Pinsky's central charge to the graduates was that individual achievement mattered less than cultural transmission. 'Your success in business or law may be laudable, and may enrich you and your families and communities,' he said, 'but that is less important in the largest way than the fact that by practicing your skills and exercising your knowledge, you are also preserving them and perfecting them.' The argument was both humbling and ennobling. It humbled because it subordinated personal glory to the chain of transmission. It ennobled because it placed every practitioner — every scientist, lawyer, musician, engineer — in a lineage stretching back to the first humans who 'made a technology out of their own body, notably with the highly refined system of grunts emitted through its feeding orifice.' Pinsky's final charge: 'I charge you not to break the chain that goes back to the primates.'