quote from Elisabeth Sahtouris:
"We have also seen that at least a few scientists worked at theories of
organic creation within matter itself. One such scientist wasCharles
Darwin's younger Russian contemporary, Vladimir Vernadsky, whose
idea of life as a metabolically active "disperse of rock" has pervaded
this book. Another was George Hutchinson, the Yale University professor
who spread Vernadsky's ideas in America. James Lovelock and Lynn
Margulis acknowledge geologist-physician James Hutton's concept of
a living Earth as a forerunner to the Gaia hypothesis. Erich
Jantsch's "self-organizing universe," which also influenced the writing
of this book, shows the interplay of the largest and smallest events of
cosmic matter/energy producing the ever more complex systems of an
essentially live universe. None of these scientific models include
the notions of purpose or life force or God.
Much groundwork for planetary physiology can be found in the work of
V. I. Vernadsky. Vernadsky's concept of life as "a disperse of
rock," paraphrased in this book as "rock rearranging itself," is very
different from our usual view of life as a collection of individual
creatures in various degrees of competition or cooperation as they adapt to
a
nonliving environment. Vernadsky pointed out that living organisms
were originally built of the "inorganic" minerals of the Earth's
crust, that they still contain such inorganic minerals, and that they
transform inorganic minerals into living matter and living matter back into
inorganic minerals. For this reason he saw no separation between biology
and geology, but became interested in the constant transformation going
on from the one domain to the other. His concept of all living
creatures together as "living matter" is one that postulates that part
of the Earth's crust is currently energetic enough to actively transform the
more passive parts into itself and its products.
On the surface, this concept of living matter is the same as
Lovelock's concept of "biota"--the sum total of living creatures,
contrasted with the "abiotic," or nonliving environment. But in Vernadsky's
conception the emphasis is on geological continuity on each as a
transformation of
the other, whereas in Lovelock's conception the emphasis is on their
interaction as separate parts of a working system. Oddly,
Vernadsky, who apparently did not see the planet alive as a whole, perceived
its integrity more fundamentally than Lovelock, who does see it as an
organism The processes by which organisms build up and destroy their own
protoplasm--the mixture of proteins, water, carbon compounds, and
minerals of which all organisms are made--is called metabolism,
from the Greek word for "change." Metabolism is a process of chemical
changes in living matter by which energy is provided for taking in
new matter, building and repairing cells, collecting and excreting
wastes.
Metabolism is divided into two parts--anabolism and catabolism, the
buildup and breakdown of protoplasm.
Metabolism, then, is the most basic (autopoietic) activity of all
life--recycling the materials of the Earth's crust into living
matter and then back into nonliving matter that can be used again to create
moreliving matter. Vernadsky understood metabolism as the activity of
all living matter taken together as well as that of any particular
organism, since he saw all living matter as a constantly shifting
high-energy portion of the Earth's crust. Since, as we said before,
virtually all of the Earth's atmosphere, seas, soil, and rock,
even to its purest, hardest diamonds, is made from the products
and dead bodies of organisms, it is clear
that life is the most powerful of "geological" forces. The record of
Earthlife's evolution lies in all of geology, not only in recognized
fossils--a record referred to in the title of a book on Vernadsky's work,
Traces of Bygone Biospheres.
The sedimentary rock formed by pressure on the ocean floor, for
example, begins as sediment, including vast quantities of algae and
animal shells, all passed through the guts of sand and mud-eating
worms to further transform them, just as soil is transformed by the
related Earth-eating Earthworms of dry land.
The geological activity of creatures also includes their production
of atmospheric gases and their transfer of groundwater back into the
atmosphere, a process that is clearly visible in the pumping action
of rain forests--the rain then falling to dissolve more Earth and rock.
On the whole, however, the geological activity of creatures is less the
larger they are, most of this work being done by microbes and rock- or
mud- or Earth-eating worms. Some microorganisms contain half a million to a
million times as much of some mineral, such as iron, manganese, or
silver, as their environment does. The concentration of elements is
one way in which life moves the Earth's crust. Microorganisms are even
responsible for concentrating the radioactive materials, such as/
uranium,that we mine to produce atomic energy--probably just to keep
themselves warm!
