534 PROTOPLASM 



deny mechanism or vitalism but ask the philosopher tenta- 

 tively to interpret life for us. Philosophically inclined biologists 

 see in emergent evolution an escape — though it is but an escape — 

 from the mechanistic-vitalistic dilemma. The name (not a 

 fortunate one, as evolution has long been accepted among 

 biologists, and all evolution is emergent) designates a point of 

 view expressed by C. L. Morgan. Some years previously, 

 G. H. Parker advanced a similar idea under the name of "organic 

 determinism," or "organicism," in which life is viewed as the 

 outcome of a specific organization of substances, each common- 

 place in itself; in other words, when organic molecules are 

 assembled in a certain way, they exhibit properties quite unlike 

 those which they show when they are brought together in another 

 way. For example, glucose is a sugar of such and such qualities 

 not only because it is made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen 

 but because of the way in which these elements are put together. 

 Many other compounds consist of the same elements, yet they 

 are not glucose. No matter how much knowledge we may have 

 of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen or of other compounds con- 

 sisting of these elements, it will avail us nothing in an under- 

 standing of glucose. In brief, a whole is more than the sum of 

 its parts, not merely because of complexity but because in the 

 functional whole we have another type of system. 



The American philosopher E. A. Singer would probably say 

 that we have no need for new names because the idea that they 

 here express is old, in one form or another, and may better be 

 stated as follows: Living matter is a mechanism obeying all 

 natural laws, but it is incapable of definition or explanation; 

 that is to say, everything that goes to make up a living system 

 is mechanical (materialistic), and the individual parts of it are 

 definable, but the collective all is indefinable. (Materialism is 

 a somewhat better term than mechanism, for the latter implies 

 that living matter is a machine like a watch, while materialism 

 states only that it is wholly physical and chemical in nature, 

 without denying that it may be mechanistic.) Such a viewpoint 

 recognizes the possibility of producing protoplasm artificially 

 in the laboratory but denies the probability, 



Democritus stated that there is nothing in a natural system 

 that does not or could not exist in a mechanical one. Aristotle 

 denied this by stating that there is something of a nonmechan- 



