Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [9]
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in every detail. Nevertheless, countless creatures fail to attain the full perfection of which they are capable.
When we investigate the causes of the failure of organisms to be whole and perfect examples of their kind, we usually find that other living things, rather than the inorganic setting, are to blame. As a rule, the environment cooperates with the organism, helping it to perfect the form that was evolved in relation to this same environment. But it is quite the contrary with living things; they rarely modify their innate tendencies to grow to full perfection so that neighboring organisms may do likewise. They crowd and push against each other until shapeliness is impossible; they twine around and constrict each other; they strive to live in such egregious numbers that none of the multitude can procure all that it needs for full development; they invade each other's vital tissues; they consume each other piecemeal or devour each other whole. So intense is the struggle that, in tropical forests, a botanist may often search through the whole crown of some great fallen tree without finding a single twig with perfect foliage for his collectioninsects have gnawed into all of them even before they stopped growing. It is only exceptionally that the environment prevents organisms from attaining their ideal form; it is far more often the strife between the living things themselves.
Yet, except among morally underdeveloped people, we rarely find a suggestion that one living thing injures another just for the sake of hurting or destroying it. Each is striving to maintain and complete itself, to realize that particular perfection inherent in its own organization, but its circumstances are often such that it cannot procure all the materials or the space it needs for this purpose without opposing or injuring other living things. Life is always primarily constructive; destruction is all too often incidental to its activity but hardly its primary goal. Thus, each living thing owes its being to an organizing movement and its continued existence to the maintenance of a harmoniously integrated pattern, yet it must ever be prepared to contend with or to resist other more or less similar entities. These opposing tendencies account for those contradictions in the character of animals that claim our attention in chapter 3.
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Real Strife Confined to the Living World
By the efforts of living things to occupy environments unfavorable to vital processes, and even more by the clash of organism with organism in a crowded world, harmonization, itself a definite, straightforward movement, becomes entangled in organic evolution, a labyrinth of complexities and contradictions that confuse the student of nature. We shall not succeed in understanding evolution unless we distinguish clearly between its driving force and true constructive principle, harmonization, and the dreadful embroilment into which the living world is plunged by the manifold interactions of evolution's products. Without this distinction, the living world appears to be a fantastic welter of competing forms, a maze of frenzied stirrings leading nowhere; only in this light can we hope to discover a path through the labyrinth (Skutch 1985).
Life has needed to be aggressive because it has had to make its own way, creating itself under the constant impulsion of harmonization working within it. Evolution is self-creation. The origin of species by gradual evolution implies their formation by their own efforts. External agents have dictated the forms that organisms must assume in order to survive, but they have not made these organisms. Beyond the primitive home of life in tepid seas and humid adjoining lands, external agents would have annihilated living things but for their stubborn drive to exist. The environment has everywhere stipulated the conditions that organisms must accept if they would continue to live, but it has not itself altered them into conformity with these conditions. On the contrary, living things have molded themselves