CHAPTER 27 • THE CONFLICTS OF LIFE 



1 Do any plants fight in the way that animals fight? 



2 Do any species ever die out in nature? 



3 How can we tell whether animals which are new to us are useful, 



or harmful? 



4 How do animals know their enemies instinctively? 



5 If species result from adaptation to particular conditions, how 



can they live in strange surroundings? 



6 Do animals ever kill for any reason except to get food or to pro- 



tect themselves? 



7 Do animals ever kill others of their own species? 



8 Is it possible to avoid competition? 



9 Are the survivors in a conflict always superior? 



10 Would there really be room for all the persons who are born? 



Life is always interfering with things, always rearranging things. It will 

 not let things remain as they have always been. That is why people have 

 thought of life as a kind of "force". It is like rushing water, changing the face 

 of the earth. It is like a storm, stirring everything up. It is Hke raging fire, 

 destroying what it touches. Yes, life is like all these "forces". But it differs 

 from them all, too. 



It is more helpful to think of life as unique, in a class by itself — not as a 

 something, not even as a force. Life is what living things — all organisms — do 

 in common. It is a persistent enlarging and extending of itself in all directions, 

 a grasping of the outer world, a converting of the outer world to itself. 



But the world seems unwilling to be taken in that way. Everything is 

 always interfering with life. This life process constantly meets resistance. 

 Especially is there resistance and interference from parts of the world that 

 are really playing the same game — that is, other living things. There is re- 

 sistance, and sometimes a fighting back. Life is a struggle, not a flowing along, 

 not a one-sided action. It is interaction, a give and take with the entire en- 

 vironment, including other life. 



How Can We Say that Plants Struggle? 



Passive Struggles^ We have learned to think of the activities of com- 

 mon plants as rather quiet processes of osmosis, diffusion of gases, chemical 

 change, as in photosynthesis, or very slow — and "cold" — oxidation. What is 

 there here to suggest a struggle? If water is abundant in the soil, the roots 

 will absorb it rather quickly — as an old rag might. But if the atmosphere is 



iSeeNo. 1, p. 557. 

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