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By Root 533 0

in the same direction, adding harmony to harmony at an ever higher level of integration, abruptly falter or reverse its course when it passes beyond the individual organism? Why does a cosmic movement having as its only goal or purpose, as far as we can tell, the enrichment of Being with high values produce so strange a mixture of values and disvalues, of good and evil? When we contemplate all the strife, carnage, and disease that afflict the living world, the fear, hatred, rage, pain, and frustration that distress us and, apparently, other animals, we sometimes suspect that pain and sorrow outweigh joy, that the farther life advances, the

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more it suffers. Success in covering Earth with myriad living forms fails to bring harmony among these forms, to make the living world what, in view of the process that pervades it, we might expect it to become.

The causes of this failure are not far to seek. The primary cause is the insulation of organisms. The integuments indispensable for the protection of all the delicately balanced physiological processes that preserve life make of each organism an almost closed system, independent of other similar systems. Their insulation is not only physiological but psychic: just as the malfunction or disease of one does not directly affect the health of another, so the joys and sufferings of one creature are not felt by another; one animal can agonize and die without causing the least discomfort to another of the same or a different kind. Even humans with a developed language and other means of communication often feel remote from those closest to them. Difficulty of communication often seems to separate us by interplanetary distances not only from animals of other species, including the domestic mammals and birds most intimately associated with us, but frequently from other humansall without the admirable arrangement that keeps every planet in its course, never clashing with another.

Thus, physiological and psychic insulation makes it possible for one creature to exploit, maim, torture, or kill another without physical or mental consequences distressful to itself. Add to this the excessive abundance of organisms, which throws them into relentless competition for almost everything they need to sustain life and to reproduce, and we have the stage set for all the miseries that creatures inflict upon one another day after day and everywhere, which in aggregate far exceed all that the living world suffers from the intermittent and local excesses of lifeless nature, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and floods. Life's great misfortune is that evolution, dependent upon random genetic mutations that are more often harmful than beneficial, is a process in which quality too frequently wages a losing battle against quantity. Although the growth of an organism is a mode of harmonization, the organism's form and function are determined by its genetic

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endowment. Harmonization arranges the genes in the most coherent pattern they are capable of assuming, but it can operate only with the materials available to it.

The failure of harmonization's success in covering Earth with abundant life is not absolute, as everyone who has experienced happiness and true values should bear witness. In the foregoing chapters we noticed some of the ways in which animals cooperate to increase the safety or enhance the quality of their lives. Noteworthy are the foraging flocks of mixed species of birds, the relations between cleaner fish and their clients, the adoption of lost or orphaned young by birds and mammals, and the concord that prevails in groups of cooperatively breeding birds. Especially significant are the mutually beneficial interactions of plants and the animals that pollinate their flowers or disperse their seeds in return for food in the form of nectar or fruits. Harmonious associations can arise among individuals of the same species, of different genera or orders, of different zoological classes of animals, and even between animals and plants.