24 déc 2011

Life, Matter, the Universe (part 2 : life as matter in movement)

Submitted by Anonyme (non vérifié)

It is no accident that the first modern searcher about the origin of life is a soviet scientist. At the same time that Vernadsky understood life as a planetary system – the Biosphere - Alexander Oparin developed the dialectical materialist conception about the origin of life.

On his side, we find the great bolshevik Olga Lepeshinskaya, that became after the revolution a great biologist, leading the Department of Live Matter at the Institute of Experimental Biology, USSR Academy of Medical Sciences.

Indeed, for us dialectical materialists, asking what is life is finding the origin of all living cells from non-living matter. Life is matter in movement, it is “just” a highly developed form of matter in movement.

There are no basic differences, at the chemical levels, between “dead” matter and “living” matter.

Of course, the dignity of reality makes that we must morally make a difference, what bourgeois thinking is unable to do, with all its animal experiments.

But to understand the process that makes life appear, it is not possible to put a Chinese wall between “dead” matter and “living” matter.

Life appears as matter in movement – a movement that was lead by necessity. Becoming a professor of biochemistry in Moscow in 1927, Oparin understood how life is a product of a gradual chemical evolution of carbon-based molecules in a “primordial soup”. As he said:

“The internal structure of the droplet determined its ability to absorb with greater or less speed and to incorporate itself organic substances dissolved in the surrounding water.

This resulted in an increase of the size of the droplet, i.e., they acquired the power to grow (…).

A peculiar selective process had thus come into play which finally resulted in the origin of colloidal systems with a highly developed physico-chemical organization, namely, the simplest primary organisms.” (Oparin, The origin of life)

 

This is clearly in contradiction with the bourgeois conception, developed in particular by Pasteur, that Omne vivum ex vivo : only life can give life.

And interestingly, the discover of the DNA and the RNA doesn't put an end to dialectical materialism, on the contrary, it is a proof that life is, as Oparin said, “a flow, an exchange, a dialectical unity”.

This explains us also why bourgeois thinking is not able to understand life. Bourgeois thinking is unable to understand the matter in movement, and so the direction of matter in movement as necessary.

So, bourgeois science can try to produce some “Frankenstein”, but there is no reason for Frankenstein to turn alive in the dialectical movement of matter, so Frankenstein can not exist, and this is exactly what bourgeois thinking can not understand.

If today life can no be synthesized in the laboratory, it is because the movement itself can not be reproduced without the exact conditions that makes matter moves in the direction of life.

Only a socialist society will be able to understand this direction, and so to understand matter in movement, and so life in itself. Then will be understood the gap between carbon compounds and self-maintaining cells that are able to reproduce.

And it is clear also, as we must follow Vernadsky, that living matter shaped the earth and so modified the initial conditions that made life appearing.

And it is clear also, that the movement (of matter) itself produced the instinct to survive, what Spinoza calls the “conatus” (“The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question”, Ethics, Part 3, Prop. VII).

And it is clear also, that living begins are made mostly of hydrogen atoms, and that these atoms produced by the stars are so organized at a higher level than before: life is not made by God, but a construction of the matter (in movement) itself.

And it is clear also, that the movement can be seen as matter continue to exist, despite the death of living beings; as said Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600 :

“Don't you see that which was seed will get green herb, and herb will turn into ear and into bread. Bread will turn into nutrient liquid, which produces blood, from blood semen, embryo, men, corpse, Earth, rock, mineral and thus matter will change its form ever and ever and is capable of taking any natural form.”

International: