SYMBIOSIS 11 



and the presence even in incipient life of autonomous powers, 

 regulating work, thus corroborates the bio-economic view that 

 organisms are primarily and normally free economic agents. 

 They are not only to a certain extent masters of their own 

 fate, but they are also to a certain extent responsible members 

 of the biological community. Though they are frequently 

 found to be slaves to habit, it by no means inevitably or even 

 normally follows that this should ever be to an excessive 

 extent. It is only where we find organisms lapsed into abnormal 

 feeding (and associated abnormal economic) habits that they 

 become "extremely determined" by the environment, i.e., 

 aberrant or degenerate, and in course of time unable to retrace 

 their steps and therefore obliged to drift into blind-alleys of 

 evolution. An extreme instance of such aberration is provided, 

 according to my view, by parasitism inseparably associated as 

 it is with metabolic abnormality. The " abnormal and well- 

 nigh impossible conditions " referred to by Prof. Keeble under 

 which the "organism, high or low, is an automaton," in my 

 opinion, are realised by obligate parasites with their extremes 

 of metabolic aberration and the concomitant extreme degrees 

 of biological nemesis. 



The same explanation applies, I believe, to the case of the 

 extinction of races in nature which so greatly puzzled Darwin, 

 for in nature, as in the laboratory, as, indeed, in human 

 society also, organisms are being lured to their doom by 

 becoming slaves to bad habits. 



By a series of experiments concerning the behaviour of 

 the plant-animals with reference to black and white back- 

 grounds, Prof. Keeble believes that he has demonstrated that 

 there is no inevitableness of reflex. Circumstances alter 

 reflexes. There are, of course, limitations to all nervous 

 actions, both reflex and conscious. The further inference is 

 reached that : 



The behaviour of both plant and animal would seem to indicate 

 that, in the reflex groundwork of nervous activity, something akin to 

 the phenomenon of attention in psychic life may manifest itself. 



