The Phenomenon of Man: The Transit to Life
Seen from outside and materially, the best we can say at the moment is that life properly speaking begins with the cell.
For a century science has concentrated its attention on this chenlically and structurally ultra-complex unit, and the longer it continues to do so the more evident it becomes that in it lies the secret of which we have as yet no more than an inkling-the secret of the connection between the two worlds of physics and biology.
The cell is the natural granule of life in the same way as the atom is the natural granule of simple, elenlental matter.
If we are to take the measure of the transit to life and determine its precise nature,
we must try to understand the ccll.
But to understand it, how are we to regard it ?
Volumes have been written about the ccll.
Wholc libraries are insufficient to contain all that has been meticulously observed
concerning its texture, the functions of its ‘ cytoplasin’ and nucleus, the way it divides, and its connection with heredity.
Yet, in itself, it is still a closed book, still as enigmatic as ever.
It seems as though, once we have reached a certain depth in our explanation, we find ourselves reduced to marking time in front of an impregnable fortress.
It might seem that the histo1ogic; and physiological methods of analysis have given us all we could expect of them and that, to get any farther, our approach must be made from another angle.
For obvious reasons, cytology has so far proceeded with an almost exclusively biological outlook.
The cell has been viewed as a minwrganism, or an example of proto-life, that must be interpreted in relation to in highest forms and associations.
But this attitude has left half our problem in the dark.
Like the moon in its first quarter, the cell has been illumined only on the side that looks towards the highest forms of life, leaving the other side (the layers we have called pre-life) floating in darkness.
That is most likely the reason scientifically speaking why its mystery has been so unduly prolonged.
Marvellous as it is, marvellous as it seems to us in its isolation among the other constructions of matter, the cell, like everything else in the world, cannot be understood (i.e. incorporated in a coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolutionary line between a past and a future.
We have turned a good deal of attention to in development and its differentiations.
It is on its origins, that is to say on its roots in the inorganic, chat we must now focus our researches if we want to grasp the essence of its novelty.
Dapite what experience has aught us in every other field, we have let ourselves become too much accustomed to thinking of the cell as an object without antecedents.
Let us see what happens if we regard it and treat it (as we cmaidy should) as something at one atrd the sanrc time both the outcome of long preparation and
yet profoundly original, that is to say, as a thing that is born.
A. Micro-organisms and Mega-molecules
First of all the preparatory process.
When we try to look at the beginning of life in relation to its antecedents rather than its consequents, we at once notice something which, strangely enough, had never struck us before.
It is in and by means of the cell that the molecular world ‘ appean in penon ‘ (if I may so express myself), touching, passing into, and disappearing in the higher constructions of life.
Perhaps a word of explanation is needed.
When we look at bacteria, it is always against a background of the higher plants and animals, and this blinds our vision.
What we should do is start from another angle, shutting our eyes to all the more advanced forms in living nature and even to most of the protozoa because, in their main lines, they are almost as differentiated as metazoa.
In the latter, moreover, let us ignore the highly specialised and often very large cells of the nervous, muscular and reproductive systems.
In other words let us confine ourselves to the more or less independent elements, externally amorphous or olyrnorphous, such as abound in natural ferments, are present in our blood and accumulate in our organs in the form of connective
tissue, in other words let us confine ourselves to what appear the simplest and the most primitive cells in nature today.
This done, let us look at this corpuscular mass in relation to the matter beneath it.
Can we fail for a moment to see the obvious relationship, in both composition and appearance, between the prot-living world on the one hand and the physico-chemical one on the other?
When we consider the simplicity of the cellular form, the structural symmetry, the infmitesimal size, the outer uniformity in character and behaviour in the mass or multitude, do we not find the unmistakable characteristics and habits of the
grulular formations?
In other words, we are still on that first rung of life, if not at the heart of ‘ matter ‘, at least fully on its border.
Without exaggeration it may be said that just as man, seen in terms of palaeontology, merges anatomically with the mass of mammals that preceded him, so, probing backwards, we see the cell merging qualitatively and quantitatively with the world of chemical structures.
Followed in a backward direction, it visibly converges towards the molecule.
This is already something more than a simple intellectual intuition.
Only a few years ago what I have just said concerning the gradual conversion of the ‘ granule ‘ of matter into the ‘ granule ‘ of life might have been thought of as being as suggestive, but at the same time as unfounded, as the fuse dissertations of Darwin or Lamarck on evolution.
But things are now changing.
Since the days of Darwin and Lamarck, numerous discoveries have established
the existence of the transitional forms postulated by the theory of evolution.
At the same time the latest advances in biochemistry are beginning to establish the reality of molecular aggregates which really do appear to reduce to measurable
proportions the gaping void hitherto supposed to exist between protoplasm and mineral matter.
If certain calculations (admittedly indirect) are accepted as correct, the molecular weights of some of the natural proteinous substances (such as the viruses so
mysteriously associated with the zymotic diseases in plants and animals) may well be in terms ofmillions.
Much smaller than any bacteria-so small in fact that no fdter can retain them-the
particles forming these substances are none the less colossal compared with the molecules normally dealt with in organic chemistry.
It is fruitful to note that if we cannot yet consider them cells, some of their properties (particularly their faculty of multiplying in contact with living tissue) definitely foreshadow those of proper organic beings.’
Thanks to the discovery of these giant corpuscles the foreseen existence of intcrmcdiate states between the microscopic living world and the ultra-microscopic ‘ inanimate ‘ one has now passed into the field of direct experimentation.
So from now on we are justified not only by our intellectual need of continuity but by positive indications when we state that, in accordance with our theoretical anticipation of the reality of a pre-life, some natural function really does link the mega-molecular to the micro-organic both in the sequence of their appearance
and in their present existence.
And this preliminary finding takes us another step towards a better understanding of the preparations for, and hence the origins of, life. ~Pierre Tiellhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Page 79-82
Life Life