PERSPECTIVES IN EVOLUTION — RITCHIE 255 



in such a way that the organism beginning as a fertilized ovum, 

 already complex in a morphological and physicochemical sense, 

 becomes still more complex. The history of life upon earth in the 

 broadest sense is also an evolution from more simple to more com- 

 plex. It might be said that even in the lifeless world from which 

 our visitors came, inorganic things showed an evolution from more 

 simple to more complex; that, for example, an ancient range of 

 mountains, with its peaks and valleys, its corries and its precipices, 

 is much more complex than the simple fold of the anticline which 

 was its beginning. But that is a complexity due to disintegration, 

 and is entirely in consonance with the physical law of randomness 

 which would assert that in the long run the hills will be deposited 

 in the valleys so that both will attain a common level beyond which 

 leveling can go no further. But the complexity of the evolution 

 of life is no disintegration ; on the contrary its characteristic is inte- 

 gration, a building up associated with an increase in the orderly 

 arrangement of particles, and not, at any rate as we focus our eyes 

 upon the products of evolution, an increase of randomness. 



Further, if our visitors were fortunate enough to have a biologist 

 as their mundane guide, he would give a final shock to their physical 

 concepts by informing them that we believe protoplasm, the essen- 

 tial living matter, to have risen from a fortuitous concourse of 

 atoms, and such an event, where physical law demands dispersal and 

 randomness, is exceedingly improbable, though nothing is impossible. 

 In brief, place before your physicist who has no knowledge of life, 

 the series atoms, protoplasm, unicellular organism, metazoan, and 

 ask him which came first; and he will swear by all the laws of 

 inorganic nature and statistical probability that the metazoan must 

 have started the chain and must have evolved or disintegrated into 

 the unicellular organism, and that into primeval protoplasm, which 

 must finally have dissociated into its constituent atoms. But we 

 know that the reverse is the true sequence, the reverse of physical 

 probability. 



Is this then a fundamental secret of life, that it reverses the 

 physical law of dissipation or increasing randomness? There has 

 been long argument "about it and about," but to take recent expres- 

 sions of opinion, that is the view taken by Sir James Jeans, who 

 frankly states that "what we describe as life succeeds in evading it 

 [i. e. the second law of thermodynamics or the law of increasing 

 entropy or randomness] in varying degree" (1933, p. 276). Other 

 writers going further see in the paradox "the intervention and con- 

 tinually active interference of a guiding force which, in the case 

 of life, lifts it into a higher plane of existence where it is not sub- 

 ject to the laws of entropy" (H. V. Gill, 1933). The opposing 



