BIO-DYNAMICS 101 



street-vendor's " cunning," Samuel Butler would probably 

 have asked, in obtaining even his moderate start? 



Spencer, together with some of his illustrious con- 

 temporaries less democratic in feeling than we are at the 

 present day seems on the whole to have been content with a 

 kind of middle-class philosophy, to the effect that every 

 organism (or man) with any decency in him will have been so 

 '' well-born " as to have a pretty good incipient capital to start 

 with. All capital, however small and of whatever kind, in 

 human as well as in organic civilisation, is primarily obtained 

 by work, and represents ancestral dynamics and the accumula- 

 tions due to symbiosis. To know the nature of these dynamics 

 in each case is to understand organisation with its subsequent 

 developments, variations, and adaptations, and also its 

 eventual fate. 



In order to understand the "striking unlikeness of bulk" 

 between an ox and a sheep, although in domestication they 

 feed and they do pretty much alike, we must go back to 

 ancestral dynamics, when we shall find that, as in the case of 

 the two species Convoluta, the differences are ultimately con- 

 nected with differences of nutrition, i.e., with metabolic 

 differences, and in the last analysis also with differences of 

 symbiotic behaviour and of symbiotic activities. 



Spencer views all these matters too narrowly and too 

 statically. These different types probably had a common 

 ancestor, and hence must have been much more alike at one 

 period. It was through subsequent differences of conduct and 

 also of circumstances that they first became of different size 

 and form. That subsequent and more recent dynamics, if they 

 produce a great similarity of external effects, as in domestica- 

 tion, must again lead to striking parallelisms and similarities 

 of structure, is amply borne out by the well-known phenomena 

 of convergence. 



Spencer's analogy concerning the bequeathing of physio- 

 logical and trade capital needs the qualification that good and 

 normal results can only accrue with right use. The accumulation 



