Some Conditions for the Appearance 

 of Life on the Earth 



R. L. BERG 



Biological Faculty, Leningrad State University, Leningrad 



In my communication discussion will be focused on the conditions that could 

 have favoured the origin of the orderly organization of matter which we call 

 life. 



Thanks to the work of Bernai, Haldane, Terenin and Pirie, it has become clearer 

 and clearer in recent years that life could only have developed in the presence 

 of a solid substrate or, as Terenin has just said, the presence of a soUd substrate 

 made possible the origin of life. In the triphasic system of a porous solid sub- 

 strate permeated by air and water, we have the necessary, specific condition 

 without which life could not have come into being. 



If we are going to adopt a geophysical, rather than a physico-chemical ap- 

 proach to the subject, the gas, Hquid and solid substrate must be taken as being 

 the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphère respectively. The soUd substrate 

 might be represented by dry land or the bottom or margin of an area of water 

 or it might be suspended in water. The Uquid and gaseous substrates might be 

 just as varied in nature. 



Where then did life arise on our planet — on land or in the ocean ? There are, 

 at present, two contradictory ideas on this question. On the one hand there is 

 the very widely supported hypothesis that life originated in the ocean, and, on the 

 other, the suggestion of Vil'yams, Kholodnyï and L. S. Berg, that the dry land was 

 the cradle of life. This old argument was started by the ancient Greeks. Vernad- 

 skiï put forward a pecuhar point of view on this question. 'The first manifestation 

 of life during the creation of the biosphere must have arisen, not in the form of 

 the appearance of any one type of organism but in the form of associations cor- 

 responding to the geochemical functions of Ufe' says Vernadskii. In other words, 

 there was a multiple origin of life, it developed under various conditions in various 

 forms. I shall bring forward a number of arguments in favour of the theory of 

 the multiple biopoiesis. 



Both the supporters of the theory that life arose in the ocean and those of the 

 theory that it arose on dry land put forward a number of arguments in defence 

 of their positions. Taken together, the arguments of both sides serve to substan- 

 tiate the idea of the multiple origin of Hfe. In fact, I shaU dispute the hypotheses 

 that Hfe could have arisen only in water or only on land. 



The most important arguments in favour of the hypothesis that life originated 

 exclusively in the ocean are: (i) the similarity between the salt composition of 

 the body fluids of land animals and that of the waters of the ocean; (2) the in- 

 dispensabihty of water for processes of fertilization and for the occurrence of 



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