Life

The origin of life and the evolution to humanity

The dimension of life phenomena

On the basis of the current scientific knowledge about the organization and functioning of living beings, the most striking aspect is the dimension – far beyond the reach of our senses – at which the fundamental processes, on which every form of life in this world develops, occur. It was only after the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century that some smart and curious investigators began to understand the complexity of the mystery of life, up to that time inaccessible to the resources of human intellect. Suffice it to say that an animal or plant cell, of the size of some microns (one micron is the thousandth part of one millimeter), 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 be better highlighted 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 determined in the past (and still determines) a series of bizarre evaluations with respect to a reasonable, albeit incomplete, understanding of life within what we call nature.

Nature and psyche

The notions on the origin and evolution of life reported in these pages are certainly not exhaustive or particularly in-depth. Anyone interested in a a comprehensive treatment of the subject can find, in specialized texts and on the web, a lot of information that integrates this synthetic framework. The interest of this research is mainly directed at the interaction between two complex phenomena that involve, and so to speak contend, the human being: nature and psyche. The natural and biological aspect of life is at the basis of the constitution 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 one's body, and at the same time is the instrument by which all the psyche's dynamics manifest in this dimension. The establishment of the first culturally developed human nuclei, which led to the exit of the human being 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 does not seem possible to reduce to natural biological functions alone (even if there are supporters of this reductionist thesis).

Time

In this short introduction I also want to point out the importance of the time factor. All the changes that have taken place from the beginning, in relation to the origin and evolution of life, show that in this world time is the dimension in which the transformation of a form of energy from a lower level of organization and information to a higher state occurs. This process, which should not be possible within a closed system (in which there is no exchange of energy with the outside) due to the law of entropy increase, is made possible by a supply of external energy, which allows the increase of internal order in the system. As we will see, this order increase has its own specific structure that defines and differentiates it from other possible states of order. Using of our human intelligence, when we want to define a certain degree of organization and order needed to achieve a goal with the tools we have, we speak of the realization of a project. It may be interesting to understand if and how this concept could be extended to organic life as well.