328 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1935 



harmonies, and dissonances of the business of living. These main 

 basic themes are : 



First : The urge to individual personal survival here and now. 

 This appears to be an attribute of all living matter. 



Second : The urge to reproduction which again appears to be a 

 property of all that lives. 



Third: Variability, once more common to all living matter, in 

 both its genetic and somatic aspects, the one leading to the observed 

 differences or variations between individual organisms, the other 

 embodying the differences in^ the same individual at different times 

 in its life. 



Finally, it is to be remembered that it is impossible to discuss or 

 even to imagine life or living things without taking into account the 

 rest of the universe in which they exist. So then we must add to our 

 material for discussion one more item that corresponds roughly to 

 the fiddles, flutes, horns, printed music, desks, and other impedi- 

 menta n,ot musical per se but without which a symphony would 

 never reach the ears. This item is: 



Fourth: The environment that conditions and in some degree 

 determines all vital phenomena. 



Let us now examine each of these four items in some detail. 



The urge to survival ^ may fairly be regarded as the most funda- 

 mental attribute of living things and is therefore placed first in the 

 list. It may be well to point out at the start that in its essence this 

 urge to survival is rather completely and uncompromisingly selfish. 

 To the best of its ability the individual organism so conducts its 

 affairs as to continue living just as long as possible, regardless of 

 what other organisms may do or think about it. When extinction 

 threatens every resource* is brought to bear to fend it off. Basically 

 this is what underlies the struggle for existence. Out of it, associ- 

 ated with it, and because of it come great ranges of biological 

 phenomena that we have, for combined reasons of convenience and 

 pedantry, departmentalized: such as food getting, metabolism, and 

 nutrition, cellular and humoral defense mechanisms furnishing im- 

 munity and resistance to disease, protective shelter seeking and 

 building, natural selection, and in good part evolution itself. 



As a matter of observed fact this survival urge is primal and deeply 

 rooted. Whenever and wherever we see its fundamental selfishness 

 apparently in abeyance or even much abated, and seemingly replaced 



'There are curious aspects to this universal urge to individual survival. One of them 

 is the biological uselessness of much of it. It would be extremely difficult, if not impos- 

 sible, to find any rational biological purpose served by the survival of the individual after 

 it has reproduced itself. Yet In not a few organisms, including man, there is normally a 

 considerable part of the life span lived after adequate reproduction has been accomplished. 

 Living grandparents, great-grandparents, and celibate clergymen are among Nature's 

 gaudier examples of Thorstein Veblen's " conspicuous waste " in the realm of pure biology. 



