What Is Life (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrodinger

  And thus at every step, on every day of our life, as it were, something of the shape that we possessed until then has to change, to be overcome, to be deleted and replaced by something new. The resistance of our primitive will is the psychical correlate of the resistance of the existing shape to the transforming chisel. For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time – it is a true continued ‘self-conquering’ (Selbstüberwindung).

  But is it not absurd to suggest that this process of evolution should directly and significantly fall into consciousness, considering its inordinate slowness not only compared with the short span of an individual life, but even with historical epochs? Does it not just run along unnoticed?

  No. In the light of our previous considerations this is not so. They culminated in regarding consciousness as associated with such physiological goings-on as are still being transformed by mutual interaction with a changing environment. Moreover, we concluded that only those modifications become conscious which are still in the stage of being trained, until, in a much later time, they become a hereditarily fixed, well-trained and unconscious possession of the species. In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution. This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of evolution.

  If this is granted it follows that consciousness and discord with one’s own self are inseparably linked up, even that they must, as it were, be proportional to each other. This sounds a paradox, but the wisest of all times and peoples have testified to confirm it. Men and women for whom this world was lit in an unusually bright light of awareness, and who by life and word have, more than others, formed and transformed that work of art which we call humanity, testify by speech and writing or even by their very lives that more than others have they been torn by the pangs of inner discord. Let this be a consolation to him who also suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been begotten.

  Please do not misunderstand me. I am a scientist, not a teacher of morals. Do not take it that I wish to propose the idea of our species developing towards a higher goal as an effective motive to propagate the moral code. This it cannot be, since it is an unselfish goal, a disinterested motive, and thus, to be accepted, already presupposes virtuousness. I feel as unable as anybody else to explain the ‘shall’ of Kant’s imperative. The ethical law in its simplest general form (be unselfish!) is plainly a fact, it is there, it is agreed upon even by the vast majority of those who do not very often keep it. I regard its puzzling existence as an indication of our being in the beginning of a biological transformation from an egoistic to an altruistic general attitude, of man being about to become an animal social. For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species; in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice. An animal that embarks on forming states without greatly restricting egoism will perish. Phylogenetically much older state-formers as the bees, ants and termites have given up egoism completely. However, its next stage, national egoism or briefly nationalism, is still in full swing with them. A worker bee that goes astray to the wrong hive is murdered without hesitation.

  Now in man something is, so it seems, on the way that is not infrequent. Above the first modification clear traces of a second one in similar direction are noticeable long before the first is even nearly achieved. Though we are still pretty vigorous egoists, many of us begin to see that nationalism too is a vice that ought to be given up. Here perhaps something very strange may make its appearance. The second step, the pacification of the struggle of peoples, may be facilitated by the fact that the first step is far from being achieved, so that egoistic motives still have a vigorous appeal. Each one of us is threatened by the terrific new weapons of aggression and is thus induced to long for peace among the nations. If we were bees, ants or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on for ever. But luckily we are only men – and cowards.

  The considerations and conclusions of this chapter are, with me, of very old standing; they date back more than thirty years. I never lost sight of them, but I was seriously afraid that they might have to be rejected on the ground that they appear to be based on the ‘inheritance of acquired characters’, in other words on Lamarckism. This we are not inclined to accept. Yet even when rejecting the inheritance of acquired characters, in other words accepting Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, we find the behaviour of the individuals of a species having a very significant influence on the trend of evolution, and thus feigning a sort of sham-Lamarckism. This is explained, and clinched by the authority of Julian Huxley, in the following chapter, which, however, was written with a slightly different problem in view, and not just to lend support to the ideas put forward above.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Future of Understanding1

  A BIOLOGICAL BLIND ALLEY?

  We may, I believe, regard it as extremely improbable that our understanding of the world represents any definite or final stage, a maximum or optimum in any respect. By this I do not mean merely that the continuation of our research in the various sciences, our philosophical studies and religious endeavour are likely to enhance and improve our present outlook. What we are likely to gain in this way in the next, say, two and a half millennia – estimating from what we have gained since Protagoras, Democritus and Antisthenes – is insignificant compared with what I am here alluding to. There is no reason whatever for believing that our brain is the supreme ne plus ultra of an organ of thought in which the world is reflected. It is more likely than not that a species could acquire a similar contraption whose corresponding imagery compares with ours as ours with that of the dog, or his in turn with that of a snail.

