The Principles of Biology, Volume 1 (of 2)Spencer, Herbert
Science
The Principles of Biology, Volume 1 (of 2)
Spencer, Herbert
Biology
to which the organism made no answering change, and that thus, both in
shortness and simplicity, the life was incomplete in proportion as the
correspondence was incomplete. Progress towards more prolonged and higher
life, evidently implies ability to respond to less general co-existences
and sequences. Each step upwards must consist in adding to the
previously-adjusted relations of actions or structures which the organism
exhibits, some further relation parallel to a further relation in the
environment. And the greater correspondence thus established, must, other
things equal, show itself both in greater complexity of life, and greater
length of life: a truth which will be fully perceived on remembering the
enormous mortality which prevails among lowly-organized creatures, and the
gradual increase of longevity and diminution of fertility which we meet
with on ascending to creatures of higher and higher developments.
It must be remarked, however, that while length and complexity of life are,
to a great extent, associated--while a more extended correspondence in the
successive changes commonly implies increased correspondence in the
simultaneous changes; yet it is not uniformly so. Between the two great
divisions of life--animal and vegetal--this contrast by no means holds. A
tree may live a thousand years, though the simultaneous changes going on in
it answer only to the few chemical affinities in the air and the earth, and
though its serial changes answer only to those of day and night, of the
weather and the seasons. A tortoise, which exhibits in a given time nothing
like the number of internal actions adjusted to external ones that are
exhibited by a dog, yet lives far longer. The tree by its massive trunk and
the tortoise by its hard carapace, are saved the necessity of responding to
those many surrounding mechanical actions which organisms not thus
protected must respond to or die; or rather--the tree and the tortoise
display in their structures, certain simple statical relations adapted to
meet countless dynamical relations external to them. But notwithstanding
the qualifications suggested by such cases, it needs but to compare a
microscopic fungus with an oak, an animalcule with a shark, a mouse with a
man, to recognize the fact that this increasing correspondence of its
changes with those of the environment which characterizes progressing life,
habitually shows itself at the same time in continuity and in complication.
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