Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [8]
This interpretation is as wide of the mark as the earlier one. It would be true only if life owed its origin to a process wholly different from that which formed the lifeless world, or if it had somehow intruded into this world from beyond. But since it is a product of the same processharmonizationthat earlier prepared the stage for it, this modern view is obviously too extreme. Actually, the living world is related to the physical world as one phase of a continuous process to an earlier phase. Life is adapted to its inorganic setting because it emerged from that setting; the setting is adapted to life because it was formed by a preceding phase of the movement that gave rise to life. The adaptation is neither all on the side of the environment nor all on the side of life, but the conformity is that of the parts to the whole.
Life's stubborn intrusion into environments poorly fitted to support it reveals the intensity of harmonization's striving to build up patterns of higher integration, even in the face of the utmost obstacles. By far the greater part of the stuff of the universe is prevented by physical conditions from attaining the level of organization found in living things. Only an infinitesimal proportion of the total quantity of matter can at one time participate in such complex formations. Yet the moment it encounters favorable circumstances,
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the stuff of the universe rushes with unrestrained exuberance to arrange itself in elaborate patterns, exhibiting closer integration and greater beauty than we often detect in the lifeless world. A major portion of life's ills springs from just this almost explosive rush by the cosmic stuff to participate in a higher synthesis; if this urge did not result in such excessive numbers of organisms, life would certainly be more pleasant for those endowed with it.
Conflicts between Organisms
Just as they are often militant against the environment, living things are belligerent toward one another. One organism invades another, forcing it to yield the requisites of its own existence, to become a living environment for it. Nothing is sacred; no organ, tissue, or fluid, no matter how exquisitely delicate and admirably adapted to an intricate function, no matter how indispensable to the life of the host, is spared the pitiless invasion. Eyes and ears, heart and lungs, the very lifeblood itselfall are at times forced to become the medium of aggressive foreign organisms. Myriads of creatures live parasitically at the expense of others, from viruses too minute to be detected by common microscopes to ticks and leeches that batten shamelessly in view of all the world.
A growing organism tends to perfect a form intimately related to its mode of life and the constants of its natural environment. Except where strong winds prevail, trees commonly form upright trunks surrounded by boughs arranged with radial symmetry. Encrusting lichens spread in expanding circles over the faces of rocks. The giant kelp assumes an elongate, flattened form that permits it to yield gracefully to the ceaseless surge and tug of the surf where it thrives. Not only the organism as a whole but each organ strives to express its innate form or pattern; each leaf, according to its position on the herb or tree, would if left to itself become an undistorted example of its hereditary type. Likewise, each animal tends to become a shapely representative of its kind, perfect of limb and organ, its garment of scales or fur or feathers comely and complete