Elements of Physical Biology

’Tis meet That noble minds keep ever with their likes For who so firm that cannot be seduced? The writer believes that he is expressing a feeling entertained by many, though not perhaps always clearly apprehended, if he states that the world is ripe for some sort of concerted effort, a binding together in one form or other, of men possessing the scientific outlook and method of thought, combined with a sincere interest in the fulfilment of the great World Purpose. It is perhaps well to call to mind that the face of science is not turned squarely and unhesitatingly in this direction. Not only has the World War shown us all too clearly that the weapons of science are as keen for internecine warfare as for the campaign in the conquest of truth; more than this, there is a certain fashionable cynicism abroad which affects a scientific pose. There are those who, having hitched their wagon to a hog, fare forth proclaiming that the world is nothing but a dung heap; and those who advocate a humoring of the elementary man in us as a health measure. From the standpoint of mental hygiene, stupidity, too, is a rather healthy condition. Yet somehow, even for the sake of our health, most of us would hardly elect to be stupid—that is, if we had any choice in the matter. Cynicism has its uses. But in the end no one, not even the cynic himself, takes it very seriously. The pessimist spends his energy in jeremiads while the optimist is covering the ground with his forward stride. Let us endorse the stand taken by L. Witmer:

What the world needs today is more of the optimism of the progressive and a little less of the pathological fear of the standpatter, more faith in creative evolution, more hope of reaching yet higher levels of achievement, and more of that freedom from prejudice called charity, another name for love—the productive passion. i Evolutionary Value of Nurture and Tradition. One form in which the demon of pessimism puts forth its head is in an overloud emphasis on the futility of the effects of nurture as opposed to the elemental force of nature’ Without committing ourselves to indefensible extremes in the opposite direction, we may put in a strong plea in support of the merits of nurture, merits so plain that their very obviousness has made us in some degree blind to them, and has thus given a weapon into the hands of the type of pessimist of which

® Compare H. 8. Jennings, Heredity and Environment, Sci. Monthly, Sept., 1924, p. 225: “What has gotten into the popular consciousness as Mendelism— still presented in the conventional biological gospels—has been grotesquely inadequate and misleading; its seeming implications as to the trivial réle of the environment has become null and void.” we speak. Those who so glibly discourse on the futility of efforts to improve man’s nature, would they be satisfied to spend their lives among untutored savages? Would they relish the company of unclean slatterns and the vermin-ridden denizen of the slums? Would they care to live under the same roof with persons innocent of the rudiments of propriety in ministering to the natural needs of their bodies? If the benefits of nurture in these lesser occasions are so welcome, why make light of them in their relation to the more serious affairs of life? Such inconsistency is surely inconsistent also with the scientific spirit. In point of fact, tradition, so far from being a negligible factor in shaping the world of men, is one of the most powerful influences for evil, as for good, known to history. The tradition most easily within control is family tradition. In it we have a powerful lever competent to stir great masses into motion slow, perhaps, but none the less effective.

Another reflection which is submitted to the attention of those who make light of the potency of nurture is this: Suppose we took this attitude of laisser faire in the realm of science. Suppose we said: “What is the use of teaching the young generation the accumulated wisdom of scientific lore—at bottom they will still remain essentially savages.” Can we picture to ourselves with any degree of satisfaction the inevitable effect of such a policy upon the advance of science? The fact is, there is a fundamental error in this emphasis upon the alleged futility of nurture. It is based upon a disregard of the organic unity of the social body. It narrowly views the evolution of man as that of an individual “contained in his skin.” The evolution of our race today is something very different from this, as we have had ample opportunity to observe in preceding chapters. It is man plus his “artificial” aids to his life activities that evolves as one unit. ‘These artificial aids most assuredly include traditions of ali sorts, whether handed down by word of mouth, deposited in the archives of learned societies, or perpetuated in any other way. And there is no reason that can claim even a show of validity why we should attempt to draw a line of division, and say: ‘Here, in the province of science, industry and so forth, tradition is one of the processes essentially forming part of the evolution of man; but here, in ethics, tradition merely lends him a superficial veneer—at bottom he remains a savage.” Our varied institutions of industry, commerce, law, etc., are no doubt subject to change and even to occa-