It was so clear to Vernadsky that the activity of living matter was
metabolic that he proposed we reclassify living organisms on the
basis of their metabolism. He argued that our present classification
from kingdom to species by way of phylum, class, order, family, and genus
had
led us to classify as related organisms many that really are not related
under natural conditions. A better\ scheme, he felt, would be to divide
kingdoms according to the way in which each of their species
metabolizes supplies from its environment. The different ways in
which organisms feed themselves had already been named by the German
biologist Wilhelm Pfeffer. Vernadsky proposed them as a biological
classification scheme for the evolutionary geochemical, or
metabolic process of living matter.
In this scheme the metabolic process of organisms begins with the
category called autotrophs--"self-feeding" organisms that can build
their own giant molecules, such as protein and nucleic acids, from
simple molecules and elements such as minerals, water, and carbon dioxide.
This category includes the photoautotropic self-feeders that use
sunlight in metabolizing basic molecules. A second major category of
organisms is called heterotrophs--"feeding off others"--because its members
cannot make large molecules from basic ones but must eat other organisms
for their ready-made large molecules. A third category is called
saprotrophs--"feeding on the dead"--because its members eat dead
bodies and reduce their large molecules back to the basic ones the
autotrophs can use. The fourth category is mixotrophs, which can
metabolize in more than one way.
Finer distinctions within these categories are made as heterotrophs
feed off other heterotrophs, and so on. What is important about this
scheme is that organisms are classified not by their structures but by
their functions within the whole geobiological life process. It
recognizes organisms as self-organizing packets of the Earth's crust
with enough energy to move about the more sluggish matter around them.
Vernadsky even suggested that evolution may proceed by the natural
selection of organisms which most increase biogenic, life-originated,
energy--the energy to move around the atoms and molecules of the Earth's
crust at the highest speed.
The energy of living matter sometimes explodes almost beyond
belief. A locust plague of a single day has been estimated to fill six
thousand cubic kilometers of space and weigh forty-five million tons! It
is the locusts' heterotrophic metabolism, of course, that makes them a
plague
as they suddenly convert vast quantities of the autotrophic crops, planted
by humans, into their bodies. Most biogeologic activity goes on less
dramatically--though it is impressive enough to consider that a
single caterpillar may eat two hundred times its weight per day. All
ecological areas have more autotrophs than heterotrophs--it takes more
of the former to sustain the latter. Thus, a forest may have 2,000 to
5,000 times as much autotrophic as heterotrophic living matter.
Vernadsky did not consider this classification scheme the only one
possible; he recognized that one can learn much by trying other
methods. One of his schemes was based on the type and amount of
mineral content in organisms. Certainly he was one of the first
modern scientists to see the Earth in a truly holistic way and to
provide evidence of its evolution through the transformation of rock into
living
creatures and back into rock.
Many scientists have since built on his work or developed
independent studies of the Earth from a holistic perspective, but
Vernadsky's work has been given particular attention here because its
fundamental
conception of biogeochemical unity is so important and so little
known in the West. Recent and more easily available books--Lovelock, The
Ages of Gaia; Margulis, Early Life; and Margulis and Sagan,
Microcosmos--present an updated account of Earthlife's evolution. "
from EARTHDANCE:
Living Systems in Evolution
Elisabet Sahtouris
copyright � 1995 by Elisabet Sahtouris
"The term "biogeochemistry," as used in Defining and Measuring
Sustainability: The Biogeophysical Foundations
(U.N. University, 1995) refersto a comprehensive study which relies on
the
disciplines of biology, geology chemistry and physics.
The originator of the concept, Vladimir Vernadsky, the
father of biogeochemistry. in his monumental work, The Biosphere (1926)
showed that the main gases of the earth's atmosphere -- oxygen,
nitrogen, and carbon dioxide are created by living things, that
living matter influences the entire chemistry of the earth's crust. G.E.
Hutchinson's studies of physical, biological, chemical and
meteorological
conditions of freshwater systems and his formal
definition of ecological of "Hutchinsonian niche" of an
organism as the intersection of all critical factors
such as temperature, food, water, etc. also
contributed to the intellectual development of the term. "
(this from a WRI ref, can't locate it right now).
--
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