Science and Morals and Other Essays by Sir Windle Bertram Coghill Alan (e book reading free .TXT) 📖

The alternative is Blind Chance; and the author, after considering the question, agrees, as again most reasonable persons will agree, that Blind Chance is no explanation of things as they are. He quotes a modern chemist who, discussing the probability of the environmental fitness of the earth for life being a mere chance process, remarks: "There is, in truth, not one chance in countless millions of millions that the many unique properties of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and especially of their stable compounds, water and carbonic acid, which chiefly make up the atmosphere of a new planet, should simultaneously occur in the three elements otherwise than through the operation of a natural law which somehow connects them together. There is no greater probability that these unique properties should be without due cause uniquely favourable to the organic mechanism" (J. J. Henderson, 1913).

If neither of the classic points of view is tenable, what then is the explanation, if, indeed, any be possible? The author casts one brief glance down that blind-alley marked "Element Way." Does some known element or some unknown element, to which the name Bion might be given, exist and form the source of the energy in living things? Radium has only been known to us for a few years; can we say that there is no such thing as Bion? Of course we cannot; but this we can say, that, if there is such an element and if it is really responsible for all the protean manifestations of life, wonderful as radium and its doings are, they must sink into nothingness beside those of this new and unsuspected entity. The author evidently does not think that this path is a profitable one to pursue, and we agree with him; so he turns his attention to the question of energy. Energy is the capacity for doing work. It is often, of course, latent, as, for example, in a cordite cartridge, which is a peaceful, harmless thing until the energy stored up in it is realised with the accompanying explosion and work is done. It is the same with a bent spring; a clock-weight when the clock is not going, and so on.

We need not develop this matter further; but one point must be alluded to, namely, the gradual exhaustion of the available energy in the changes from one manifestation to another. In all physical processes heat is evolved, which heat is distributed by conduction and radiation and tends to become universally diffused throughout space. When complete uniformity has been attained, all physical phenomena will come to an end; in other words, our solar system must come to an end, and it must have had a beginning. It is a well-known argument. Is there anything to rewind the clock which is running down before our very eyes? It was once urged that stellar collisions, and such-like things, might permit us to postulate a cyclical arrangement (and thus rearrangement) of universal phenomena; but that hypothesis does not seem to find any supporters to-day.

In his interesting book, already mentioned, Dr. Johnstone called attention to the power possessed by living matter of reversing the process; but no reversal of this kind and extent can make up for the constant degradation of energy which is taking place all round us. We mention this because it shows that "energy" cannot, in any case, afford an eternal solution, but only a temporal and therefore a limited one. No one doubts that there is energy in the living thing, nor that there are what the author calls "complexes of energies." No one, again, will quarrel with the statement that energy is first seen in the sun, in the earth, in the air, and in the water; that "with life something new appears in the universe, namely, a union of the internal and external adjustment of energy which we appropriately call an Organism." That "the germ is an energy complex" is no doubt an unproved hypothesis, as he admits, but is quite likely. With all these assertions we may agree, though we cannot with that which follows, namely, that energy is creative, for that such is impossible in any true sense of that word we have already tried to show.

We have now to ask ourselves in what way this energy conception of life differs from, or goes beyond, the two theories of life—mechanistic and vitalistic, which have hitherto been supposed to have exhausted the possibilities of explanation. In order to do this we must analyse the author's idea of energy and its relationship to biological processes a little more closely. He begins his study of life and its evolution by considering how nutrition and the derivation of energy can have taken place before chlorophyl had come into existence; and he very pertinently points to the prototrophic bacteria as probably representing "the survival of a primordial stage of life chemistry." Thus a "primitive feeder," the bacterium Nitrosomonas, "for combustion ... takes in oxygen directly through the intermediate action of iron, phosphorus or manganese, each of the single cells being a powerful little chemical laboratory which contains oxidising catalysers, the activity of which is accelerated by the presence of iron and manganese. Still, in the primordial stage, Nitrosomonas lives on ammonium sulphate, taking its energy (food) from the nitrogen of ammonium and forming nitrates. Living symbiotically with it is Nitrobacter, which takes its energy (food) from the nitrates formed by Nitrosomonas, oxidising them into nitrates. Thus these two species illustrate in its simplest form our law of the interaction of an organism (Nitrobacter) with its life environment (Nitrosomonas)" (p. 82, author's italics).

