A WORD ON BIOLOGY
By PROFESSOR C. M. YONGE
THE war, we realise, was won by science ; the peace likewise may be won by it or civilisation as we know it be obliterated by this same mastery over physical forces. This science which will decide the immediate fate of man is largely the product of the physicist and the chemist. Small wonder, then, that science has increasingly become identified in the popular mind with the physical sciences. But this country has produced a Darwin as well as a Newton, and science embraces the study of the living, in which man himself is included, as well as the non-living. It is just because they do include the study of the structure and origin of man that the biological sciences, after their initial development by the Greeks, have had a harder struggle for recognition than the physical sciences. Research into the properties of matter was never condemned as impious as was the dissection of the human body. Galileo suffered little, but Vesalius had to abandon anatomical research at the age of 29. Priestley was persecuted by the ignorant, but Darwin and Huxley faced vilification by bishops and statesmen at a time when the pro- nouncements of contemporary leaders in the physical sciences were received with hushed respect. Yet the fruits of biological research today include conquest of diseases and advances in every branch of agriculture, while those of physical research are overshadowed in every mind by high explosives and the atomic bomb.
Inevitably the biologist has been ousted from the centre of the stage he occupied, not always, be it admitted, with the dignity of Thomas Henry Huxley, in the nineteenth century. He is now heavily outnumbered, while the audience is not unnaturally more concerned with its dubious future than with its now generally conceded humble past. It is told, and in the circumstances rightly told, that to survive it must educate more and more physicists and chemists and provide armies of highly trained technicians to man the laboratories and to work and service the machines. The importance of research in medicine and agriculture is admitted, but this has become increasingly identified with the production of synthetic drugs, of fertilisers and of devastating insecticides, with the audience, it may be incidentally noted, ignorant of the fact that the majority of insects are of as great value to man as the minority are injurious.
The progress of research which, in a generation, has passed from the laboratory experiments of Rutherford to the obliteration of a city by a single bomb has inevitably astounded man by the evidence of his powers. Workers in the physical sciences see before them a bewildering prospect of mastery of forces extending even beyond the confines of this planet. There can, indeed, be no question as to the power which man may now command. If for no other reason than this, those branches of science which deal with living things and so, directly or indirectly, with man himself should assume a surpassing importance. The triumphs of biology in the nineteenth century bred an overweening confidence in certain of the successors of Darwin. The evolution of man could be traced back to the single-celled protozoon ; from this it was surely but a step to primordial proto- plasm and thence to inorganic matter with the origin of life revealed. But the Bathybius that Huxley and Haeckel hailed from the depths of the oceans faded into a chemical precipitate, and, although today we have a surer bridge between living and non-living in the virus, the progress of research reveals an ever-greater complexity in living matter. The modern biologist is a humbler man than his grandfather.
The first analytical attack on the age-old problem of inheritance revealed to Mendel a mechanism of beautiful simplicity. At the hands of T. H. Morgan and his school this has led to the greatest triumph of modern biology, and affords some glimpse of the probable mechanism of evolutionary change. Together the geneticist and the cytologist have penetrated the cell to explore the chromosomes, and demonstrate and map along their length the genes which control the characters of the organism. But even with the gene, which some think essentially similar to a virus, the biologist encounters a highly complex molecule, the properties of which are fundamentally influenced by its neighbours and by the conditions prevailing in the cell. Where the physicist may impose what conditions he will on his subject-matter and exclude all unwanted variables, the biologist can experiment only within the narrow limits in which life can be main- tained and with innumerable variables beyond his control.
The delicate equipoise of forces that finds external expression in a single living organism has its counterpart in a similar balance between organism and organism, and between them and the physical forces of the environment. In a new approach to the natural-history studies of his forefathers, the modern scientific ecologist reveals unexpected sequences of cause and effect as he analyses the com- plexities of the balanced communities of wild life. The elaborate complexity of both the living organism and the community of which it is a part demand for evolution immense periods of time. With the discovery of radio-activity the old dispute between geologist and physicist about the age of the earth has been settled by general agreement at the higher figure demanded by the former. While we can never know when life began, it has unquestionably been evolving for many hundreds of millions of years. Yet the modern species of man which now dominates the earth can be traced back for only a few tens of thousands of years.
Possessed of these facts, the biologist cannot but view his world with misgiving. Man, barely out of his evolutionary cradle, ignorant still of the very nature of thought on which his power depends, hedged in on all sides by the narrow restrictions which confine all forms of life, has come to control incredible power. No wonder he blunders in its use ; the greater wonder if he survives. Should he not do so, the next mammal to attain, by evolution, the power of conceptual thought may well find the explanation of the extinction of his predecessor in the failure of man to precede his mastery of the forces of inanimate matter by a like conquest of the problems of life itself.
Previous page
