20 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF LIFE 



taining these actions, reactions, and interactions and con- 

 stantly building up new ones : at the same time the potentiality 

 of reproducing these actions, reactions, and interactions in the 

 course of the development of each new organism is gradually 

 being accumulated and perpetuated in the germ. 



From the very beginning every individual organism is 

 competing with other organisms of its own kind and of other 

 kinds, and the law of the survival of the fittest is operating 

 between the forms and functions of organisms as a whole and 

 between their separate actions, reactions, and interactions. 

 This, as Weismann pointed out, while apparently a selection 

 of the individual organism itself, is actually a selection of the 

 heredity-germ complex, of its potentialities, powers, and pre- 

 dispositions. Thus Selection is not a form of energy nor a part 

 of the energy complex; it is an arbiter between different com- 

 plexes and forms of energy; it antedates the origin of life just 

 as adaptation or fitness antedates the origin of life, as re- 

 marked by Henderson. 



Thus we arrive at a conception of the relations of organisms 

 to each other and to their environment as of an enormous and 

 always increasing complexity, sustained through the interchange 

 of energy. Darwin's principle of the survival or elimination 

 of various forms of living energy is, in fact, adumbrated in the 

 survival or elimination of various forms of lifeless energy as 

 witnessed among the stars and planets. In other words, Dar- 

 win's principle operates as one of the causes of evolution in mak- 

 ing the lifeless and living worlds what they now appear to be, 

 but not as one of the energies of evolution. Selection merely 

 determines which one of a combination of energies shall survive 

 and which shall perish. 



The complex of four interrelated sets of physicochemical 

 energies which I have previously set forth (p. xvi) as the most 



