What is Life? (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrödinger

Popular expositions of Darwin’s theory are apt to lead you to a gloomy and discouraging view on account of the apparent passivity of the organism in the process of evolution. Mutations occur spontaneously in the genom – the ‘hereditary substance’. We have reason to believe that they are mainly due to what the physicist calls a thermodynamic fluctuation – in other words to pure chance. The individual has not the slightest influence on the hereditary treasure it receives from its parents, nor on the one it leaves to its offspring. Mutations that occur are acted on by ‘natural selection of the fittest’. This again seems to mean pure chance, since it means that a favourable mutation increases the prospect for the individual of survival and of begetting offspring, to which it transmits the mutation in question. Apart from this, its activity during its lifetime seems to be biologically irrelevant. For nothing of it has an influence on the offspring: acquired properties are not inherited. Any skill or training attained is lost, it leaves no trace, it dies with the individual, it is not transmitted. An intelligent being in this situation would find that nature, as it were, refuses his collaboration – she does all herself, dooms the individual to inactivity, indeed to nihilism.