What is Life? (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrödinger

Now as a species we are developing, and we march in the front-line of generations; thus every day of a man’s life represents a small bit of the evolution of our species, which is still in full swing. It is true that a single day of one’s life, nay even any individual life as a whole, is but a minute blow of the chisel at the ever unfinished statue. But the whole enormous evolution we have gone through in the past, it too has been brought about by myriads of such minute chisel blows. The material for this transformation, the presupposition for its taking place, are of course the inheritable spontaneous mutations. However, for selection among them, the behaviour of the carrier of the mutation, his habits of life, are of outstanding importance and decisive influence. Otherwise the origin of species, the ostensibly directed trends along which selection proceeds, could not be understood even in the long spaces of time which are after all limited and whose limits we know quite well.