The biosphere and man

As is known, in the theory of evolution various researchers put forth and considered the most diverse causes and circumstances of the origin of species in the animal world and their genesis, based mainly on the concepts of variability, mutational laws, heredity and evolutionary adaptation of organisms to the environment.

The fact of a sequential complication of the nervous system of the animal series in itself pushes to the idea that the biosphere and man are subject to certain spontaneous impulses of evolution itself, which do not depend on the external environment. While there is no definitive scientific concept explaining this improvement, one still needs its own history, and the theory of the question. Vernadsky, however, suggested that the revolutionary variability in the morphology of living beings depends on the critical periods of the geological history of the planet, the impulses of which go far beyond the limits of actual terrestrial phenomena. The intensity of the process, in his opinion, can be concluded in the so far not completely explored, and therefore not understandable to us, cosmic impact.

It is interesting that it was precisely among geologists that the scientifically expressed idea of the significance of man and his activity in the rational transformation of the Earth appeared for the first time. The very problem of the biosphere and man, precisely because of their active work, has become a truly scientific problem. For example, the American researcher Charles Schubert and the Russian scientist Alexei Petrovich Pavlov, independently, concluded that it is necessary to single out the era of man's appearance on Earth in a special geological era. Pavlov gave it the name of anthropogenic, Schubert - the psychosis. Academician Vernadsky himself pointed out that the founder of glaciology, J. L. Agassi in the nineteenth century, wrote about the era of man, and before him, in the 18th century, Buffon - about the "kingdom" of man.

But even in the history of philosophical thought, long before that, Vernadsky sees thoughts connected with the comprehension of the place and role of life in the universe. He also connects them with ideas about living matter. Suffice it to recall in connection with this topic two remarkable thinkers of the XVIII century, who long before Darwin and Dan were motivated in their discussions about the essence of man and his place in nature by deep evolutionary ideas. One of these thinkers was Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev, who wrote in his work "On the Man, His Mortality and Immortality" that man is the uppermost step in the endless process of improving nature, and the influence of human activity on the biosphere is unlimited, because this influence is of a creative nature. This property in itself contributes to overcoming the physical imperfection and acts to some extent as a compensatory factor that determines the place of a person in the biosphere.

Another such scholar was the German Enlightener Herder, who, in the work "Ideas for the Philosophy of History," argued that it was the person who was the next to achieve all of the creatures living on earth in achieving his purpose in the universe. The objectivity of its further development is for Herder and Radishchev from the force that determines the formation of the world, the acquisition of its life forms.

The same problem - the biosphere and man, as the dream of predecessors, sounds in the works of V. I. Vernadsky in a different, rational and evident manner. Rejecting the utopianism of some views, but preserving the evolutionary logic, he affirms the objective direction of the development of the living, which can not be limited to the appearance of man in the present, very imperfect habitat.

The idea that the biosphere and man represent only an empirical generalization of the evolutionary process opens up a huge layer of problems for science that were previously considered either already solved or unscientific. According to this logic, Homo sapiens can not be an example of a perfect mental apparatus. This is only some link in the chain of beings, to which evolution has prepared both the past and the future.