And now observe, in confirmation of this view, that self-fertilization is limited to organisms in which an approximate equilibrium among the organic forces is not long maintained. While growth is actively going on, and the physiological units are subject to a continually-changing distribution of forces, no decided assimilation of the units can be expected: like forces acting on the unlike units will tend to segregate them, so long as continuance of evolution permits further segregation; and only when further segregation cannot go on, will the like forces tend to assimilate the units. Hence, where there is no prolonged maintenance of an approximate organic balance, self-fertilization may be possible for some generations; but it will be impossible in organisms distinguished by a sustained moving equilibrium.
§ 95. The interpretation which it affords of sundry phenomena familiar to breeders of animals, adds probability to the hypothesis. Mr. Darwin has collected a large "body of facts, showing, in accordance with the almost universal belief of breeders, that with animals and plants a cross between different varieties, or between individuals of the same variety but of another strain, gives vigour and fertility to the offspring; and on the other hand, that close interbreeding diminishes vigour and fertility,"—a conclusion harmonizing with the current belief respecting family-intermarriages in the human race. Have we not here a solution of these facts? Relations must, on the average of cases, be individuals whose physiological units are more nearly alike than usual. Animals of different varieties must be those whose physiological units are more unlike than usual. In the one case, the unlikeness of the units may frequently be insufficient to produce fertilization; or, if sufficient to produce fertilization, not sufficient to produce that active molecular change required for vigorous development. In the other case, both fertilization and vigorous development will be made probable.
Nor are we without a cause for the irregular manifestations of these general tendencies. The mixed physiological units composing any organism being, as we have seen, more or less segregated in the reproductive centres it throws off; there may arise various results according to the degrees of difference among the units, and the degrees in which the units are segregated. Of two cousins who have married, the common grandparents may have had either similar or dissimilar constitutions; and if their constitutions were dissimilar, the probability that their married grandchildren will have offspring will be greater than if their constitutions were similar. Or the brothers and sisters from whom these cousins descended, instead of severally inheriting the constitutions of their parents in tolerably equal degrees, may have severally inherited them in very different degrees: in which last case, intermarriages among the cousins will be less likely to prove infertile. Or the brothers and sisters from whom these cousins descended, may severally have married persons very like, or very unlike, themselves; and from this cause there may have resulted, either an undue likeness, or a due unlikeness, between the married cousins.[[39]] These several causes, conspiring and conflicting in endless ways and degrees, will work multiform effects. Moreover, differences of segregation will make the reproductive centres produced by the same nearly-related organisms, vary considerably in their amounts of unlikeness; and therefore, supposing their amounts of unlikeness great enough to cause fertilization, this fertilization will be effective in various degrees. Hence it may happen that among offspring of nearly-related parents, there may be some in which the want of vigour is not marked, and others in which there is decided want of vigour. So that we are alike shown why in-and-in breeding tends to diminish both fertility and vigour: and why the effect cannot be a uniform effect, but only an average effect.
§ 96. While, if the foregoing arguments are valid, gamogenesis has for its main result the initiation of a new development by the overthrow of that approximate equilibrium arrived at among the molecules of the parent-organisms, a further result appears to be subserved by it. Those inferior organisms which habitually multiply by agamogenesis, have conditions of life that are simple and uniform; while those organisms which have highly-complex and variable conditions of life, habitually multiply by gamogenesis. Now if a species has complex and variable conditions of life, its members must be severally exposed to sets of conditions that are slightly different: the aggregates of incident forces cannot be alike for all the scattered individuals. Hence, as functional deviation must ever be inducing structural deviation, each individual throughout the area occupied tends to become fitted for the particular habits which its particular conditions necessitate; and in so far, unfitted for the average habits proper to the species. But these undue specializations are continually checked by gamogenesis. As Mr. Darwin remarks, "intercrossing plays a very important part in nature in keeping the individuals of the same species, or of the variety, true and uniform in character:" the idiosyncratic divergences obliterate one another. Gamogenesis, then, is a means of turning to positive advantage the individual differentiations which, in its absence, would result in positive disadvantage. Were it not that individuals are ever being made unlike one another by their unlike conditions, there would not arise in them those contrasts of molecular constitution, which we have seen to be needful for producing the fertilized germs of new individuals. And were not these individual differentiations ever being mutually cancelled, they would end in a fatal narrowness of adaptation.
