18/3 AMPLIFYING ADAPTATION 



they would provide most valuable and convincing examples). 

 What all would show is that when a single-valued operation is 

 performed repeatedly on a set of states (this operation being the 

 4 laws ' of the system), the system tends to such states as are not 

 affected by the operation, or are affected to less than usual degree. 

 In other words, every single-valued operation tends to select forms 

 that are peculiarly able to resist its change-inducing action. In 

 simple systems this fact is almost truistic, in complex systems 

 anything but. And when it occurs on the really grand scale, on a 

 system with millions of variables and over millions of years, then 

 the states selected are likely to be truly remarkable and to show, 

 among their parts, a marked co-ordination tending to make them 

 immune to the operation. 



The development of life on earth must thus not be seen as 

 something remarkable. On the contrary, it was inevitable. It 

 was inevitable in the sense that if a system as large as the surface 

 of the earth, basically polystable, is kept gently simmering 

 dynamically for five thousand million years, then nothing short 

 of a miracle could keep the system away from those states in 

 which the variables are aggregated into intensely self-preserving 

 forms. The amount of selection performed by this system, of 

 which we know only one example, is of an order of size so vastly 

 greater than anything that we experience as individuals, that we 

 not unnaturally have some difficulty in grasping that the process 

 is really the same as that seen so trivially in our everyday systems. 

 Nevertheless it is so; the greater extension in space enables a 

 vastly greater number of forms to be tested, and the greater 

 extension in time enables the forms to be worked up to a vastly 

 greater degree of intricate co-ordination. 



We can thus trace, from a perfectly natural origin, the gene- 

 patterns that today inhabit the earth; we are not surprised that 

 the earth has developed forms that show, in conjunction with their 

 environments, the most remarkable power of being resistant to the 

 change-inducing actions of the world around them. They are 

 resistant, not in the static and uninteresting way that a piece of 

 granite, or a run-down clock, is resistant, but in the dynamic and 

 much more interesting way of forming intricate dynamic systems 

 around themselves (their so-called ' bodies ', with extensions such 

 as nests and tools) so that the whole is homeostatic and self- 

 preserving by active defences. 



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