390 THE FIRST ORGANISMS 



or the appearance of the opposite antipode may be avoided 

 altogether and the system may retain its asymmetry indefin- 

 itely.'' 



Thus the asymmetry of protoplasm is due to its definite 

 organisation in time, the co-ordination of the reactions occur- 

 ring in it. This co-ordination certainly did not arise by chance. 

 It was enabled to arise by selection of the original systems, 

 for, according to W. H. Mills, ^^ everything else being equal, 

 reactions proceed at a significantly slower rate in racemic 

 mixtures than in optically active mixtures. Systems made 

 up of asymmetric material must therefore have been more 

 effective in the struggle for existence than their competitors 

 made up of racemic mixtures. 



Systems, in which a definite co-ordination of reactions had 

 led to the formation of asymmetry, carried out their syntheses 

 more quickly than otherwise identical systems based on 

 racemic mixtures. The growth of the former must therefore 

 have been significantly faster and their dynamic stability 

 must have been greater. As a result of all this the action of 

 selection must have tended to increase the asymmetry of 

 the substances entering into the composition of our original 

 colloidal systems from the first stages of their evolution. In 

 contemporary protoplasm this asymmetry has reached a very 

 high level ; there is an extremely high degree of optical purity 

 which can only be present as a result of a very close co- 

 ordination of the rates of the reactions contributing to the 

 synthesis of the substances in question.''^ 



In order to renew and preserve themselves continually in 

 a state of uninterrupted interaction with the external 

 medium, our original systems could extract the ingredients 

 which they needed ready-made from the medium, sometimes 

 in the form of very complicated organic molecules. However, 

 even at the earliest stages of the evolution of our original 

 systems, the substances entering them must have undergone 

 some sort of chemical transformation, otherwise the pro- 

 perties which characterise open systems could not have arisen. 

 As we saw above, this did not involve any direct ' multiplica- 

 tion ' of the individual molecules, they could not ' reproduce 

 themselves ' directly. What did occur was only a more or 

 less constantly repeated formation of new material based on 



