Elements of Physical Biology

Distance travelled in one hour by different modes of conveyance Mani. walkitig ye cratic en vee esac eerie 8 G. E. Larner 1905 IV Cioy sybbavtbelaas, ay Sea ie So ocascusac cat camar 11 J. Bouin 1913 Manon: bicy.clemn.ncceirs serscase sek eerie eee 50 H. Caldwell 1903 IMMENouCayey ARON AONE tone ocacdduguadecaccs aoe 100 O. Walker 1915 Manron aeroplanes aanenac sates eee ers 200 About 1920 It has already been noted that the evolution of man’s artificial aids to his effectors, by a process of ‘survival of the fittest’’ was recognized as early as 1757 by David Hume. We can now add, from the modern quantitative viewpoint, that this resemblance between the development of our inorganic accessories and that of organic populations extends also, in a number of instances, to the growth curves. So, for example, figure 71 exhibits the curve of growth of American Railways (United States).’? It will be recognized as the typical S-shaped Verhulst-Pearl curve of growth.

Singular Effects of Industrial Evolution. Aside from its obvious result of greatly enhancing the effectiveness of the correlating apparatus, the modern development of its artificial aids has had certain other less obvious and in some respects rather singular effects. For the artificial portion of our correlating apparatus differs in several important respects from our native endowment. My microscope does not die with my body, but passes on to my heirs. There is thus a certain permanence about many portions at least of the artificial apparatus. And for that very reason the development of this artificial equipment of human society has a cumulative force that is unparalleled in ordinary organic evolution. This cumulative effect is most of all marked in the artificial aids to our elaborators.

The most singular feature of the artificial extension of our natural body is that they are shared in common by a number of individuals. When the sick man consults the physician, who, we will say, makes a microscopic examination, for example, the patient is virtually hiring a pair of high-power eyes. When you drop a nickel into the telephone box, you are hiring the use of an ear to listen to your friend’s voice five or ten miles distant. When the workingman accepts a wage of forty dollars for his weekly labor, he is in fact paying to his em-

ployers an undetermined amount for the privilege of using his machines as artificial members to manufacture marketable wares." The modern development of artificial aids to our organs and faculties has exerted two opposing influences. On the one hand it has in a most real way bound men together into one body: so very real and material is the bond that modern society might aptly be described as one huge multiple Siamese Twin. On the other hand, since the control over certain portions of this common body is unevenly distributed among the separate individ-

11 In certain branches of industry (e.g., shoemaking) a rental is actually paid by the worker for the use of machines. uals, certain of them may be said in a measure to own parts of the bodies of others, holding them in a species of refined slavery; and though neither of the two parties concerned may be clearly conscious of the fact, it is often resented in a more or less vague way by the one less favored. Herein lies one source of much of the social unrest that has accompanied the development of modern industrialism. The more optimistic among us may entertain a hope that in time the unifying influence of our ever growing common body may outweigh the disruptive forces that ever and again manifest themselves too plainly for our comfort. That a species of “slavery,” that is to say of ownership of one person’s body by another or by others, should prevail, is in the last analysis an absolutely unavoidable situation, once we recognize that no sharp lines are drawn to separate the individual from his fellow; willy-nilly we must accept the fact. We may, however, seek to control the distribution of this ownership in the way most advantageous to the general welfare. That is the purpose of our property laws, such as they are and such as they will be.

ny bodily eyes Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw Appeared like something in myself, a dream, A prospect of the mind.’’ —Wordsworth. The Elaborators. While the sense organs (receptors) are the prime agents in the formation of our world picture, they are not the sole agents that contribute. The further elaboration of this picture is largely the work of our mental faculties: memory, which stores impressions and makes our picture a chronological album or file rather than a single snapshot: and imagination, which fills in those features of the landscape that are hidden from view by intervening obstacles. This process of filling in hidden features may be either arbitrary, as in the demonistic interpretation of nature current among savages and surviving among us in many superstitions, in the play of the child, and in the fancy of the poet; or, the process of filling in may be more or less rigorously directed by certain rules which long experience has taught us to be productive of a realistic picture, a picture which, when comparison with actuality becomes possible, is found to be ‘‘in accord with facts; one that may safely be made a basis for zweckmdssig action.2 The realistic type of thinking, the kind which “works,” has perhaps been evolved by a process of survival of the fittest from the other kind (termed autistic thinking). The body of rules which realistic thinking follows constitutes the science of logic. The constructive exercise of the imagination within the limits prescribed by logic is what we call the process of reasoning. When

1JTt should be noted in passing that the word imagination itself means image-formation or depiction. 2 It is deserving of emphasis that the function of imagination is not merely the conception of mythical creations, but also, and quite particularly, the presentation, to the mind, of realities. Hence imagination plays an important réle in the exact Sciences. its premises are suitably chosen, for instance, on the basis of sense perceptions, the product is a contribution to a realistic world picture.