sional upheaval. Yet they have a considerable degree of stability, quite comparable with that of the somatic substance of our race; it also is neither unalterable nor wholly immune from danger of extinction in some world-wide cataclysm. We have every reason, then, not only to anticipate, but to encourage a development of man’s emotional and ethical being alongside with and in the light of the advances made in the intellectual sphere. And indications are not lacking that in the emotional sphere, as in the intellectual, an orthogenetic bias is ready to anticipate selective evolution. The trend of selection in the realm of emotions, of instinctive proclivities, of tastes we have already‘noted: it follows Spencer’s hedonistic principle, according to which those races are best adapted for survival, in whom adjustment of agreeable feelings to beneficial action is most perfect. And the principle admits of extension. Not only is it advantageous that we should desire those things that profit us and our species, but it is evidently equally essential that we should not set our hearts upon things impossible of attainment. The man who is forever crying for the moon is not well adapted for existence in this practical world. Thus the things we purpose, we who have stood the test of survival, must, on the whole, or at least in reasonable net balance, be things that come to pass. Evidently the statement can be turned about: the things that come to pass are, in many instances at any rate, things we purpose; what is more important, they are the general type of things that we purpose. They have, accordingly, to us a characteristic appearance of purposefulness. And the human mind, contemplating the spectacle of the world’s events, is impressed with this appearance of purposefulness, and finds itself constrained, by an inborn bias, by an instinctive intuition, to construe this appearance as the outcome of design.

The fact seems to be that the operation of a fundamental purpose or design in Nature is one of those things that can neither be proved nor disproved. We are, therefore, at liberty, if we so choose to, believe in such a purpose. This is an occasion for the legitimate exercise of faith. We may, if we will, embrace this purpose for our own. Such will spells ultimate survival. No better guarantee for the welfare of the race could be furnished, than its essential harmony with Nature. Selection, then, would seem to point the way toward a will in con-

formity with that general principle which, for want of a better term, we may describe as the Supreme Purpose of the Universe. But selection alone does not determine the path of evolution. Just as the purchaser in a store is dependent upon the bias of the storekeeper who lays in a stock of assorted goods, so evolution must humor any bias there may be in the variety of types presented for selection. Are men’s wills changing? Is there a drift in the general average? If so, whither does it tend? Toward a merging with the Supreme Purpose, or away from it? Have we any instrument competent to discover as much as a hint of an answer to these questions?

Perhaps we have. It is true that the recent world cataclysm has reminded us all too clearly of the potency of knowledge to destroy; of the danger that our orthogenesis be of the fatal type; that man, having grown too clever, may perish by the very perfection of his own weapons. But if the proverbial cat has nine lives, the human race at present has some seventeen hundred million, and the presumption is that even the most disastrous conflict would leave some remnant to carry on. Meanwhile there are not lacking signs on which the optimist may hang his hopes of a happier issue of our orthogenesis. He will point out that since our evolution has been upward in the past, it is reasonable to expect it to continue so in the future. He will point to the rude ancestors, more beast than man, from whom we have ascended. Then, he will say, if you wish to form a conception of the future of our race, consider the foremost, the most enlightened spirits of today, and reflect that these will represent the average of a day that is coming. These men, looking out upon the world, are impressed above all with the essential unity of Nature, and of man with her. For ‘man is part of Nature, the part that studies the whole.” Therefore, as man’s eyes are opened by modern science to view the intricacies of atomic architecture, or to fathom the secret places of the stars, what is it but the Universe awakening, like some great giant, to a consciousness of his remoter members?? ‘To the cold intellectual realization of this unity of man with the Universe there is an emotional counterpart. A full and intensely vivid realization

