MULTICELLULAR ORGANISMS 



must have aided or hindered different mutants at 

 various periods of time. 



It should be noted at this point that while the inte- 

 gration and specialization of the cells follows a strictly 

 rational pattern, governed by the requirements of the 

 developing organism, there is no reason to believe that 

 any conscious realization of this process existed in 

 either the cells themselves or in the organism. 



Yet the development of metazoa has on the average 

 followed a very definite trend. This trend is the ever- 

 increasing extropy of evolving organisms, together with 

 the development of improved means of preserving this 

 increasing extropy level. 



What is the reason for this improving integration of 

 the organisms and the increasing complexity of their 

 structures? The usual answer that is presently available 

 to this question is the well-accepted genetic answer, 

 citing the selective effect of environment upon the 

 naturally occurring mutations. But does an answer 

 based upon these considerations only, really explain 

 satisfactorily why evolution has moved generally in the 

 direction of increasing complexity? Why indeed is 

 there such a definite correlation between the increas- 

 ing extropy of the developing forms of life and the 

 passage of time? Is it not rather surprising that animal 

 and plant evolution which bifurcated very early in the 

 development of living matter should have taken a path 

 which shows so many parallelisms? Does this not per- 



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