Geochemistry and the Biosphere. Vladimir I. Vernadsky
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with its surroundings. In the late eighteenth century, F. Vique d’Azir brilliantly expressed these ideas in the lectures he delivered in Paris, in which he tried to introduce a scientific and logical definition of life. This was one of the numerous definitions of life, one of the attempts to solve the problem (more a logical than a scientific one), which had drawn the attention of scientists and philosophers for many generations. In his influential report on the state of sciences in post-revolution France, presented to Napoleon in 1808, Cuvier expressed the same thoughts as Vique d’Azir with a peerless clarity and precision. He deepened these thoughts in his other papers. He wrote, “So life is a more or less fast, more or less complicated whirlpool, which always captures molecules possessing certain qualities, and which has a constant direction. But it is always penetrated by, and always deserted by individual molecules, so the form of a living body is more significant for it than its substance. As long as this motion exists, the body within which it occurs is alive, it lives. As soon as the motion comes to a complete standstill, the body dies.” One of the main thoughts expressed here, that of the greater importance of the form of a living body than of its substance, was the principal idea of biology throughout the whole nineteenth century. It was accepted, but everything else significant for Cuvier was discarded. In fact, in the nineteenth century, not only the substance, the molecules, were put aside, but also the influence of an organism on the environment, i.e., the motions of the molecules of the environment that, according to Cuvier, were essential for life.
In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the notions of the relations between life and environment, or the understanding of Cuvier’s formula, became more profound. The roots of these changes are to be found in geological and biological research. Geologically, they brought forth the discovery of the organized character of the biosphere adjusted to life and regenerated by life. Its particular manifestations are the biogeochemical processes studied in this book. The whirlpool of atoms entering and leaving a living organism is determined by a definite organization of life’s environment, by a geologically definite mechanism of the planet – the biosphere.
Biologists come to the same conclusion proceeding from the living organism. The form becomes clear only when both parts of Cuvier’s whirlpool are taken into consideration: that in the environment and that in the morph [form] the organism. The outstanding and original French zoologist, F. Houssait, was quite right to point out “schema-tization”; the complete discrepancy between the biologists’ “living organism” and a real living organism. The real organism is inseparably connected with the environment and can be separated from it only theoretically.
One cannot study and understand an organism, comprehend its form and vital activities, without studying and knowing its environment. A younger contemporary of Houssait, the English physiologist D. Haldan, insisted on an even closer connection between the environment and the organism’s functions. Another physiologist, the American L. Henderson, put these concepts into a distinct and more profound form; he connected them into a single unity with geological processes. But all these scientific studies of biologists could not channel scientific biological work into a different direction.
The grand manifestations of living organisms that are evidently connected with the environment – their respiration and nutrition – continued to be studied and have been studied while disregarding their influence on the environment from which the organisms receive chemical elements, and to which they return them by means of these processes. A living organism of a biologist in the “cosmic” environment is, in the greatest majority of cases, different in its scientific scope from the real body of empirical knowledge – a living organism of the biosphere.
Whole fields of biological problems have remained outside the realm of biology. But separate thinkers among the biologists have long been trying to go deeper, to approach the general substratum of inert and living matter while handling biological problems. In the archives of science we find profound ideas of this kind, which should draw the attention of our time as well. These ideas are revivified now. The old scientists of the late eighteenth century were less limited by patterns and habits of mind than their descendants. Before the new chemistry was finally formed, the idea of a universal cosmos had dominated, and consequently a search for a universal power ruling the world. In all the phenomena of our life, such as an apple falling from a tree, and in the greatest cosmic manifestations, such as the movement of celestial bodies, hence in the whole system of nature, one and the same universal power was seen: gravity. I. Newton, who had discovered the law of gravity, and who ruled supreme in scientific understanding of the cosmos in the late eighteenth and in the nineteenth century, had not been the author of the idea of “universal gravity,” but he also tried to transfer his laws to new fields such as chemistry, where it is not they that dominate as we will see.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the manifestations of “universal gravity” were looked for everywhere. This led to the discovery of new laws and to the clarification of complicated and tangled phenomena, but at the same time the scientists always came to the conclusion that the newly discovered forces were different from “universal gravity.” In the eighteenth century, Coulomb proved that the laws of attraction and repulsion of electrified bodies were similar to those of gravity, but that these laws are similar only in their outward appearance. Proceeding from gravity, Laplace came to the theory of special capillary forces. Attempts to find manifestations of “universal gravity” in the phenomena of chemistry and in chemical affinity brought forth the discovery of new laws and fruitful generalizations that had nothing to do with Newton’s attraction of gravity.
In 1782, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences put forward a problem for a competition in the realm of biology, generated by the same trend of thought. The question was whether there were any relations between Newton’s gravity and the force acting in the processes of nutrition and respiration of living matter. Which force makes it possible for living organisms to extract from their environment all the substance necessary for them to live and grow? Caspar Wolff, one of the most outstanding members of our Academy, a great investigator of life and one of the creators of embryology, initiated this question and published a memoir after the competition, in which he proved what seems obvious to us – that the forces of nutrition and respiration are quite different from Newton’s attraction of gravity. But the thing that can intrigue us in this forgotten episode of the past is the question itself. In fact, this question is an attempt to scientifically embrace the reflection in the environment, in the biosphere, of the countless minute phenomena of respiration and nutrition of living beings. Respiration and nutrition are considered not only as phenomena of the organism but also as planetary phenomena.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, another scientist, the well-known Polish medical man J. Sniadecky, returned to the same ideas. He compared Newton’s attraction of gravity with the “attraction” of matter – the respiration and nutrition of living beings. He expressed the idea that the intensity of the force inducing these processes in an organism grew in inverse proportion to the mass of the organism, while Newton’s gravity acts in direct proportion to the mass. Small living beings unseen by the eye produce the most significant effects. This trend in biological research soon died out completely, but the complex of ideas that had induced it has lately reappeared in geochemistry because the influence of living beings in the history of chemical elements of the Earth’s crust is exerted mainly by their nutrition and respiration.
In geochemistry, organisms manifest themselves and can be studied only from the point of view of the general effect created by these physiological phenomena, the complex of which makes up a planetary phenomenon. But these ideas are even more profoundly connected with our thought. They are most closely related to a biogeochemical study of life, as in the research of Wolff, Sniadecky, and earlier in that of Buffon. The universal gravity by Wolff, and the atoms in life’s biogeochemical embrace by Sniadecky, are attempts to connect the phenomena of life with the main elements that manifest themselves in the cosmos.
5 the history of free oxygen
The planetary significance of the phenomena of life, namely of respiration, can be well understood if we consider the history of free oxygen in the Earth’s crust – one of the innumerable chemical bodies introduced into the biosphere by living matter.
Free oxygen as molecular O2 in gaseous form, and especially