Life

The origin of life and the evolution to humanity

The scale of life phenomena

On the basis of current scientific knowledge about the organization and functioning of living organisms, what strikes us most is the scale – far beyond the reach of our senses – at which the fundamental processes underlying every form of life on Earth take place. It was only after the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century that some intelligent and curious investigators began to understand the complexity of the mystery of life, which until then had remained inaccessible to the human intellect. Suffice it to say that an animal or plant cell, only a few microns in size (one micron is one thousandth of a millimeter, 0.001 mm), is home to biochemical processes whose complexity and level of organization and information far exceed those of the most important man-made industrial plants. As will become clearer in the section devoted to the psyche, the lack of adequate knowledge of the complexity of the phenomena on which organic life is based may have given rise in the past (and still does so) to a number of bizarre interpretations rather than a reasonable, albeit incomplete, understanding of life within what we call nature.

Nature and psyche

The information on the origin and evolution of life presented in these pages are certainly not exhaustive or particularly detailed. Anyone interested in a comprehensive treatment of the subject can find, in specialized texts and on the web, a wealth of information that integrates this concise overview. The main focus of this study is the interaction between two extraordinary phenomena that involve and, so to speak, compete for the human being: nature and psyche. The natural and biological aspect of life forms the basis of the structure and functioning of our organism, which supports both the neurovegetative system and the peripheral and central nervous system. The latter, through the brain, allows each of us to receive and process the signals from the outside world and from our own body, and at the same time is the instrument by which all the dynamics of the psyche manifest themselves in this dimension. The establishment of the first culturally developed human nuclei, which marked humanity's emergence from the limits of animal life, must have required the activity of certain attunements of the psyche and a sufficient level of evolution of consciousness. Consequently, the socio-cultural development of human nuclei necessarily implies a process that cannot, in my view, be reduced to natural biological functions alone (even if there are advocates of this reductionist view).

Time

In this short introduction I also want to point out the importance of the time factor. All the transformations that have taken place, and continue to take place, over time in relation to the origin and evolution of life highlight the fact that time is the dimension in which a form of energy can be transformed from a lower level of organization and information to a higher one. This process, which should not be possible within a closed system (in which there is no exchange of energy with the outside) according to the principle of increasing entropy, is made possible by a supply of external energy, which allows the system's internal order to increase. As we will see, this increase in order has its own specific organization that defines and differentiates it from other possible ordered states. Using our human intelligence, when we want to specify a certain degree of organization and order needed to achieve a goal with the tools we have, we speak of implementation of a project. It may be interesting to understand whether and how this concept could be extended to organic life as well.