Once one has got to this stage, it is ex hypothesi easy to ascend through the vegetable and animal worlds and to formulate the various laws which appear to have shaped the evolution of life and of species. We are then "within the system," but to arrive at anything worthy of the name of an explanation we have first to get within the system. Even then there remains over the task of explaining how the system comes to be there to get inside of. The writer talks of his example as "the simplest form." Yet, in his own words, it is a "powerful little chemical laboratory," well stocked with catalysers and other potent means for carrying on its work. "Simple"! Well, no doubt comparatively simple, but in reality complex almost beyond the power of words to describe. "A chemical laboratory"! Yes; and one which performs most delicate operations. "Well stocked with catalysers"! And what are they? Most wonderful things which induce change without themselves undergoing any; discoveries of quite recent date as to which we still know but little. "Simple" seems hardly the word to apply, save in strict relation to other and higher forms. How did this laboratory come into existence? In what way did it learn to do its work? How did catalysers come to be? Was all this mere chance-medley? It is Paley's example of the watch found on the heath once more. Does it help us in any way to talk about "energy" and "complexes" of energy and "the creative force of energy"? To us it does not seem to advance matters one little bit. Either these operations of Nitrosomonas are determined or they are not; either they are the result of a law or they are the result of blind chance; in either case the energy which is involved must act according to the conditions ordered or not ordered. In other words: if it is the dominant factor, as the writer would lead us to suppose; if there is "direction," then the action of energy must be directive; and, if it is directive, in what possible way does it differ, save in name, from the old entelechy or vital principle, or whatever else one may choose to call it? On the other hand, if there is no such a thing as direction, if everything happens by chance, if the mechanistic theory is right, how does energy save us from complete surrender to that theory?

From all this it would appear that whilst energy is constantly being exhibited (and in all sorts of manifestations) by the living object, that does not explain anything, since it does not explain how energy originally came to be, nor how it came to work under the laws which seem to govern it. It is one more added to the long list of "explanations," which hopelessly break down because those who have put them forward have never apparently applied themselves to the task of grasping the important difference between a final and an intermediate cause.

Let us sum up this part of our author's teaching in the light of this distinction. The organism is a material complex, and all sorts of actions and reactions take place in it. They are subject to the laws of physics, and notably to those relating to energy and its transformations. It has internal energies which must be adjusted to one another and not less to those around it; that is to say, it must be more or less in harmony with its environment. There are the problems of germ-plasm, and its transmission; the effect on it, if any, of the body, and the reaction of the body to its environment. There are also the catalysers of which we have spoken, with many problems associated with them, and throwing a possible and unexpected light on the vexed question of Vitalism and the Conservation of Energy. There are all these things, manifestations of energy; there is the watch, and it is going. But, as we remarked elsewhere, the fact that we have learned that the resiliency of the spring in the watch makes it "go" does not exhaust the explanation of the watch any more than the fact that we know something of the actions and reactions of energy in the organism exhausts its explanation. The watch is "going"; so is the organism. Each of them, in a sense, is a "wonderful little laboratory" in which manifestations of energy are constantly taking place. The watchmaker constructed the watch for that purpose; who or what constructed the organism? Darwin and the Darwinians would have said—Natural Selection. In fact, Darwin rather lamented that "the old argument from design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails now that the law of Natural Selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of Natural Selection, than in the course which the wind blows." There again Darwin fell into a mistake, because he confused an intermediate with a final cause. Even if Natural Selection were all that the most ultra-Darwinian could claim it to be, it could not, as Driesch and others have shown, exhaust the explanation of the organism.

As a matter of fact the world of science is very far from thinking of Natural Selection as anything more than a factor, perhaps even a minor factor, in evolution. The author of the work with which we are dealing tells us that "Darwin's law of selection as a natural explanation of the origin of all fitness in form and function has lost its prestige at the present time, and all of Darwinism which now meets with universal acceptance is the law of the survival of the fittest, a limited application of Darwin's great idea as expressed by Herbert Spencer." But let that pass. In another place the author makes it clear that the explanations of to-day, including his own, do not exhaust the subject,