The Hit-and-Miss Method of Nature

THE method of nature seems to be an all-around-the-horizon one, without specific direction or discrimination. Or we may say that, whereas man’s activity is in right lines toward definite predetermined ends, nature’s activity is in circles; her impetus goes out in all directions, so that she is sure, sooner or later, to reach her goal, because she covers all the ground. This method involves delay, waste, failures, — or what would be such to ourselves, but are a matter of indifference to the Infinite. Man plans and builds and plants by method, order, system; he has eyes to see, and hands to guide, and wit to devise; nature builds and plants blindly, haphazard, all around the circle; her hand-maidens are industrious but undirected.

See the jays, the crows, the squirrels, planting acorns and chestnuts here and there, in the grass or amid the leaves, thinking only of their own wants, and not knowing that they are the gardeners of nature. The seeds of many plants are deftly concealed in tempting fruit which some creature will eat, and thus the hardcoated seeds will get disseminated. How many apple trees and red-thorn trees the cow plants; the seeds which her teeth do not crush escape from her body and are planted. It is a chance hit, but nature takes it, and wins often enough for her purpose. The seeds which the winds carry travel to all points of the compass and fall blindly here and there; a hundred or a thousand fail where one finds the spot it was looking for. The winged seeds of the cat-tail flag set out in fleets upon the air, cruising for ditches and swamps; they search all around the horizon and sooner or later a few of them find what they were looking for; before you are aware of it, the ditch that drains your land is choked with a growth of cattail flag. I say ‘find,’ when, in truth, they find nothing; they simply fall by chance upon the spots suitable for them, as a thirsty blind man might stumble upon a spring.

The spores of the black knot trust themselves blindly to the wind which bloweth where it listeth, and yet had they a thousand eyes they could not more surely find the plum or cherry trees or other hosts they are in need of. In autumn how many seeds of how many plants are waiting with hooks and barbs ready to seize on some passing creature and get free transportation to new lands. To cow’s tail, to sheep’s wool, to dog’s hair, to men’s clothing, they commit themselves and take their chances. Some one has written a book called A Vagabond Journey around the World — circling the globe without money or friends. How many plants have made this same journey, catching or stealing a ride here and there, tarrying in this country and in that, but sooner or later pressing forward!

The sun itself is a type of nature’s wholesale, spendthrift method. It radiates its light and heat in every possible direction, and if we regard its function as the source of light and heat to the worlds revolving around it, what an incalculable waste goes on forever and ever! The amount of this life-giving solar radiance that falls on the planets is a fraction so small that it is like a grain of sand compared to the sea-shore. Yet probably, in our sense of the word, there is no waste of anything in the universe. How can the infinite waste or be wasted?

The hit-and-miss method of nature is well illustrated in the case of the drones and the queen-bee in the hive. The drones are there to fertilize the queen, and the queen is there to perpetuate the swarm, as she is the one mother-bee in the hive. If she is not fertilized, her eggs produce drones and nothing else. Here again, we see what a spendthrift nature is in regard to the male principle. The case of the bees is analogous to the fertilization of the flowers by the agency of the wind — the same hitand-miss method. A thousand minute grains of pollen are thrown to the winds, when one will do the work if it hits the mark. But the chances are that it will not hit the mark; so a thousand or more are fired blindly into space, and the chances are thus a thousand times greater that the mark will be struck. One drone, and one chance meeting with the queen in the air, and the queen is fertilized; her eggs will now all produce worker or neuter bees. But this meeting of the queen in the air by the drone or male bee, is quite a fortuitous matter: the day and hour of her flight is fortuitous, her course on the wing is fortuitous, and the course of the drone through the air is equally fortuitous.

The queen makes but one flight, and the fields of summer air in which she wanders are very wide, and the ‘spirit of the hive’ has not advised any drone at what particular moment she will be at any particular point. The spirit of the hive has a simpler if a more wasteful method: it has developed many drones, a score or two of them, I should think, and they go forth every fair day and search the air in all directions during the period when the nuptial flight of the queen is likely to take place. One male some day, some moment, is doomed to meet her and yield his life for the swarm, as the worker-bee yields her life when she stings an enemy in defense of the colony. Soon after the fertilization of the queen has taken place, the drones are all killed or expelled from the hive. It is a cruel fate from our point of view, and a wasteful method, but cruelty and waste in this sense do not trouble the cosmic or universal processes. The swarm thrives, the race of honey-bees goes on, and that, apparently, is all that the gods of evolution are solicitous about.

