EVOLUTION AND HUMAN DESTINY 



is a useful one. It aids in the illustration of the essen- 

 tial continuity of the process of pre-organic evolution 

 and the evolution of life. 



Of greater complexity than crystals and consequently 

 of greater extropy are colloidal substances, which are 

 composed of an orderly array of atoms. They differ 

 from the simpler crystals as a result of the much larger 

 number of atoms that are required to constitute a unit 

 of minimum size, which will show all the characteris- 

 tics of the substance. Their complexity becomes par- 

 ticularly great when one considers those colloids which 

 are made up of a large variety of structurally differen- 

 tiated atoms. Under proper conditions colloids grow 

 by adding suitable molecules from their immediate 

 surroundings to their own structures in a somewhat 

 similar, although far more complicated manner than 

 that followed by the simpler crystals. 



Proteins are colloids which are orderly aggregates of 

 a very considerable number of the molecules of sev- 

 eral amino acids. Proteins are substances of great com- 

 plexity which may be regarded as constituting a rather 

 high level of local extropy. It appears probable that 

 the formation of proteins from amino acids was a 

 process which did not happen all at once but required 

 the prior formation of a chain of intermediate com- 

 pounds of increasing complexity. Such a process should 

 be thought of as having required a long period of grad- 

 ually increasing complexity until substances with the 

 complexity of proteins were formed. 



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