Chapter IV 



THE BIOLOGICAL APPROACH 



MOSCOW SYMPOSIUM OF THE INTERNATIONAL UNION 

 OF BIOCHEMISTRY 



In the preceding chapters we have seen how strong uniformitarianism 

 is as a philosophy in geology and how geology accepts extrapolation, 

 in a general way, of actual processes into the geological past, even 

 over time-spans of millions and billions of years. Consequently, we 

 must now first look into the results of biological studies of life at 

 present and their bearing on the origin of life. We must learn what 

 characterizes life at present; what we may call living and what we 

 regard as dead; what actual processes are at work in living things 

 now, or, put in other words, what is the metabolism of the present 

 forms of life. 



Biologists interested in the origin of life have supplied us with an 

 outstanding summary of the state of their science — together with 

 some gleanings from astronomy and geology — in the proceedings of 

 the Symposium of the International Union of Biochemistry', held at 

 Moscow in 1957. These proceedings, originally edited by Oparin, 

 Pasynski, Braunshtein and Pavlovskaya later appeared in an English — 

 French- — German version, edited by Clark and Synge, as Vol. I of 

 the I.U.B. Symposium Series in 1959 under the title The Origin of 

 Life on Earth (Oparin et al., 1959). Later a shorter account appear- 

 ed, containing selected papers but not the discussions (Florkin (Ed.), 

 1960), under the title Aspects of the Origin of Life. It is from these 

 accounts mainly that the following statements are drawn. They con- 

 tain a summary of the biological approach to our problem, as far as 

 is necessary to understand its geological aspects. 



NON-LIVING AND LIVING IN BIOLOGY 



One of the main difficulties biologists have to cope with is the 



