Fitness of the Environment

Water is truly a crucial determinant of the fitness of the environment. In a very real sense, organisms are aqueous systems in a watery world. 

A second unexpected property of water is that it expands when it freezes. Water has its maximal density, mass per unit volume, at 4°C. As it is cooled further, it begins to expand. Ice at 0°C occupies about 11% more volume than does liquid water at the same temperature. In this respect water is nearly unique. Almost all other liquids contract when they freeze, as we would expect since the solid phase is generally more compact and more ordered than the liquid phase and, hence, is denser. This behavior is not just a laboratory curiosity the fact is that our life on this planet is dependent on this remarkable property. This point has been elegantly stated by L. J. Henderson, a leading biochemist in the early twentieth century, in his thoughtful book The Fitness of the Environment which he wrote in 1913 Here are his words. 

L. J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment. An Inquiry into the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter, Macmillan, New York, 1913. 

So who was this man whose The Fitness of the Environment, published some ninety years before, was chosen as the emblem of the project, Fitness of the Cosmos for Lifel ... 

Where did The Fitness of the Environment come from and where did L. J. Henderson go with it In spite of the several fields in which Henderson worked, a number of commentators, his contemporaries, and later analysts noted a markedly similar approach in many of his endeavors. Looking back at his work later in life, Henderson himself noted more unity than he had been aware of at the time. His focus was on organization and system the organism, the universe, and society. John Parascandola, the author of a doctoral dissertation and several important articles on Henderson, put it succinctly The emphasis in his work was always on the need to examine whole systems and to avoid the error of assuming that the whole was merely the sum of its parts (1971, p. 63). 

By February 1912, however, having become fully convinced of the primacy of carbonic acid and water in the environment and the importance of the buffer concept, he set about writing The Fitness of the Environment. He claimed that he made no outline of the book (or of later ones, for that matter, including the treatise on Blood) and spent less than sixty days (and probably closer to fifty) writing the volume (p. 186). 

Darwinian fitness is compounded of a mutual relationship between the organism and the environment. Of this, fitness of [the] environment is quite as essential a component as the fitness which arises in the process of organic evolution and in fundamental characteristics the actual environment is the fittest possible abode of life. Such is the thesis which the present volume seeks to establish. This is not a novel hypothesis. In rudimentary form it has already a long history behind it, and it was a familiar doctrine in the early nineteenth century. It presents itself anew as a result of the recent growth of the science of physical chemistry. (p. v)... 

In 1913, long after Charles Darwin had argued for the htness of organisms for their environment, the Harvard chemist Lawrence J. Henderson pointed out that the organisms would not exist at all except for the htness of the environment itself. Fitness there must be, in environment as well as in organism, he declared near the outset of his classic work. The Fitness of the Environment (1913, p. 6). While most of Henderson s contemporaries ignored the philosophical implications of this work, as John Barrow and Frank Tipler have noted, it still comprises the foundahon of the Anthropic Principle as applied to biochemical systems (1986, p. 143). 

At the other side of the temperature scale, water has a most peculiar property it expands as it freezes, contrary to most known substances. Anyone who has suffered the misfortune of frozen water pipes in the winter will be all too familiar with this property. Were it not for this anomalous expansion, ice would sink when it freezes and form a frozen reservoir at the bottom of the oceans. Because of the low thermal conductivity of water, the oceans would not thaw out in the summer. Year after year the ice would increase in winter and persist through the summer, until eventually all or much of the body of water, according to the locality, would be turned to ice (Henderson, 1913, p. 109). Henderson further stated that [t]his unique property of water [the anomalous expansion on freezing] is the most familiar instance of striking natural fitness of the environment, although its importance has perhaps been overestimated but he added that on the basis of its thermal properties alone. . . water is the one fit substance for its place in the process of universal evolution, when we regard that process biocentrically (1913, p. 107). 

Returning now to fitness, we may be sure that, whatever successes science shall in the future celebrate within the domain of teleology, the philosopher will never cease to perceive the wonder of a universe which moves onward from chaos to very perfect harmonies, and, quite apart from any possible mechanistic explanation of origin and fulfillment, to feel it a worthy subject of reflection. .. 1 cannot hope to have provided more than a very imperfect illumination of certain aspects of teleology in this venture upon the foreign field of metaphysics, and I should wish to be understood as very doubtful of my success in stating what seem to me some of the philosophical conclusions to be drawn from the fitness of the environment. 

John Haught. who contributes a chapter to the current volume, makes this argument of the fitness of the environment for intelligence" the key moment in his challenge to Darwinian atheists, whom he addresses in the second person in a kind of f accuse ... 

In conclusion, I wish simply to comment that, although the notion of the fitness of the environment is most obvious and direct at the level of biochemistry, the interconnections of life via evolution effectively predetermine the process. This situation evidently imparts both directionality and, more controversially, inevitability. 

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