Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [1]
The most glaring of nature's incongruities is the internecine strife between organisms that, from the least to the greatest, have so much in common. The more intensively they are studied, the more similarities are disclosed, in genetic control and physiological processes, between creatures that vary immensely in form, habitat, and activities. The life and health of each are preserved by a high degree of internal harmony among diverse organs and functions, yet their external relations are frequently far from harmonious.
To understand this paradoxical situation, we must look deeply into the nature of the universe, which, as I explained in Life Ascending (1985), is pervaded by an unremitting tendency to arrange its materials in patterns of increasing amplitude, complexity, and coherencethe process of harmonization that brings order out of chaos. On a vast scale it has condensed great quantities of matter, originally present as intergalactic clouds of gases and dust, into stars, planets, and their satellites. It has set the planets in orbits around the stars, the satellites in courses around the planets, in dynamic systems so balanced and stable that, as in our solar system, they endure for long ages.
On a small scale, the same process is evident in the union of atoms in molecules of innumerable kinds, and the alignment of atoms or molecules in enduring crystals that are often of scintillating splendor. In the living world, the tendency of matter to form patterns of increasing amplitude, complexity, and coherence is most
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It is not difficult to understand how strife and suffering arise in a world pervaded by a process that is primarily creative and beneficent. Unguided creativity is unrestrained by moderation. It initiates so many organisms that they compete stubbornly for the space and materials that they need to complete and preserve themselves, with all the lamentable consequences that we have noticed. Not more creativity but more restraint is the world's great need, and this is nowhere more evident than in the human sphere.
In addition to this major paradox, the living world presents many minor ones, a few of which are examined in this book. Among them is the dual nature of animals, products of harmonious development, depending for their survival upon close adjustment to their environments, often dwelling in amity with other creatures, yet capable of such fierce rivalry and lethal violencecontrasts nowhere more glaring than in humankind. Is it not paradoxical that plants, sharply distinguished from animals by their ability to synthesize their own food from inorganic matter as no animal can do, should occasionally turn the tables and devour animals as, on an infinitely larger scale, animals devour plants as well as other animals?
Not the least of the incongruities that the living world presents are revealed by a survey of the growth of intelligence. We might expect reasonthe ability to think, to compare, to foresee to advance steadily from humblest rudiments to full maturity, as a seedling grows into a tree, as daylight brightens from dawn's first glimmer to noontide brilliance, thereby becoming a luminous guide to peaceful living. On the contrary, as chapter 9 tells, our fumbling cold in a frigid zone, causes great destruction of living things. We are then apt to remark upon the harshness or cruelty of nature. But can one who perversely sits too close to the fire claim to be unfairly treated if scorched now and then?
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efforts to use our inchoate rationality have yielded mountains of error and been a major source of absurd practices and widespread suffering.
It is not surprising that serious attempts to understand a confusing living world have led to fantastic interpretations widely accepted by biological