2 SYMBIOGENES1S 



I have gone further, and whilst emphasising the 

 important part played by food have pointed out that "It is 

 the bio-economic task of organisms to earn their sustenance, and 

 over and above this to provide for marginal and exchangeable 

 bio-economic values to be used in the mutual accomplishment 

 of evolution." I have referred to Sir E. Bay Lankester's 

 recent statement that "the system of elaborate service of one 

 organism to another is now found on examination to be 

 practically universal," and I believe that I have to a certain 

 extent shown that " nothing, in fact, at the present day wants 

 emphasising more than that the whole organic world is 

 primarily and normally based on relations of mutuality, and 

 that every step that transgresses these relations leads towards 

 degeneration and decline." 



I have expressed the opinion that the fact that Darwin 

 borrowed no ideas from political economy beyond the 

 Malthusian doctrine constitutes a great defect in the Darwinian 

 outlook, and I have shown that other and more important 

 teachings of political economy apply as fully and fitly to the 

 economic relations governing the world of biology. I have 

 quoted the botanist Kerner's view that such symbiosis, as is 

 implied, for instance, by the relations between bee and honey- 

 flower, shows a reciprocity which is at bottom but a copy of 

 the complementary interaction of plant and animal which 

 takes place on a grand scale in the organic world, and I have 

 set this view in juxtaposition to Darwin's pronouncement that 

 "we are profoundly ignorant of the mutual relations of the 

 inhabitants of the world," and have shown that the neglect 

 of symbiosis has led to many serious misapprehensions of the 

 general philosophy of biology. For the benefit of those of my 

 readers who have not read my Evolution by Co-operation, I 

 cannot do better than here append part of a review of this book 

 appearing in the British Medical Journal (25/4/14). 



The title of his book, Evolution by Co-operation, affords a clue to 

 his mam position, which is akin to that of Drummond, Chambers and 

 k> some extent, Lamarck. He is of opinion that nutrition is a dominant 



