Introduction

Abstract

A universe comes into being when a space is severed into two. A unity is defined. The description, invention and manipulation of unities is at the base of all scientific inquiry.

So long as ideas of the nature of living things remain vague and ill-defined, it is clearly impossible, as a rule, to distinguish between an adaptation of the organism to the environment and a case of fitness of the environment for life, in the very most general sense. Evidently to answer such questions we must possess clear and precise ideas and definitions of living things. Life must by arbitrary process of logic be changed from the varying thing which it is into an independent variable or an invariant, shorn of many of its most interesting qualities to be sure, but no longer inviting fallacy through our inability to perceive clearly the questions involved.

Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment