What we clearly see in the different kinds of organisms--in
the metabolically constructive plant and the metabolically
destructive animal; or in the instinctively-acting Arthropod and
the intelligently-acting Mammal--is the progressive development of
different _tendencies_. If the green plant is, in its essence, the
same kind of physico-chemical constellation as is the animal, yet the
tendency of its evolution has been that more and more it has acquired
the habit, or the power, of using solar radiation to combine together
carbon dioxide, water, and nitrogenous inorganic salts to form proteid
and carbohydrate substances. On the other hand, the tendency of the
animal has been more and more to absorb into its own tissues the
proteid and carbohydrates synthesised by the green plant, and then to
break these substances down into carbon dioxide and water, and less and
less to effect such syntheses as are effected by the plant. Even if
the Annelid worm, the Arthropod, and the Vertebrate were, at the origin
of their ancestries, animals which were very like each other in the
morphological sense; even if there are some Arthropods which are very
like Annelids, and some Annelids which might very easily be imagined
to become transformed into Vertebrates, and some extinct Arthropods
which may after all have been Vertebrates, yet it is the case that the
tendencies of the evolution of each of these groups have been very
different. All the while the Vertebrate tended more and more to develop
a rigid axial rod or notochord, becoming later a jointed vertebral
column, and a soft, pliable, exo-skeleton; while the Arthropod tended
more and more to develop a rigid exo-skeleton, and to remain soft in
its axial parts. Even if these two tendencies may not have been fully
realised, is it not the case that they are really different things?
The evolutionary process has therefore been, in its essence, the
development, or unfolding, of tendencies originally one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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