This truth will be most clearly seen if we reduce it to its purely abstract form, thus:—Suppose a quite homogeneous species, placed in quite homogeneous conditions; and suppose the constitutions of all its members in complete concord with their absolutely-uniform and constant conditions; what must happen? The species, individually and collectively, is in a state of perfect moving equilibrium. All disturbing forces have been eliminated. There remains no force which can, in any way, change the state of this moving equilibrium; either in the species as a whole or in its members. But we have seen (First Principles, § 173) that a moving equilibrium is but a transition towards complete equilibration, or death. The absence of differential or un-equilibrated forces among the members of a species, is the absence of all forces which can cause changes in the conditions of its members—is the absence of all forces which can initiate new organisms. To say, as above, that complete molecular homogeneity existing among the members of a species, must render impossible that mutual molecular disturbance which constitutes fertilization, is but another way of saying that the actions and re-actions of each organism, being in perfect balance with the actions and re-actions of the environment upon it, there remains in each organism no force by which it differs from any other—no force which any other does not meet with an equal force—no force which can set up a new evolution among the units of any other.
And so we reach the remarkable conclusion that the life of a species, like the life of an individual, is maintained by the unequal and ever-varying actions of incident forces on its different parts.[[40]] An individual homogeneous throughout, and having its substance everywhere continuously subject to like actions, could undergo none of those changes which life consists of; and similarly, an absolutely-uniform species, having all its members exposed to identical influences, would be deprived of that initiator of change which maintains its existence as a species. Just as, in each organism, incident forces constantly produce divergences from the mean state in various directions, which are constantly balanced by opposite divergences indirectly produced by other incident forces; and just as the combination of rhythmical functions thus maintained, constitutes the life of the organism; so, in a species, there is, through gamogenesis, a perpetual neutralization of those contrary deviations from the mean state which are caused in its different parts by different sets of incident forces; and it is similarly by the rhythmical production and compensation of these contrary deviations, that the species continues to live. The moving equilibrium in a species, like the moving equilibrium in an individual, would rapidly end in complete equilibration, or death, were not its continually-dissipated forces continually re-supplied from without. Besides owing to the external world those energies which, from moment to moment, keep up the lives of its individual members, every species owes to certain more indirect actions of the external world, those energies which enable it to perpetuate itself in successive generations.
§ 97. What evidence still remains may be conveniently woven up along with a recapitulation of the argument pursued through the last three chapters. Let us contemplate the facts in their synthetic order.
That compounding and re-compounding through which we pass from the simplest inorganic substances to the most complex organic substances, has several concomitants. Each successive stage of composition presents us with molecules that are severally larger or more integrated, that are severally more heterogeneous, that are severally more unstable, and that are more numerous in their kinds (First Principles, § 151). And when we come to the substances of which living bodies are formed, we find ourselves among innumerable divergent groups and sub-groups of compounds, the units of which are large, heterogeneous, and unstable, in high degrees. There is no reason to assume that this process ends with the formation of those complex colloids which constitute organic matter. A more probable assumption is that out of the complex colloidal molecules there are evolved, by a still further integration, molecules which are still more heterogeneous, and of kinds which are still more multitudinous. What must be their properties? Already the colloidal molecules are extremely unstable—capable of being variously modified in their characters by very slight incident forces; and already the complexity of their polarities prevents them from readily falling into such positions of equilibrium as results in crystallization. Now the organic molecules composed of these colloidal molecules, must be similarly characterized in far higher degrees. Far more numerous must be the minute changes that can be wrought in them by minute external forces; far more free must they remain for a long time to obey forces tending to re-distribute them; and far greater must be the number of their kinds.
Setting out with these physiological units, the existence of which various organic phenomena compel us to recognize, and the production of which the general law of Evolution thus leads us to anticipate; we get an insight into the phenomena of Genesis, Heredity, and Variation. If each organism is built of certain of these highly-plastic units peculiar to its species—units which slowly work towards an equilibrium of their complex proclivities, in producing an aggregate of the specific structure, and which are at the same time slowly modifiable by the re-actions of this aggregate—we see why the multiplication of organisms proceeds in the several ways, and with the various results, which naturalists have observed.
Heredity, as shown not only in the repetition of the specific structure but in the repetition of ancestral deviations from it, becomes a matter of course; and it falls into unison with the fact that, in various inferior organisms, lost parts can be replaced, and that, in still lower organisms, a fragment can develop into a whole.