130 SYMBIOGENESIS 



common bond, and though it may be said, of course, that death 

 makes all organisms alike, this same agency cannot very well 

 change all survivors simultaneously. As Butler puts it in his 

 own case against Natural Selection : 



Do animals and plants grow into conformity with their surroundings 

 because they and their fathers and mothers take pains, or because their 

 uncles and aunts go away ? For the survival of the fittest is only the 

 non-survival or going away of the unfittest in whose direct line the 

 race is not continued, and who are, therefore, only uncles and aunts of 

 the survivors. I can quite understand its being a good thing for any 

 race that its uncles and aunts should go away, but I do not believe the 

 accumulation of lucky accidents could result in an eye, no matter how 

 many uncles and aunts may have gone away during how many genera- 

 tions. 



Let us take the case of organisms specially "adapted" 

 (extremely determined) to a particular "environment" like 

 parasites. Though they be thus "naturally selected," by 

 what logic can we presume them to have changed 

 simultaneously w T ith, say, organisms that all the time have 

 remained strenuous? Neither their mode of change nor rate 

 of change can bear the slightest resemblance to those operative 

 amongst the strenuous organisms. The " heredities " are 

 totally different because the directions of evolution are totally 

 different. An organism living by plunder instead of mutual 

 aid is able to " progress" along its own lines (which are those 

 of the inclined plane) and often rapidly. In so doing it cannot 

 very well be said to make a change simultaneous (so far as 

 regards any inter-connected series) with that of slow advancing 

 strenuous organisms. Organisms living by mutual support 

 develop quite differently, for here the correspondences with the 

 external world are many and profound, and every change must 

 be a correlated change. The complexity of their corres- 

 pondences by way of reaction implies a complexity of 

 organisation, and there again, as Spencer has shown, every 

 change of function must be long continued and of a permanent 

 nature to stamp a permanent change on so complex an organi- 

 sation. On the other hand, and this is what Spencer omits, 



