Studies on the Motion of Viscous Flows— II 



The reason historical development and evolution have not previously been 

 recognized as fundamental aspects of physical reality, is that physical theory, 

 which is but a way of looking at certain phenomena which we by convention call 

 physical, is based on a description of nature and concepts which are formulated 

 in mathematical statements, called principles or laws, that are in principle de- 

 void of historical content and information. If we look at biological reality from 

 the point of view of physical theory, what we see is not different, and in principle 

 cannot differ, from what we see by adopting the same point of view in examining 

 phenomena which we arbitrarily call physical. According to the present work, 

 which claims a total correspondence between all natural phenomena, and in par- 

 ticular therefore between phenomena which we have by convention designated as 

 biological and physical, the evolutionary and historical aspects of nature should 

 in fact emerge in what by convention is called physical reality, if we engage this 

 reality directly by crucial experiments that are conceived to identify them. The 

 expression, 'physical aspects of evolution' will be used in what follows in order 

 to refer concisely to the particular aspects of evolution which we may be able to 

 identify experimentally and theoretically, within the experimental domain that 

 physical theory now purports to condition fully by its mathematically stated laws. 



Whereas evolutionary and developmental processes are macroscopically 

 imminent to us in certain materials which we have learned to call biological 

 (and no doubt the reason for this is that we are made of these materials), as- 

 pects of evolution and of historical development emerge in materials which we 

 have learned to call physical, on time scales that are either much larger or 

 much smaller than the time scale in which, for example, the aging of a man or 

 the development of an embryo can be discerned by direct observation — i.e., 

 without requiring specially designed experiments. It is the attenuation in these 

 materials of the immediately apparent phenomenological manifestations of evo- 

 lution, which has given rise to the misconception that there exists a real and 

 fundamental dichotomy between two aspects of reality, called physical and bio- 

 logical. This circumstance has, however, afforded man the important opportu- 

 nity to identify experimentally in the nature of matter certain features that are 

 constant in space and time and that are therefore maintained constant under the 

 universal process of evolution, which is understood here to prevail and function 

 equivalently in all matter and to be an equivalent aspect of all natural phenom- 

 ena. These constant features of nature with which, according to the principles 

 of universal correspondence, all matter is essentially endowed, but which were 

 initially revealed in the behavior of so-called physical material, have been 

 mathematically formulated by propositions which are now the established laws 

 of physical theory. Again, by the principle of universal correspondence, it fol- 

 lows that the laws of physical theory are laws that condition all natural phenom- 

 ena, and therefore in particular materials we now call biological. It also follows 

 from the principle of universal correspondence, that physical theory does not 

 give a complete description of or condition all of the essential aspects of physi- 

 cal reality, viz., its evolutionary aspects. The forces in nature bridge and thus 

 reconcile the aspects of nature which according to the laws of physical theory 

 are maintained constant in space and time, with the evolutionary aspects which 

 manifest themselves by the historical development and thus change of natural 

 phenomena in space and time. This conclusion, which bears fundamentally on 

 the nature of force and which is therefore equally relevant to all forces in na- 

 ture, implies that all forces are the universal instruments of evolutionary thrust 



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