° This was sensed by Hegel, who held that ‘‘the course of history is the process, not simply by which man comes to a consciousness of God, but that by which God comes to a consciousness of himself.”” (A. K. Rogers, A Student’s History of Philosophy, 1921, p. 448). Compare also H. G. Wells, God the Invisible King; and M. Lembat, Science Progress, 1923, p. 112. of the inspiring truth is undoubtedly accompanied by feeling of high exaltation. To this we have, among many others, the testimony of Wordsworth

I felt the sentiment of Being spread O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still; O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought And human knowledge; to the human eye Invisible, yet liveth to the heart. Wonder not If han the transport, great the joy I felt Communing of this sort through earth and heaven With every sort of creature. It seems inevitable that a lively sense of this merging of the Self with the Universe shall hold as one of its constituents a fusion of personal desires with the Supreme Purpose of the Universe. “No man,” says Emerson “has a right perception of a truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.”

The relation of knowledge and of ignorance to will is discussed, from a somewhat different angle, by Bertrand Russell in his book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914, p. 234). He remarks: The apparent indeterminateness of the future is merely a result of our ignorance. It is plain that no desirable kind of free will can be dependent simply upon ignorance. .... Let us therefore imagine a set .of beings who know the whole future with absolute certainty, and let us ask -ourselves whether they could have anything that we should eall free will.

The beings we are imagining would easily come to know the causal -connections of volitions and therefore their volitions would be better calculated ato satisfy their desires than ours are. df the extension of Spencer’s hedonistic principle, as sketched above, applies, and if through orthogenetic bias or otherwise the human race shall provide the requisite material for selection to operate upon, then these beings which Bertrand Russell “imagines” for the sake of his argument, will become something of an actuality as our evolution culminates. To them the words of Emerson will apply, that they will be “made of the same stuff of which events are made. . . . . The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.”

Their attitude will be biologically sound, for, as Claude Bernard has said; It is not by struggling against cosmic conditions that the organism develops and maintains its place; on the contrary, it is by an adaptation to, and agreement with, these conditions. So, the living being does not form an exception to the great natural harmony which makes things adapt themselves to one another: it breaks no concord; it is neither in contradiction to nor struggling against general cosmic forces; far from that, it forms a member of the universal concert of things, and the life of the animal, for example, is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.

Or, to quote a spokesman of our own generation, the closing words of Sir Charles Sherrington’s Presidential Address still ring in our ears: One privilege open to the human intellect is to attempt to comprehend , . . . the how of the living creature as a whole. In the biological synthesis of the individual this problem is concerned with mind. It includes examination of man himself as acting under a biological trend and process which is combining individuals into a multi-individual organization, a social organism surely new to the world. Man, viewing this great supra-individual process, can shape his course conformably with it even as an individual, feeling that

ees to rebel would be to sink lower rather to continue his own evolution upward. Thus, in the light of modern knowledge, man is beginning to discern more clearly what wise men of all ages have intuitively felt—his essential unity with the Universe; and the unity of his puny efforts with the great trend of all Nature. A race with desires all opposed to Nature could not long endure; he that survives must, for that very fact, be in some measure a collaborator with Nature. With extending knowledge must come awakening consciousness of active partnership with the Cosmos—‘‘When souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge above selfishness;” and “he that sees through the design must will that which must be.” This is no mere resignation of a man to his fate, though the saying of Anatole France be true ‘Les grandes Ames se résignent avec une sainte joie.” Not even joyful resignation is adequate; the state of the fully awakened consciousness is better described by the great physicist Clerk Maxwell, as “an abandoment of wilfulness without extinction of will, but rather by a great development of will whereby, instead of being consciously free and really in subjection to an unknown law, it becomes consciously acting by law, and really free from interference of unrecognized laws.”

Such is the outlook to which the development of modern Science seems inevitably to be leading the thoughts of men. This is the goal of evolution, the perfect adjustment of feelings to actions, which guarantees survival: To say with the great Stoic—‘O Universe, whatsoever is in harmony with thee, is in harmony with me.” The being whose will is so adjusted is Fortune’s favorite; all things must bend to his will as they bend to Nature’s law. For his will is Nature’s law.

