Emergent evolution and the social / by William Morton Wheeler.

  • William Morton Wheeler
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Emergent evolution and the social / by William Morton Wheeler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    most illustrious of physiologists, du Bois- Reymond and Claude Bernard. The former, in the preface to his monumental work on animal electricity (1848 p. 46), in the midst of a violent attack on the vitalism of his day, asks the following questions : “If organisms exhibit appear¬ ances which are not seen in inorganic nature, may this not be due simply to the fact that their material particles, though endowed with the very same and with no other properties than those occurring outside of organisms, never¬ theless enter into new relations to one another and form new combinations ? Is it any wonder that these should be able to act in novel ways ? ” Claude Bernard’s statement is more startling and comprehensive. It occurs in his Introduction to the study of Ex¬ perimental Medicine, published in 1865. I quote from Greene’s recent tran¬ slation (1927, p. 90) : “ In chemistry, synthesis produces, weight for weight, the same body made up of identical elements combined in the same proportions; but in the case
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