The spirit of the hive has no further use for the drones, and the parsimony of nature, which asserts itself, not for the individual but for the race, asserts itself now. It is hard to see how natural selection, which is looking after the fittest to survive, would bring about this result. This cumbersome, roundabout method of fertilizing the queen should have many disadvantages to the colony: the queen might be lost in her flight, caught by some flycatcher, or overwhelmed by a sudden storm; it is certain that many drones are caught by king-birds in the air. Then this gang of drones has to be harbored and fed by the colony, which is no small item. The fittest and most economical process would be the fertilization of the queen in the hive, thus doing away with the superfluity of drones, which are certainly a tax upon the swarm. It is an unfit method which has as yet survived.

I wonder if the life of the world, as we behold it, has reached this stage of development, not by direction, but by a conflict of forces? Was it determined by intrinsic necessity, or is it simply the result of extrinsic conditions and forces, like the course of the stream to the river, and of the river to the sea?

The streams flow in all directions, yet sooner or later they reach the great reservoirs of lakes or seas. Ask the rivulet that issues from the spring at your door where it is going, and if it could speak it would reply, ‘I am bound for the sea.’ It has no eyes, no legs, no chart, no wit, but it will surely reach its goal — not by its own efforts or will, but by the law of mechanical forces acting upon its own fluidity or aquosity. Without gravitation working with variations of the earth’s surface, it would never get there.

It seems to me that evolution, too, must work all around the circle; and had there not been some universal, underlying force analogous to gravity, and some modifying conditions in the environment, it would never have got anywhere.

Gravity gives to water the impulse to flow, or to seek a lower level; the conditions exterior to it determine where it shall flow.

It is the nature of life to flow, to seek new directions, to reach higher forms; the environment, the action, the reaction, and the interaction do the rest.

No extrinsic conditions could have made a man out of a worm, the manscheme must have been inherent in the worm; but extrinsic conditions must have favored and guided the development of the higher form.

The moisture and the warmth do not determine the kind of plant or tree that shall arise from the seed you sow, but without them there would be no tree and no plant. Huxley’s phrase, ' the predestined revolution ’ of all forms of life, constantly comes to my mind: some inherent primordial bias or impulse or force that made the tree of life branch thus and thus and not otherwise, and that now before our eyes makes the pine branch one way, the oak another, the elm another.

We say that nature is blind, but she has no need of eyes, she tries all courses: she has infinite time, infinite power, infinite space; and so far as our feeble minds can see, her delight is to play this game of blind man’s buff over and over to all eternity. Her creatures get life, and the joy and pain that life brings, but what is augmented, or depleted, or concluded, or satisfied, or fulfilled, — who knows?

Yet through this hit-and-miss method of nature, things have come to what they are; life has come to what we behold it; the trees and the plants are in their places; the animals are adjusted to their environments; the seeds are sown, fruits ripen, the rains come, the weather system is established, and the vast and complex machinery of the life of the globe runs more or less smoothly; non-directed, in the human sense. Blind groping, experimenting, regardless of waste, regardless of pain, regardless of failure, circuitous, fortuitous, ambiguous, traversing the desert and the wilderness without chart or compass, beset by geologic, biologic, and cosmic catastrophes and delays, yet the great procession of the life of the globe, with man at its head, has arrived and entered into full possession of the inheritance prepared for it.

How difficult to think of it all as brought about by the hit-and-miss method of nature which I have been discussing — a score of failures to one success, a hundred bullets astray to one that goes to the mark; and yet apparently such is the fact.

The course of evolution has been a wayward, blundering course. The creative energy has felt its way from form to form, as an inventor feels his way in working out his ideas — failing, discarding, changing, but improving, advancing; and life is what it is because it had an onward and upward trend to begin with, and this inherent aspiration has never gone out. Life cannot stand still; it is its nature to develop, expand, increase. The sum of matter and the sum of force in the universe cannot be increased, but the sum of life has been increasing from the first. Matter does not beget matter, but life does beget life.

Given this tendency to increase, to seek new forms, will natural selection do the rest? Start the worm, and in due time will man appear? The finite mind, the mind developed and disciplined in this world of effort, of rule and guidance, of cause and effect, fails to see how the unguided, the irresponsible, fortuitous action of a multitude of cells would and could build up the human body, or any other living body. Count and analyze every cell in a man’s body, and you have not found the man: he is the result of all the myriads of cells acting in unison; he is the unit arising out of this vast multiplex series of units; they are all coördinated and working together to an end which no one of them, nor any group of them, knows. The man is a unit, the tree is a unit, the flower, the fruit, is a unit; each with form, structure, color, quality of its own, each made up and built up of an incalculable number of minute units, none of which have the secret of the key to the whole. There must be a plan which is not in the keeping of the cells. These units act together as the men of an army act together in battle, carrying out a system of manoeuvres and of tactics, of which individually they know nothing.

Who does know? Whose plan is it? Who and where is the general who is conducting the campaign?