SOME SPECULATIONS CONCERNING REGULATIONS 465 



be imagined. Whether it is optimal, beneficial, wise, beautiful, fit, 

 or purposeful can be argued and defined. All those concepts might 

 enter into speculations concerning origins and modifications of 

 physiological regulations. 



§ 170. Survival and death 



Finding in 14 diverse species a single type of diagram for net 

 water equilibration (§72) instead of several possible types of dia- 

 gram that are never found, might be used as statistical evidence of 

 one kind of fitness to survive. There are no strong indications of 

 how the fitness of recoveries came about in the course of phylogeny. 

 Fitness might be treated as another correlative ; then all the com- 

 ponents that are characteristically related (interwoven) with one 

 another are also correlated with this one property of fitness. 

 That the very component which is loaded should also be returned 

 (unloaded), is anything but a random relation of two quantities. 

 Such a fit specificity is observed repeatedly ; there is nothing about 

 it to be glossed over or ashamed of. It suggests that the organism 

 would not be here if means of establishing such relations had not 

 been ''invented" for each of many components. Appropriateness 

 of the same order is involved in LeChatelier 's rule (§ 160) ; the very 

 factor that has undergone change is the one that tends to be an- 

 nulled in the physico-chemical system. In both non-living and 

 living systems the recognition of the fitness when so defined is 

 descriptive. 



Fitness might be treated as a variable that is particularly cor- 

 related with survival. Recovery and equilibration in their turn 

 are also correlated with survival in the case of most components, 

 for most displacements (loads) are recovered from during life. 

 The two correlatives of survival are, therefore, correlated one with 

 the other ; by such a truism biological interrelations are epitomized. 

 There are exceptions to the universal tendency to recover : missing 

 appendages, benign carcinomas, obesity, and deposited lead are all 

 compatible with survival. Perhaps even in each of these instances 

 there are augmentations of exchange in unrecognized correlatives 

 that tend toward recovery. Subsidiary and contributory * ' causes ' ' 

 of death take on another meaning when regarded as correlatives 

 of physiological equilibrations. 



Death may be viewed from equilibration diagrams in the fol- 

 lowing ways, (a) Some one or more components reaches a posi- 