The Scientific World Picture: Coordinate Systems. The last refinement in world depiction is the scientific world picture. In the exact sciences this assumes the numerical form. So, for example, the position of a particular object in space is identified, in the simplest case (namely, if the object is sufficiently described as a point) by the statement of three numbers, the space codrdinates of that point. The motion of the point is then described or represented (pictured) by a set of equations

where x, y, 2 are the codrdinates of the moving point at instant f, this last being also identified by means of a number. Now an infinite number of equally appropriate pictures of this kind can be given for the motion of the point, for the codrdinates x, y, 2 can be chosen in an infinite number of ways. They may be rectangular codrdinates, or polar codrdinates; their reference frames may be fixed on the earth, or on the sun, or in any other suitable manner. But each choice of a system of codrdinates will furnish its own particular set of functions f; each picture will in this respect differ from every other such picture. Not a little of the success of the scientific investigator depends on his judgment in choosing a suitable system of codrdinates, such as will furnish the simplest and most convenient picture, the most convenient functions f. So, for example, the motion of the planets is most simply desorbed with reference to a frame of codrdinates fixed to the sun, and not, for example, one fixed to the earth. The discovery of a partiqularis convenient reference frame, though in a sense it adds nothing to our knowledge of concrete facts, may nevertheless constitute one of the major events in the progress of human knowledge. For, such discoveries “‘make the Universe anew within the minds of men,’”4

The Ego as a Coérdinate Reference Frame. It is a matter of very particular interest that the first rudiments of this numerical world picture, in terms of coérdinates, is to be discerned in one of the most fundamental traits of the human mind, one of the most elementary, irresistible, naive intuitions to which we are all subject, namely, the distinction between a self and an external world. If we wished to express mathematically the relations between the appearance upon the ground glass screen of a photographic camera, and the “external world” about the camera moving through that world, we should undoubtedly find that the simplest expression would be obtained in terms of a reference frame fixedly attached to the more solid features of the external world, and a second reference frame fixedly attached to the camera.

So we find it most convenient to express the infinite variety of sense perceptions (the totality of our world-picture) and the relations between them in terms of a self and an external world. This naive intuitional view may be taken to be the rough unanalyzed raw material out of which, by a process of attenuation and abstraction, the scientific method has finally peeled the kernel of the two systems of coérdinates—the one in which the external world is described, and the second, privately owned by the individual as it were, in which his world picture is recorded. The self thus appears as something of the nature of a (somewhat blurred) reference frame of codrdinates, or rather, a set of several such frames, for the individual is quite accustomed to a multiple entry system of bookkeeping, in which the same object is entered both as seen and as felt, for example.®

The Ego Immaterial. This conception of the self as something of the nature of a system of codrdinate reference frames will be found rather helpful in several connections. So, for example, it instantly makes clear why we cannot conceive of the self as something material. 5 It is no doubt this double entry system that is largely responsible for our construct of an external world compounded of what are at bottom nothing more than complexes of sensations. As E. B. Holt remarks, ‘even two reflexes acting within one organism bring it about that the organism’s behavior is no longer describable in terms of the immediate sensory stimulus, but as a function of objects and situations in the environment”’ (The Freudian Wish, 1916, p. 76). Those complexes of sensations which we refer or ascribe to objects are characterized by a greater or less degree of permanence. It is this permanence of association of certain sensations that induces us to postulate an object as their carrier. Such relative permanence lends a peculiar interest to the sensation complex, so that it has truly been said that the aim of science is the search for the invariants of Nature (E. W. Brown, Scientifie Monthly,

When I say that J (the ego) was at Grand Central Station yesterday at noon, it is true that from the nature of things a certain object which I speak of as my body, i.e., the body of the ego, was there at the time stated. But this is merely an implication, it is not a simple identification of the ego with the body, otherwise the phrase my body would be pointless. Once I become accustomed to think of the ego as something of the nature of a codrdinate reference frame, the matter is perfectly clear. The thing that counts, in the depiction of the world in me, is the position of my reference frame relative to the external world. To say that J was at the station yesterday at noon is to say that this reference frame was thus situated. The body attached to this reference frame is in that sense my body. And clearly, the ego so defined is something immaterial.