“Ce mage divisa en plusieurs parties ce qui n’avait pas besoin d’étre divisé; il prouva méthodiquement tout ce qui était clair; il enseigna tout ce qu’on savait; il se passionna froidement, et sortit suant et hors d’haleine. Toute l’assemblée alors se réveilla et crut avoir assisté a une instruction.”’— Voltaire. Charts I, II, III, IV refer to the following list, which indicates some of the principal references to such items in this book. In a few instances of points not otherwise covered in this book supplementary references to the literature are given.

Indirectly referred to in the substance of pages 383, For the general energetics of nutrition and related topics see special works on the subject, as, for example, Lefévre, La Chaleur Animale et Bio- énergétique, 1911. 5. Second abstraction a=0 Inertia-free or completely damped systems 4, First abstraction b=0 Frictionless systems of periodic habit 6. General Equation of Kinetics of Completely Damped Systems 10. Equations affected 12, Equations free with lag or lead from lag or

lead 11. Example in epidemiology: Lag introduced by period of incubation (Ross malaria equations) 16. Factors influencing B 17. Food ingested 18. Births 19. Procreation coefficient 20. Mating coeffiihe cient 37. Kinetics 38. Statics 39. Dynamics 13. Analysis of form of function Ff 14. Growth velocity = (mass newly formed — mass eliminated) 15. Aggregates of individuals traversed by stream of mass (living organisms) 35. Aggregates of individuals retaining identical mass (atoms and molecules)

visteiqaoo 76 ootl-eifren] «= senadaye - soxeseya haqmab sidad sib to sutfenlat Ye aoiteupM latensD 8 antoseye boqmed yletolqaoD (O Vigh « + + gk 4 = ee j ; > bas 7 page af eal oem sini Berar) vuris : iA 7 Py erat at Pa 10 wel mon baal to iw baol ; i Rggreeuten r ‘ indir iatiale : i= ati : by Stféari.of oes Living urpaniercs) ST PE ee ee — . | Bete yoteneufa: aagios 0! | Ba, Genera) finthience of ; ane Ritter 2 ' ~ihigdo ‘gare’ de we. cath; \iet ‘tats wlcths fa “ a

61 Solution of funda- 64. Single 67. Two dependent 70. Three 71. X passes through mental equation mental equation dependent variables dependent zero. Extinction ordinary near singular variable variables of species point (exponential series) = ie tt 68. Example: 69. Example: Epidemiology Parasitology 62. Topographic study of (Ross, Martini) integral curves 65. Physico-chemical 66. Population systems growth 51. Disparity of velocities a dX Pace set by slowest —; r dt ; ee 72. By asymptotic 52. Limiting factors approach®*t6

r > fe RAIGRST i, BIOLOGY m. Paraweters A, } sidaitey 9 SA metomeraT —- infter-opaci«e Rw ~- = do enoitainay yretiidtA .T) eaoitonn? ct — ~soalqaib jeralomeied sort Ve ;muiidiliips to taesar ; ereaet) .03 ~aivl a'wileted ot > aiqio Lsiosa® £8 t eftinuldo noiiiin8.:00 wal acitetipe [ataga i)- 5 on)in — Viawby ws.) . ; taiog vlwola exsemetel .22 sibaitaq aD ai ogaad) 08 8 86eD ai agned Ob aA at one asloeqa-avial noltgiovH — iim) @ = lo sarin? si boaleb a'D 65 — -iniiah Leoiteigad® 8 sissosisio osilehiwelé #'D te avid

mee “| 92. Biological 95. Analysis of 96. Human 125, Quasi-dynamics (ophelimetry, surveys stomach Economics psychological basis of ecocontents nomics) 93. Statistics of 94. Statistics of | flora and depredations Dynamics fauna See Chart IV ie —* 97. Agricultural 120. Civic 121. Industrial living on our capital; exhaustion of natural resources; utilization of atmospheric nitrogen; of sunlight als, 113. Nitrogen 114, Phosphorus 115, Alkalis a 117. Restoration to circulation by human agencies 118. Sewage recovery

