Abstract
THE mathematicians and physicists refer things no longer to three axes of co-ordinates, but to four, the fourth being the time axis. The world is ‘four-dimensional’, and is a world of events.This conception of time as intrinsic to things and not just something that happens to them, is applicable to the biological no less than to the physical sphere, and leads to interesting results, especially as bearing upon the theory of evolution. Some of these corollaries have been indicated by Mr. J. C. McKerrow in a pamphlet “Evolution without Natural Selection” (London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd.) supplementing his “Novius Organum” (1931). The Darwinian theory was that out of a number of chance or random variations a certain number were chosen by ‘natural selection’ to survive. The difficulty for the Darwinian has always been to account, not for ‘natural selection’ or survival, but for the occurrence of the variations themselves. But it is obvious that if an organism is a ‘four-dimensional process' or a system of activity, an event and not a thing, it is not so much variations as repetition and sameness that call for explanation. In a world of events, things happen, whereas in a world of static fixtures, they do not.
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Evolution Restated. Nature 145, 546 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/145546a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/145546a0
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