Observations placeholder

Erwin Schrodinger – Mind and Matter

As a new organ develops, behaviour becomes more and more bound up with its mere possession.  Behaviour and physique merge into one.  You simply cannot possess clever hands without using them for obtaining your aims, they would be in your way …You cannot have efficient wings without attempting to fly.  You cannot have a modulated organ of speech without trying to imitate the noises you hear around you.  To distinguish between the possession of an organ and the urge to use it and to increase its skill by practise, to regard them as two different characteristics of the organism in question, would be artificial distinction, made possible by an abstract language but having no counterpart in nature … It is the new organs themselves .. that carry along with them the habit and the way of using them….

It is illuminating to compare this natural process with the making of an instrument by man.  At first sight there appears to be a marked contrast.  If we manufacture a delicate mechanism, we should in most cases spoil it if we were impatient and tried to use it again and again long before it is finished.

Nature, one is inclined to say, proceeds differently.  She cannot produce a new organism and its organs otherwise than whilst they are continually used, probed, examined with regard to their efficiency.  But actually this parallel is wrong.  The making of a single instrument by man corresponds to ontogenesis, that is, to the growing up of a single individual from the seed to maturity.  Here too interference is not welcome.  The young ones must be protected, they must not be put to work before they have acquired the full strength and skill of their species.  The true parallel of the evolutionary development of organisms could be illustrated, for example, by a historical exhibition of bicycles, showing how this machine gradually  changed from year to year, from decade to decade, or in the same way of railway engines, motor cars, aeroplanes, typewriters etc.  Here just as in the natural process, it is obviously essential that the machine in question should be continually used and thus improved not literally improved by use, but by the experience gained and the alterations suggested