CHAPTER Vlll 



THE ORIGIN OF THE 

 FIRST ORGANISMS 



The evolution of the initial systems. 



Anyone looking at nature around him will, almost un- 

 erringly, divide it into the world of the lifeless and inorganic, 

 and the world of living things. The world of living things 

 is made up of a tremendous variety of animals, plants and 

 microbes which are widely different from one another. 

 Nevertheless, among all this diversity, even a person without 

 scientific experience will notice something common to all 

 living things, something which relates them to one another 

 and distinguishes even the very simplest organism from 

 objects belonging to the inorganic world. This direct, and 

 sometimes even unconscious, assumption of the ordinary man 

 concerning the world around him itself contains the most 

 primitive as well as the most general definition of life. 



The age-long philosophical quarrels and acrimonious 

 differences of opinion on this subject are fundamentally 

 simply concerned with the question as to what is the essence 

 of this ' something ' — the essence of life. The idealists see 

 it as something spiritual, the essential nature of which is 

 inaccessible to experimental study, while, according to the 

 materialists, life, like everything else in the world, is material 

 in nature and an explanation of it does not call for the 

 acknowledgement of anything supernatural. 



Quite large numbers of scientists now take the view that 

 an understanding of life in general involves no more than a 

 very thorough knowledge of physics and chemistry and a 

 very thorough explanation of all vital phenomena in terms 

 of physical and chemical processes. According to this view 

 there are no specifically biological laws, and the rules which 

 prevail in the inorganic world also govern all the phenomena 



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