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What is life? Is it “the assemblage of the operations of nutrition,
growth, and destruction,” as Aristotle thought? Or is it “organization
in action,” as French physician and biologist François-Xavier
Bichat defined it? Or might it be “…the continuous adjustment
of internal relations to external relations,” as the British philosopher
and sociologist Herbert Spencer believed?
Science historian James E. Strick has studied how scientists have struggled
to define life and explain its origin ever since Darwin produced his path-breaking
book, Origin of the Species, which in 1859 set forth his theory of evolution.
Strick, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society
at Franklin and Marshall College, spoke at a NASA and Templeton Foundation
sponsored workshop, “Origin of Life,” hosted by the Dialogue
on Science, Ethics, and Religion of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science.
Rather than focus on the vociferous arguments of Darwin’s critics,
however, Strick has closely examined the debate that took place among
Darwin’s supporters. “We expect a story about the new evolutionary
science to include much heated objection from religious quarters,”
he said. “But a look at how divisive the issue was among the Darwinians
themselves is an even more complex and enlightening story.”
Darwin was not the first to develop a theory of evolution. More than
50 years before him the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed
that the various species had not been created in their current forms all
at once, as was commonly believed, but had evolved through time by natural
processes. He also embraced the principle of spontaneous generation propounded
by Aristotle: Living things came into being directly from nonliving matter.
Lamarck supposed this occurred on a minute scale unobservable to human
eyes.
Although Lamarck’s theory was never widely accepted and was later
proven wrong, it did influence Darwin’s early mentor, Robert Grant,
and fueled an ongoing controversy about spontaneous generation among scientists
of Darwin’s generation. For example, William Benjamin Carpenter,
a professor of physiology at the Royal Institution of London, rejected
spontaneous generation, arguing that nonliving matter could never organize
itself into living matter except through the agency of other living matter,
that is, if dead matter is consumed by a living organism and thereby transformed
into living matter as that organism adds to itself. Yet because Carpenter’s
argument relied on a qualitative difference between what he called “vital”
and nonliving forces, Strick said, it had an unexpected effect on the
life sciences that Darwinist theory had inspired. “[Carpenter’s
arguments] seemed to prove an absolute, uncrossable divide between the
living and nonliving worlds, leaving no alternative but a supernatural
explanation for the first origin of life on Earth.”
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