Evolution by Symbiosis

Abstract

IT is not very easy to deal with Mr. Reinheimer in a short notice; but at the same time one cannot feel sure that he deserves a longer one. This book is but one of a number which he has written, all telling the same story, namely, “that the standards of virtue and vice in the universe depend upon two antitheses: symbiosis and parasitism; that it is definitely immoral and ruinous, through the whole of nature, for an organism to be parasitic; that the degree of virtue is the degree in which an organism co-operates or ‘gets on’ with the universe, living by helping the rest of creation” (p. 8). “Only austerely constituted organisms can hope to enjoy natural immunity from disease” (p. 23). A carnivore is a “semidegenerate organism” (p. 44) “there is but a difference of degree between carnivorism and parasitism ”(p. 45); “symbiotic cross-feeders [that is, herbivores] are ipso facto in due relation with the world of life and thereby best qualified to enter into fruitful, sympathetic and intelligent social intercourse of the most varied kinds” (p. 56), so long as they do not overdo it and become “plant-assassins” (wasteful and destruc. tive herbivores) like the elephant, which is “a typical acromegalic animal in a state of hopeless senescence verging on extinction” (p. 109).

Evolution by Symbiosis.

By H. Reinheimer. Pp. viii + 141. (Surbiton: Grevett and Co., Ltd., 1928.) 5s. net.