rc - ——tr— andiupe-ieuy) 22 Mao uit, a a, awiidiliups laoimsde-onie 9 (esimany boar =o $i, Olaeer vatican) dat enoliale: lasitvlané. 7 : sy Tipe as) ncen jo souastiogie siumouosd .28 ena of : ¥ ~ Biasinitteao 137. Parameters P defining state of external world 138. Climatic parameters 132. Individuals are physicochemical units (atoms, molecules, electrons) r 134. Transformers fed from continuously distributed sources (plants) i= 135. Transformers fed from discontinuously distributed sources (animals) Te < ite 136. Physical factors that determine growth velocit cad vat

ee 148. Energizers : < ae ail Pa Depictors or 149. Epictors or | Informants Transformants 158. Growth 159. Repair limetry, Psychlogical basis (autocatakinesis) of Economics 160. Augmentative or autogenic 161. Duplicative or deuterogenic The following references and notes, which have been omitted from the text through inadvertence or because they came to the author’s notice too late, are here appended as a supplement. As stated in the Preface, no attempt at completeness of bibliography has been made. Perhaps, however, the material presented in these pages may be found, by anyone sufficiently interested, to furnish a serviceable base of departure for the gathering of a more exhaustive collation.

Chapter I, page 9, footnote 10. See also L. A. Herrera, Royal Academy of the Lincei, June 15, 1924. Imitation of nervous and cellular tissue, by means of potassium hydroxide, silica and alcohol. Chapter II, page 36. Comparealso A. J. Lotka, Irreversibility, Cosmic and Microcosmic, Jour. Washington Acad. Sci., August, 1924, pp. 352-3. It should perhaps be pointed out that the dissipative processes of nature, as discussed in this chapter, include, of course, both processes irreversible with regard to macroscopic operations, and also processes irreversible in the usual sense, that is, thermodynamically irreversible.

Chapter II, page 44. Intra-group Evolution. If the composition or constitution of a group or species of organisms is described in terms of a frequency function, intra-group evolution is exhibited by the fact that the characteristic coefficients in such a function are functions of the time. This point has been referred to by Arne Fisher in Amer. Math. Monthly. March-April issue, 1923, p. 97. Fisher thus writes the normal frequency function in the form

Chapter VII, Growth of Individual Organism, page 71. In this connection reference may also be made to the work of Lecomte de Nouy, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, on the rate of cicatrization of wounds. Page 72, footnote 9, add the following reference: H.C. Bastian, The Nature and Origin of Living Matter, p. 47. Chapter XV, page 203. Reference should have been made to Macallum’s paper in the Trans. Roy. Soc. Canada, 1908, ii, p. 145. The marine origin of terrestrial animals was taught in remote antiquity, by Anaximander (610—

Chapter XXII, page 298. The réle of the hands in the evolution of man’s intelligence seems to have been clearly recognized by the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.) ‘‘He explained man’s intelligence by the power of manipulation that came when the forelimbs were freed from the tasks of locomotion’? (W. Durant). Chapter XXIII, page 300. Compare also O. Matousek, Geological Laws of Population, Amer. Jour. Physical Anthropology, 1924, vol. 7, p. 389.

Chapter XXV, page 342. For further details regarding automatic telphone exchanges see also F. A. Ellson, Automatic Telephones (Pitman’s Technical Primers, London, 1924); W. Aitken, Automatic Telephone Systems (Ernst Benn, London, 1924) Page 354. The influence of diet upon the mode of life was remarked by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.): ‘Of beasts some are gregarious, and others are solitary—they live in the way which is best adapted to obtain the food of their choice.’’ Very clearly the characteristics of animals and plants are referred to their respective food sources by La Mettrie in his little book L’Homme Plante (1748). He remarks very pointedly: ‘‘Les étres sans besoins sont aussisans ésprit.’’ (See also pages 219 and 366 in Chapters XVII and XXVI.)