The Woods. Vladimir Bibikhin
practice, common in the classical world, of placing humans on a scale of living beings, in respect of morphology, physiology, and ethics.
The cosmic unity of life, or, more broadly, its unifying sensitivity (Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky), complicates discrimination between inanimate and living matter.1 (Neo-)Darwinism as a principle of systematic replacement of life forms needs to be reconsidered in the light of adverse selection and non-stochastic development (nomogenesis). Overall, the views of Lev Berg, compared with those of Darwinism, lose out by failing to take into account the importance of a gathering, concentrating, focusing, extreme element which is critical for life.2 Berg leaves this role to natural selection, but only as a means of maintaining the norm. He discerns a significant role for deviations from the norm. Berg does not argue that the status quo of a constant natural dispersion of variants and deviations is preserved within a species, but that, although in every generation there is invariably a large dispersion, there is, through the action of Darwinian selection, a thinning out, a testing for vitality. Marginal forms are eliminated and the species reverts towards the norm. Berg quotes Karl Pearson’s research into generations of poppies to the effect that every race is much more a product of its normal members than might be expected on the basis of the relative numbers of its individual representatives.3 The same applies in human society: the dispersion of deviants, degenerates, and alcoholics is great in every generation, but in each subsequent generation, children, on the whole, again begin within the norm. If the number of children in poor health increases, then it is to a lesser extent than among adults. Typically, children are more normal than their parents. The opposite is less common. Attention needs to be paid to Berg’s thesis. By itself, natural selection does not change the norm; for that to happen, other factors are needed. There is a great need to clarify the concepts of improvement, adaptation, fitness, and survival. When Darwinism, or selectionism, talks of survival of the fittest, if by ‘the fittest’ is meant only those most able to survive, we are looking at a pleonasm. This awkward fact has been noticed, but it is one of those instances where a striking expression takes on a life of its own.
In reality, ‘survivors’ and ‘the fittest’ are not synonyms and are even, in some respects, opposites. It would not be wholly absurd to say that the miracle of life is that the fittest do actually survive. Darwinism does more than present a picture of stray individuals, some of whom happen to be selected. We need to recognize that this array, this spread and these degrees of possibility are objective. It is not the fittest that exist and there is, moreover, no need to wait for the extinction of individuals or a species before concluding who does. Already in their behaviour, in their every movement and the profile of every living creature, the divergence between the fittest and the rest is obvious.
Researchers often naïvely judge success in terms of what they would see as success for themselves: that is, having a full stomach, being in good health and fertile. Clearly, however, other criteria are possible. Life is contingent on possibility and selection, where the criteria are uncertain. There are at least two of these, survival and fitness, and the correlation between them is uncertain. Only a total absence of fitness precludes survival, but the opposite does not follow: total retention by a savage beast of its savagery in the presence some hundreds of thousands of years ago of human beings led to extinction. When, after the radiation death of this planet, only the rats remain, their survival will not in any customary sense prove they were the fittest. Although logical analysis of premises is a rarity and everything is allowed to remain on the level of intuition, academic biologists might be surprised to know how often in assessing fitness they are applying a criterion that Konstantin Leontiev used for arguing against positivism. This was the criterion of ‘flourishing complexity’, which, while not excluding protracted observation, does not require it, relying less on observation than on sympathy and empathy.4 We can also note, dotted around in the economy of nature, pre-existing niches of fitness, hospitable locations to which life forms are attracted and into which they are drawn. That ‘strokes of luck’ are a possibility in our world deserves to be considered alongside the observation by physicists that our part of the universe is itself a stroke of luck because of the clear segregation here of energy and matter. In respect of the attraction of life forms to fitness, it should be noted that in the behaviour of herds, including the human herd, we do not find a stochastic distribution of more and less successful forms of behaviour from 0% to 100%. Technically, according to mathematical probability theory, this could be the case, but life seems from the outset to be predisposed to hitting the target. In view of all this, it is proposed that Darwin’s term ‘fitness’, in the sense of successful adaptation, should be replaced with the term ‘goodness’, in Russian godnost’, ‘to be good for something’. In the Indo-European languages, this word is in good company. The word for ‘weather’ in Russian is pogoda; in Slovenian, a related word means ‘timeliness’, ‘ripeness’, ‘festivity’, ‘anniversary’; in Latvian, it means ‘to hit the target’, ‘to gain’; in Lithuanian, ‘honour’, ‘glory’; in German, there is gut and in English ‘good’; in Greek, αγαθόν, agathón, ‘good’.
For a life form to be good for something does not necessarily mean only that it is successfully adapted to a purpose: it may indicate that it is a celebration, a glory. There is a great deal of controversy surrounding selectionism and Darwinism’s concept of natural selection, which we can sidestep by defining fitness as ‘goodness’. We have no grounds to oppose the idea that the spread of possible forms of life, including forms of behaviour, is enormous, or that which of these are ‘good’ becomes evident post factum. We must not, however, overlook the fact that even ante factum a ‘taste’ for goodness, either immediate or after trial and error, determines or tends to determine the behaviour of living creatures (as evidence from ethology tells us). It resembles such things as joy and celebration, and dictates not the content of behaviour but purely the form, in terms of gesture, brilliance, and beauty. This is born of anticipation that a pleasing action is possible in our world. We do not have to reject Darwinism and its random mutations and imagine that God has stored up a set of forms for future content into which life preforms itself. There are no ready-made anticipated forms, but something that argues in favour of an attracting, anticipatory effect of goodness is the absence of intermediate species in the gaps between those that have been successful. Darwin supposed they had just not yet been found. ‘The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.’5 Now it is almost conclusively clear that these intermediate forms have never existed. Nature can be compared to an artist whose works always find a place in the exhibition. ‘Nowhere do we find monstrous forms such as would indubitably have occurred in the event that limitless variability was the rule’ (Berg).6 This makes it all the more pressing to find an explanation for the succession, and abandonment, of hundreds of millions of its forms in the course of life’s history on earth.
The polarities of life are reflected in science in the contrast between the processes of feeding and reproduction; of proteins and nucleic acids; of symbiosis, inquilinism, parasitism, and xenobiosis; in the hypothesis of two lives; and in the ‘tyranny of genes’. It appears helpful to view the cell as an anthill, a colony of lower physiological units, in the light of the fact that absolutely all organisms are in fact colonies and communities, and that life is fundamentally ‘sociogenic’. All life is drawn towards other life and either assimilates or collaborates with it (symbiosis, inquilinism, parasitism, xenobiosis). The guiding principle is not so much the struggle for survival as an organism’s ability to find its place, to compromise, to serve the interests of unity and of other organisms in a kind of ‘egoistic altruism’.
Myrmecology, the study of ants, provides an opportunity to observe collective organisms. It opens up perspectives for understanding, on the one hand, the interaction of cells in an organism and, on the other, that of communities of living beings, including human beings. It also shows how expedient many processes in fact are which, if not closely examined, might lead to superficial conclusions. In ant colonies, we can observe age groups, a calendar, castes and caste-based laws, purposeful organization, training in personal hygiene, social education of the young, collaboration, mutual care, division of labour, general education, ethics, etiquette, taboo foods, donation, greeting, rituals of personal care, hygiene, incest taboos, language, care of larvae, medicine,