  If this be so, then – though it is not relevant in principle – it interests us, as it were for personal reasons, whether anything of the sort could be reached on our globe by our own offspring or the offspring of some of us. The globe is all right. It is a fine young leasehold, still to run under acceptable conditions of living for about the time it took us (say 1,000 million years) to develop from the earliest beginnings into what we are now. But are we ourselves all right? If one accepts the present theory of evolution – and we have no better – it might seem that we have been very nearly cut off from future development. Is there still physical evolution to be expected in man, I mean to say relevant changes in our physique that become gradually fixed as inherited features, just as our present bodily self is fixed by inheritance – genotypical changes, to use the technical term of the biologist? This question is difficult to answer. We may be approaching the end of a blind alley, we may even have reached it. This would not be an exceptional event and it would not mean that our species would have to become extinct very soon. From the geological records we know that some species or even large groups seem to have reached the end of their evolutionary possibilities a very long time ago, yet they have not died out, but have remained unchanged, or without significant change, for many millions of years. The tortoises, for instance, and the crocodiles are in this sense very old groups, relics of a far remote past; we are also told that the whole large group of insects are more or less in the same boat – and they comprise a greater number of separate species than all the rest of the animal kingdom taken together. But they have changed very little in millions of years, while the rest of the living surface of the earth has during this time undergone change beyond recognition. What barred further evolution in the insects was probably this – that they had adopted the plan (you will not misunderstand this figurative expression) – that they had adopted the plan of wearing their skeleton outside instead of inside as we do. Such an outside armour, while affording protection in addition to mechanical stability, cannot grow as the bones of a mammal do between birth and maturity. This circumstance is bound to render gradual adaptive changes in the life-
history of the individual very difficult.

  In the case of man several arguments seem to militate against further evolution. The spontaneous inheritable changes – now called mutations – from which, according to Darwin’s theory, the ‘profitable’ ones are automatically selected, are as a rule only small evolutionary steps, affording, if any, only a slight advantage. That is why in Darwin’s deductions an important part is attributed to the usually enormous abundance of offspring, of which only a very small fraction can possibly survive. For only thus does a small amelioration in the chance of survival seem to have a reasonable likelihood of being realized. This whole mechanism appears to be blocked in civilized man – in some respects even reversed. We are, generally speaking, not willing to see our fellow-creatures suffer and perish, and so we have gradually introduced legal and social institutions which on the one hand protect life, condemn systematic infanticide, try to help every sick or frail human being to survive, while on the other hand they have to replace the natural elimination of the less fit by keeping the offspring within the limits of the available livelihood. This is achieved partly in a direct way, by birth control, partly by preventing a considerable proportion of females from mating. Occasionally – as this generation knows all too well – the insanity of war and all the disasters and blunders that follow in its wake contribute their share to the balance. Millions of adults and children of both sexes are killed by starvation, exposure, epidemics. While in the far remote past warfare between small tribes or clans is supposed to have had a positive selection value, it seems doubtful whether it ever had in historical times, and doubtless war at present has none. It means an indiscriminate killing, just as the advances in medicine and surgery result in an indiscriminate saving of lives. While justly and diametrically opposite in our esteem, both war and medical art seem to be of no selection value whatever.

  THE APPARENT GLOOM OF DARWINISM

  These considerations suggest that as a developing species we have come to a standstill and have little prospect of further biological advance. Even if this were so, it need not bother us. We might survive without any biological change for millions of years, like the crocodiles and many insects. Still from a certain philosophical point of view the idea is depressing, and I should like to try and make out a case for the contrary. To do so I must enter on a certain aspect of the theory of evolution which I find supported in Professor Julian Huxley’s well-known book on Evolution,2 an aspect which according to him is not always sufficiently appreciated by recent evolutionists.

  Popular expositions of Darwin’s theory are apt to lead you to a gloomy and discouraging view on account of the apparent passivity of the organism in the process of evolution. Mutations occur spontaneously in the genom – the ‘hereditary substance’. We have reason to believe that they are mainly due to what the physicist calls a thermodynamic fluctuation – in other words to pure chance. The individual has not the slightest influence on the hereditary treasure it receives from its parents, nor on the one it leaves to its offspring. Mutations that occur are acted on by ‘natural selection of the fittest’. This again seems to mean pure chance, since it means that a favourable mutation increases the prospect for the individual of survival and of begetting offspring, to which it transmits the mutation in question. Apart from this, its activity during its lifetime seems to be biologically irrelevant. For nothing of it has an influence on the offspring: acquired properties are not inherited. Any skill or training attained is lost, it leaves no trace, it dies with the individual, it is not transmitted. An intelligent being in this situation would find that nature, as it were, refuses his collaboration – she does all herself, dooms the individual to inactivity, indeed to nihilism.

  As you know, Darwin’s theory was not the first systematic theory of evolution. It was preceded by the theory of Lamarck, which rests entirely on the assumption that any new features an individual has acquired by specific surroundings or behaviour during its lifetime before procreation can be, and usually are, passed on to its progeny, if not entirely, at least in traces. Thus if an animal by living on rocky or sandy soil produced protecting calluses on the soles of its feet, this callosity would gradually become hereditary so that later generations would receive it as a free gift without the hardship of acquiring it. In the same way the strength or skill or even substantial adaptation produced in any organ by its being continually used for certain ends would not be lost, but passed on, at least partly, to the offspring. This view not only affords a very simple understanding of the amazingly elaborate and specific adaptation to environment which is so characteristic of all living creatures. It is also beautiful, elating, encouraging and invigorating. It is infinitely more attractive than the gloomy aspect of passivity apparently offered by Darwinism. An intelligent being which considers itself a link in the long chain of evolution may, under Lamarck’s theory, be confident that its striving and efforts for improving its abilities, both bodily and mental, are not lost in the biological sense but form a small but integrating part of the striving of the species towards higher and ever higher perfection.

  Unhappily Lamarckism is untenable. The fundamental assumption on which it rests, namely, that acquired properties can be inherited, is wrong. To the best of our knowledge they cannot. The single steps of evolution are those spontaneous and fortuitous mutations which have nothing to do with the behaviour of the individual during its lifetime. And so we appear to be thrown back on the gloomy aspect of Darwinism that I have depicted above.

  BEHAVIOUR INFLUENCES SELECTION

  I now wish to show you that this is not quite so. Without changing anything in the basic assumptions of Darwinism we can see that the behaviour of the individual, the way it makes use of its innate faculties, plays a relevant part, nay, plays the most relevant part in evolution. There is a very true kernel in Lamarck’s view, namely that there is an irrescindable causal connection between the functioning, the actually being put to profitable use of a character – an organ, any property or ability or bodily feature – and its being developed in the course of generations, and gradually improved for the purposes for which it is profitably used. This connection, I say, between being used and being improved was a very correct cognition of Lamarck’s, and it subsists in our present Darwinistic outlook, but it is easily overlooked on viewing Darwinism superficially. The course of events is almost the same as if Lamarckism were right, only the ‘mechanism’ by which things happen is more complicated than Lamarck thought. The point is not very easy to explain or to grasp, and so it may be useful to summarize the result in advance. To avoid vagueness, let us think of an organ, though the feature in question might be any property, habit, device, behaviour, or even any small addition to, or modification of, such a feature. Lamarck thought that the organ (a) is used, (b) is thus improved, and (c) the improvement is transmitted to the offspring. This is wrong. We have to think that the organ (a) undergoes chance variations, (b) the profitably used ones are accumulated or at least accentuated by selection, (c) this continues from generation to generation, the selected mutations constituting a lasting improvement. The most striking simulation of Lamarckism occurs – according to Julian Huxley – when the initial variations that inaugurate the process are not true mutations, not yet of the inheritable type. Yet, if profitable, they may be accentuated by what he calls organic selection, and, so to speak, pave the way for true mutations to be immediately seized upon when they happen to turn up in the ‘desirable’ direction.

  Let us now go into some details. The most important point is to see that a new character, or modification of a character, acquired by variation, by mutation or by mutation plus some little selection, may easily arouse the organism in relation to its environment to an activity that tends to increase the usefulness of that character and hence the ‘grip’ of selection on it. By possessing the new or changed character the individual may be caused to change its environment – either by actually transforming it, or by migration – or it may be caused to change its behaviour toward
s its environment, all this in a fashion so as strongly to reinforce the usefulness of the new character and thus to speed up its further selective improvement in the same direction.

  This assertion may strike you as daring, since it seems to require purpose on the side of the individual, and even a high degree of intelligence. But I wish to make the point that my statement, while it includes, of course, the intelligent, purposeful behaviour of the higher animals, is by no means restricted to them. Let us give a few examples:

  Not all the individuals of a population have exactly the same environment. Some of the flowers of a wild species happen to grow in the shadow, some in sunny spots, some in the higher ranges of a lofty mountain-slope, some in the lower parts or in the valley. A mutation – say hairy foliage – which is beneficial at higher altitudes, will be favoured by selection in the higher ranges but will be ‘lost’ in the valley. The effect is the same as if the hairy mutants had migrated towards an environment that will favour further mutations that occur in the same direction.