time: the refreshing river 



(4) a rise in the effectiveness with which the individual organism 

 carries out its purposes of survival and reproduction,^ including 

 the power of moulding its environment. 



There is nothing vitalistic about these criteria. All the levels of 

 biological organisation are higher than the physico-chemical level, 

 hence it is only natural that regularities will be expected to occur in 

 them which cannot be seen at any physico-chemical level. But this is 

 not to say that biochemistry and biophysics are not the fundamental 

 sciences of biology. A living organism is both a ''patterned mixed- 

 up-ness," and a "patterned separatedness." The mere fact of the 

 aggregation of millions of cells together into a functioning metazoon 

 necessitates the provision of efficient means of control of the whole. 

 Hence the mysterious similarity between the view that we see when 

 looking down a microscope at a transparent blood-vessel, and the 

 view of Broadway from the top of a skyscraper. Hence the mysterious 

 similarity between the nerve fibres and the pyloned wire striding 

 across the countryside. The new walls built in and around bombed 

 buildings in London seem like scar tissue growing in an animal's body. 

 A partly built steel-frame building, with its maze of pipes visible, 

 seems like a metal organism in which human beings are parasitic. 

 We speak of the "saturation" of anti-aircraft defences just as we 

 speak of the saturation of an enzyme by its substrate, and the filtering 

 of tanks through a line of defences resembles diapedesis.^ Those 

 thinkers who apply biological analogies to human society and its pro- 

 ducts are as foolish as any who would conversely try to persuade us 

 that there really are micro-telephone-operators within the coelentrate 

 nerve-net. The point is that the works of organisation have a certain 

 similarity at all levels of their operation. 



Furthermore, it is in general true that the higher the level of bio- 

 logical organisation, the more independent of the environment the 



^ There is a sense, of course, in which an amoeba is as organised as a man in that it 

 carries out all the functions of assimilation, metabolism, reproduction, etc., but the 

 difference lies in the variety of conditions under which it can do so, and the kind of 

 limitations on the type of life which it can lead. There is also a sense in which all those 

 species of plants and animals which have succeeded in persisting through evolutionary 

 change are equally successful. But this is not the only criterion of success. Merely to 

 persist is certainly the sine qua non, but we have also to consider under what variety 

 of changed circumstances this persistence can occur, and also what the organism does 

 with its persistence. One of the main objects in defining biological organisation and its ' 

 rise during evolution is to get rid of as much subjectivism as possible in our outlook 

 on other living things. 



^ C. M. Beadnell, Literary Guide, 1942, 57, 79. 



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