with metazoan origins. Among these are the evolution of gene families required for cell adhesion and cell signaling, the presence of which catalyzed the evolution of multicellularity and whose functions have since been elaborated to regulate cell differentiation, developmental patterning, morphogenesis, and the functional integration of tissues. The most ancient tissues — differentiated epithelia — are found in sponges and evolved before the origin and diversification of modern phyla.

A Roman citizen of high birth must remember his ascendants' names and political career. This family memory is composed not only of knowledge, but of acts, because remembering one's forefathers involves imitating them and taking them as one's model (exemplum) in war, in politics, and in one's moral life. This is expressed by a metaphor: ‘following in one's ancestors' footsteps’ (vestigia sequi). On the other hand, if to remember is to imitate, to imitate is to be like (similis), not only regarding moral behaviour and acts, but also physically; in fact, a son has to be the image (imago) of his father. Gentilician identity is thus constructed doubly: on the one hand, the identity of a young noble stems from his name and the story of his family; on the other, this identity depends on his ‘being like’ and ‘acting like’.