128 SINNOTT 



blind us to the fact that at this point on the frontier progress has long been 

 interrupted. Save for being able to pose the problem of organic self-regulation 

 in clearer terms we are not much farther along than were Vochting and 

 Driesch at the end of the nineteenth century. 



This is not surprising, for one is here at grips with the very nature of life 

 itself — not life simply as a series of chemical changes but as an integrative 

 process. Because of this the student of morphogenesis lacks in many cases 

 the advantage of employing the basic scientific technique of analysis, which 

 has proven so successful in the physical sciences. No internal activity, or 

 environmental factor, can be isolated in its effect or studied as a single 

 variable, for each is concerned, to a greater or less extent, with the entire 

 living system. Though the plant may seem to be made up of independent units 

 in inheritance, it is not so in development. The influence of a given genetic 

 factor is usually more conspicuous on one trait or group of traits than on 

 the others, but modifying the organized framework in one respect affects 

 the entire system to some degree, as the widespread occurrence of the 

 multiple effects of genes makes clear. Similarly, the reaction of a plant to a 

 particular external factor depends on what the other factors are. The effect 

 of light is modified by temperature and inner rhythms. What auxin will do 

 depends on the place and the process on which it operates. In metabolism, 

 one can often break down the complex series of chemical changes and study 

 the particular steps in each, but in the processes of regulation the changes 

 have complex interrelationships and homeostatic activity which we do not 

 yet understand. Of such a process, L. J. Henderson once said, "Sooner or later, 

 when the problem is studied, we come upon the fact that a certain organ or 

 group of cells accomplishes that which is requisite to the preservation of 

 the equilibrium, varying the internal condition according to the variation of 

 the external conditions, in a manner which we can on no account at present 

 explain." 



The process of organization and regulation is of significance beyond the 

 boundaries of biology itself. Being concerned with the essential quality of 

 life, it is important in the fundamental problems of all living things, includ- 

 ing man himself. Biological organization must even be taken into account 

 in certain philosophical questions, and it is here that the life sciences may 

 have an important contribution to make to man's understanding of his own 

 nature. It has been suggested by several biologists, for example, that there 

 is a basic identity between the self-regulation shown in development and 

 that shown in behavior, and that the origin of psychical traits, and thus 

 perhaps of mind itself, may be found in the same protoplasmic activities 

 that are concerned in morphogenesis. The march from fertilized egg to the 

 formation of a mature individual, a march in which the organism tends so 

 stubbornly to persist even when it is blocked experimentally, suggests that 

 in the organism there is a protoplasmic norm or series of norms to which it 



