EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS 



arrangement, and above all the arrangement of the more complex 

 liquid crystals, is doubtless the most highly ordered and organised. 

 But below the crystalline level there is the molecular level, and below 

 that again the level of the atoms, some of which have a much more 

 complex "solar system" of elementary physical particles than others. 

 When crystals form spontaneously they do so in processes which 

 involve decreases in free energy.^ The physicist must therefore say 

 that disorder has increased, but the biologist, as a student of patterns, 

 cannot but say that there is more order and organisation in the well- 

 arranged crystal than in its homogeneous mother-liquor or corre- 

 sponding gas.2 



So also in the development of our world. In its earliest stages, we 

 are told, there were nothing but the elementary physical particles, 

 and conditions were such that the atoms of the elements we know 

 could not exist. But as the temperature of the earth grew colder, the 

 atoms of the elements became stable and at last even the heaviest 

 ones, with their dozens of revolving electrons, were able to persist.^ 

 Here, from the biologist's point of view, pattern and organisation 

 had increased, but certainly from the physicist's point of view, 

 order had decreased. The chaos which ensues upon the degradation 

 of energy cannot therefore be the same chaos which existed at the 

 beginning of the world before the atoms of the elements were stable. 

 For that chaos coincided with a maximum of free energy, and the 

 former accompanies its successive minima. 



The point is, therefore, (a) that we cannot refuse to extend the 

 concept of organisation downwards to include non-living patterned 

 aggregations,* and (b) that since these require no continuing metabolic 

 upkeep for their persistence, the "metabolic" theory which asserts 



^ Cf. G. N. Lewis & M. Randall, Thermodynamics, p. 122. 



^ Certain writers dispute this, e.g. R. O. Kapp {Science versus Materialism, London, 

 1940). They see in inorganic nature nothing but particles of different sorts "flying about" 

 and "shaking down"; life alone introduces a plan or pattern. But may not life be the 

 way the proteins shake down when in conjunction with lipoids, carbohydrates and 

 certain other constituents ^ 



^ F, Wood-Jones {Design and Purpose, London, 1942, p. 55) has related how he, as 

 a student, was struck by the similarity between Mendeleev's table of the elements 

 and Huxley's table of biological types. Both have the status of evolutionary sequences. 

 For an account of where Mendeleev's table of the elements stands to-day, see F. A. 

 Paneth, Nature, 1942, 149, 565. 



* It should be noted that this conclusion is also that of certain philosophies; the 

 emergent evolutionism of Lloyd-Morgan and others, the organic mechanism of White- 

 head, and the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. It has also been finely expressed 

 by the eminent physiologist Otto Meyerhof, in a review which is the best account of 



225 P 