Interpenetration of Egos. Then again, it is a notorious fact that the boundaries between the self and the external world cannot be clearly drawn. The objective significance of this has already been noted, in the discussion of our artificial receptors and effectors, which are largely “‘shared’’ by a number of persons. The conception of the self indicated above makes it immediately clear that any attempt to establish boundaries between the self and the external world, or, for the matter of that, between two selves, is not only useless but meaningless. Coédrdinate reference frames have no boundaries, and freely interpenetrate each other, being merely immaterial aids to fix our ideas. So the overlapping of many egos in fields common to them, their essential unity with one another and with the universe, ceases to appear as a strange thought entertained by peculiarly minded people, and becomes an obvious truth.

® Compare F. B. Sumner, Scientific Monthly, 1922, vol. 14, p. 233. ‘The organism and the environment interpenetrate one another through and through—the distinction between them is only a matter of convenience.” Also C. J. Keyser, Mathematical Philosophy, ‘‘How blind our familiar assumptions make us! Among the animals, man, at least, has long been wont to regard himself as a being quite apart from and not as part of the cosmos round about him. From this he has detached himself in thought, he has estranged and objectified the world, and lost the sense that he is of it. And this age-long habit and point of view, which has fashioned his life and controlled his thought, lending its characteristic mark and color to his whole philosophy and art and learning, is still maintained, partly because of its convenience, no doubt, and partly by force of inertia and sheer conservatism, in the very teeth of the strongest probabilities of biological science. Probably no other single hy-

pothesis has less to recommend it, and yet no other so completely dominates the human mind.” Where is Mind?’ The question which has sometimes been raised, as to location of the mind, is also seen in a better light. The thing that counts, in the affairs of the individual, is the relative position of the several reference frames, his own and that of the external world. Where the adjustors, even their concrete, material apparatus, are located, is inconsequential. We may be in doubt whether the expression “the location of the mind” has any meaning; but there can be no doubt that such location is of no practical consequence. If it canin any sense be said that mind perceives the world of physical phenomena, this at least is certain, that it does so exclusively through the channels of our sense organs. The mind looks into the physical world through the pupils of our eyes as the small boy watches the ball game through a knothole in the fence; the position of the knothole determines how much he shall see of the game, and in what perspective. And the mind plays upon the physical events in our world as the organist plays upon the pipes of a modern organ, from a keyboard whose location is immaterial. The question ‘‘Where is the mind?” or ‘Where is the ego?” might, if we rightly understood all the pertinent facts, appear as absurd as the tourist’s request to be shown the equator’ These terms are merely symbols of reference by the aid of which we describe relations between things.®

And quite in accord with this, we see in death not so much even as the dissolution of a system of codrdinates, but merely the loss of their pragmatic significance: 7 Compare Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, 1921, pp. 141-142. “The subject appears to be a logical fiction, like mathematical points and instants. It is introduced, not because observation reveals it, but because it is, linguistically convenient, and apparently demanded by grammar. Nominal entities of this sort may or may not exist, but there is no good ground for assuming that they do.

“Tf we are to avoid a perfectly gratuitous assumption we must dispense with the subject as one of the actual ingredients of the world.” 8 From this point of view one is scarcely disposed to agree altogether with the proposition of Sir C. 8. Sherrington in his Providential Address before the British Association at Hull (1922): ‘The how of the mind’s connection with its bodily place seems still utterly enigma.’’ Nature, 1922, vol. 110, p. 351. For a presentation of a point of view somewhat opposed to the one here set forth, the reader may be referred to an article The Group Mind and the General Will by J. Laird, in the Monist, 1923, p. 453.

