LIFE AND THE CELL 59 



In solitary wasps they are completely separated. Neither knows the other. 

 In the robin they are intimately united for a prolonged period. One may 

 often see a nearly full-grown robin soliciting and receiving food from its 

 indulgent parents after it is perfectly able to forage for itself. 



Among the mammals, the care of offspring has become part and parcel 

 of the perpetuation of life. In fact, the possession of mammary glands, the 

 unique structural feature to which the class of Mammalia owes its name, 

 would be valueless in the absence of the maternal instinct to foster and 

 nourish the young, and the correlated instinct of the young to obtain its 

 food from the maternal fount. As in birds, parental care increases, as a 

 rule, as we pass from lower to higher forms. In the apes it is exhibited in 

 many ways that appear quite human. We may regard it as the source of 

 social sympathy and affection. It is the earliest form of true altruism. With- 

 out it man would probably never have become a "normal animal," as he 

 was said to be by Herbert Spencer. 



Parental care, as I have attempted to show (although lack of space for- 

 bids producing sufficient evidence for this conclusion), is an outgrowth 

 of accessory reproductive activities which have been superadded to the 

 more primary reproductive functions. If it has afforded the evolutionary 

 basis for altruistic behavior it is because reproduction is fundamentally 

 and essentially an altruistic function. It is concerned not with the individ- 

 ual per se but with others. We can not say that altruism evolved out of 

 egoism. Both are present in the simplest organism that divides by fission. 

 Both are coeval with life itself. 



THE QUEST FOR THE MYSTERY OF LIFE * 

 H. GORDON GARBEDIAN 



Why do we fall sick? Why do we grow old.^ And why do we die? We 

 would have the answers to those great riddles if we could find the answer 

 to the more fundamental problem: Why do we live? 



To explain the life process has become the great quest of modern science. 

 That search is already yielding surprising results and unusual benefits to 

 mankind, and if it succeeds in giving us an understanding of the complex 

 phenomena of Hfe it would be the crowning glory of man. 



Artificial life created out of non-living stuff in the laboratory is a dream 

 as old as the alchemists' ambition to make gold out of lead. Present-day 

 investigators have obtained results which tend to show that it is possible 

 to make artificial "cells" which contain the spark of life and which are 



* Copyright 1933 by H. Gordon Garbedian. Reprinted by permission of Crown 

 Publishers. 