And then so slight, so delicate is death That there is but the end of a leaf’s fall, A moment of no consequence at all. —Mark Swann. Fundamental Premises and Implicit Assumptions. It has been noted in passing that the practical adequacy (Zweckmassigkeit) of the world picture formed by the aid of the elaborators depends on the judicious choice of the premises upon which the further elaboration is based. This, of course, is a very important condition. In so far as the premises are direct data of observation, the condition resolves itself into a demand for care and accuracy in taking observation, and for judgment in weighing evidence, especially where the data are presented in statistical form, with perhaps a considerable margin of doubt attached to each individual report.

But there are other less obvious cases, in which a scrutiny of the fundamental assumptions is needful and presents no little difficulty. For some of these premises relate, not to observational data but to conceptual structures peculiar to the world picture into which these data are fitted. Such premises are the fundamental postulates and axioms of geometry. By a stroke of genial intuition the founder of Euclidian geometry set down among his fundamental premises the parallel axiom, which states, in effect, that through a given point one and only one straight line can be drawn parallel to a given straight line. The true character of this fundamental premise remained hidden from the understanding of geometricians for many centuries. So difficult is it sometimes for us to become clearly aware of the nature of fundamental assumptions underlying our reasoning. Not till the end of the eighteenth century (Gauss 1792) was it realized that the parallel axiom, so far from being a “ necessary truth,” is essentially of the nature of an arbitrary assumption, and is only one of several alternatives each of which can claim equal legitimacy, each of which leads to a separate system of geometry. The Euclidian system was, until recently, the one in terms of which the world picture of the physicist found most convenient description. But in recent years, observations of electrons moving with velocities approaching that of light, and a number of other phenomena harmoniously comprehended in Einstein’s theory of relatively, have given us a new world picture that finds its most convenient representation in terms of non-Euclidian geometries.

Difficulty of Shaking off Preconceived Premises. The examination, and, where need be, revision of our fundamental premises is a task of a wholly different order from that of rearing upon these premises a structure of logical argumentation. It is a task that often demands the efforts of giant intellects, of men of altogether unusual independence of thought. Most of us are held back by our preconceived, intuitive judgments, which, blindly entertained, blind us also against the recognition of possible alternatives. ‘The main reason for the painfully slow progress of the human race is to be found in the inability of the great mass of people to establish correctly the premises of an argument.’’® Nor is it only the great mass of the people, the average minds, that suffer from this ineptitude. Of Dr. Johnson, MacAuley remarks

How it chanced that one who reasoned on his premises so ably should assume his premises so foolishly is one of the great mysteries of human nature. The same inconsistency may be observed in the schoolmen of the middle ages. These writers show so much acuteness and force of mind that the modern reader is perpetually at a loss to comprehend how such minds came by such data. As a matter of fact our innate perversity in this matter, our inveterate conservatism in all that concerns some of those “implicit and unrecognized assumptions out of which sophistry is bred,” is not due to negative influences, to sloth of mind, alone. There is a strong positive misguiding influence at work also: The wish is father to the thought.!°

The fact is, we are confronted here with a species of aberration of our adjustors; an aberration which our race must outgrow if it is to come into its full inheritance under the sway of evolution. For, as Simpson remarks, “the stabilization of our institutions rests ultimately upon our ability to know and to test assumptions, 10 There is, fortunately, a natural corrective for our inclination to allow likes and dislikes to influence our reason. This corrective is found in the instinct of curiosity, the faculty that impels men to seek the truth, even if it be unpalatable. In fact, a certain type of mind seems to take a particular satisfaction in digging up such otherwise displeasing revelations; the cynic and even the muckraker thus has his useful function. It is probably safe to say, too, that curiosity—a desire to know life in all its phases, to ‘‘experience reality’”’—is fundamentally the motive that impels some individuals to taste of the less savory phases of life.

and upon a willingness to revise them without partizanship, or bitterness, or distress.’ One direction in which we may be called upon to make such a revision is our conception of the self or ego, along the lines already indicated. The old intuitive conception of the self, which narrows it down and fences it off rigorously from the rest of the world, may have to give place to a broader conception. This may require the breaking through of inhibitions that obstruct our view and prevent us from gaining a full and lively realization of our essential unity with the universe; it may involve in some degree a retracing of our steps in past evolution; a retrenchment of our overdeveloped self-consciousness, to make room for a more comprehensive world-consciousness.

Aside from the ordinary receptors and elaborators, there is another avenue, a highly specialized type of receptors, by which the world picture acquires further detail and extension, namely by communication from one individual to another. How far the faculty of such communication may be developed in species other than our own is today an open question; nor is this of much consequence for us here, as we are concerned with principles rather than with concrete examples, and a single indubitable instance, such as we have in ourselves, suffices for the establishment and exemplification of the principle.

Orthogenesis in Human Evolution. In the human species the communication of information from one to another takes place chiefly through speech, tradition and carved, written or printed records. The incalculable significance of these aids to the individual’s elaboration of his world-picture needs no emphasis. In a recent number of Nature there appeared Professor Bohr’s address on the structure of the atom, delivered on the occasion of the award to him of the Nobel prize for 1922. In this historical survey of the development of his theory he mentions nearly fifty names of investigators who directly or indirectly contributed to this part of our world-picture. A person intelligently reading this lecture, making the picture part of his own mental stock-in-trade, is thus virtually

endowed with fifty pairs of eyes and hands, and has the benefit of the workings of fifty brains, for the most part master brains of the first rank, for the list includes such names as, Faraday, Maxwell, J. J. Thomson, Rutherford, Hertz, Lorentz, Planck, Einstein, to mention only a few. It is this thought-transmitting propensity of the human species, more than any other, that gives it a superlative lead over all the other creatures of the globe.!2 Man is the only animal who in any considerable measure bequeaths to his descendants the accumulated wisdom of past generations. Evolution in this case proceeds not merely by the slow process of selection, but is immensely hastened by the cumulative and continuous growth of a body of knowledge exempt from those laws of mortality which set a term to the life of the individual. Such evolution by a process not directly dependent upon (although subject to) selection is what biologists have termed orthogenesis—the direct genesis of a trait or species by the pursuit of an inherent trend or bias, irrespective of selective influences. Such orthogenesis (of the functional, not the physiological kind noted in Chapter XXII) is exhibited not only in the cumulative effect of tradition and printed records, but even more strikingly in the basic process itself by which the scientific world picture is developed. This development has not been wholly an evolution by selection, by survival of the fittest, at least not if we take the word survival in its literal sense. On the contrary, this is perhaps the clearest example extant of evolution by orthogenesis, by the unfolding of an inherent trend independently of any selecting influences. Our Galileos, our Newtons, our Thomsons, our Einsteins, have not been singled out by a process of lethal selection from among others less fit to survive.

The process by which viable, pragmatically competent systems of thought (or world-depiction) are evolved is quite other than this. The Copernican system has survived over the Ptolemaic, not because the originators and the supporters of the former were better adapted to life under the then existing conditions— rather the reverse was true. It is not even a mere principle of economy of thought that gave victory to the Copernican system. The decisive factor

12 The importance of the accumulation of human knowledge through tradition, permanent records, and lasting technical installations has been emphasized by A. Korzibski (Manhood of Humanity, Dutton, 1921) to whose central thesis—the existence of a fundamental hiatus between man and the rest of creation—I cannot, however, subscribe. was that the comparative simplicity of the Copernican system eased the further advance of knowledge, which had been very effectively checked by the intricacies of the epicycles. It is not so much that the human mind has a bias for simplicity—though that may be true —as that, with its finite limitations, the mind progresses faster and farther as soon as a simpler system is substituted in place of a more complicated, even when both systems are otherwise competent truly to represent facts.

Orthogenesis does not, of course, suspend selection. Of two species, that one will most survive, whose orthogenesis, if any, leads it in a favorable direction. Presumably, destructive orthogenesis may occur, as well as constructive. Indeed, it has been suggested that some of the extinct monster species were thus drawn to their doom by an orthogenesis, controlled perhaps by endocrine glands, that swelled their dimensions beyond all bounds of propriety. What is most significant is that orthogenesis, whether constructive or destructive, must accelerate the pace of evolution. No more telling demonstration of this could be asked than the prodigious advance made by man in recent centuries and decades, advances traceable directly to the orthogenetic character of the evolution of his mental furniture. The provocative agent in this orthogenesis is curiosity, the faculty that anticipates needs, that solves problems before they become burning issues; that inspires research in pure science, and throws in for good measure practical applications, as gifts that are often only too truly gratuitous. And coupled with this curiosity, a native impulse that induces men to impart their findings to others.