Heritage and Foundations

by Alain de Benoist

  In other words, the living systems are accounted for by organic substances, and organic substances by living systems. It is this contradiction, notably articulated by Lecompte du Noüy, who formulated the ‘Lecomtian bind’300 at the beginning of the century.

  The Russian scientist A. I. Oparine observes: ‘It was logical to think that living beings are formed by the evolution of the organic substances that compose them. But if such substances cannot be formed in natural conditions other than by the vital process of organisms, our deductions involuntarily fall into a vicious circle which appears inescapable. We realise that such ideas seemed to raise insurmountable difficulties for solving the problem of the origin of life’ (L’origine et l’évolution de la vie. Ed. de Moscou, 1960).301

  It is precisely Oparine who, in 1924, allowed researchers to escape the impasse by advancing a ‘revolutionary’ hypothesis: the atmosphere of the earth has changed.

  The ‘Primordial Soup’

  Astrophysics teaches us that the atmosphere of most planets is ‘reducing’. That is to say, it is composed essentially of methane, ammoniac, hydrogen, and water vapour. Due to this, it is transparent to the ultraviolet radiation that emanates from the sun with great energy. On earth, by contrast, the atmosphere is ‘oxydising’: the ultraviolet rays are stopped by the twenty percent of oxygen in the atmosphere (and by the ozone layer which surrounds the globe at a height of 30 km).

  Now, following Oparine, there is every reason to think that the primordial earthly atmosphere was also ‘reducing’ some three million years ago. It therefore allowed the ultraviolet rays to pass without filtering them. And it is this hyper-energetic radiation that could have provoked, on the surface of the earth and the sea, during powerful storms, some reactions of synthesis resulting in the formation of simple organic substances.

  Our planet was probably formed at a relatively low temperature by the accumulation of cold, solid bodies of heterogeneous constitution. The difference of constitution and density of the solid matter of which it was formed has determined the ‘non-homogeneity’, that is to say it has provoked the appearance of diversity. This makes itself felt by a progressive reheating, principally due to the heat resulting from the disintegration of radioactive elements. The largest parts of the hydrocarbons detach themselves from the lithosphere and then combine themselves on the surface of the Earth with water vapour, ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, and the other ‘reductive’ atmospheric gasses.

  ‘The primeval earth can be represented’, writes Steven Rose, a thirty-nine year-old biochemist attached to London’s Maudsley Institute, ‘as a planet principally constituted by vast hot oceans, containing in solution different salts coming from rocks. Under these conditions, a certain number of organic compounds would have begun to form and spread themselves widely throughout the entire extent of the oceans. The formation of these compounds would have been conditioned by this ‘reductive’ atmosphere and by the constant influx of energy in the form of light and ultraviolet rays coming from the sun.

  Initially dispersed in the form of solutions, the first organic substances would have then been combined to form macromolecular structures, which would be progressively differentiated, organised into ‘coacervates’ (a kind of ‘drop of jelly’ combined with salts, polymers, and organic compounds of weak molecular weight, studied by the science of colloids), before entering into exchange with the ambient milieu. These exchanges would have been complete by taking on the nature of the characteristic exchanges of life: self-renewal, self-regulation, self-reproduction. Finally, the current atmosphere would have replaced the early atmosphere, oxygen being successively freed by photosynthesis, produced by evolution, whereas a self-regulating ‘carbon cycle’ would establish itself between organisms, creating at the same time a new phase of life.

  ‘At a certain stage of development’, continues Steven Rose, ‘the nucleic acids and proteins must have emerged in the form of interdependent molecules capable of mutual synthesis, thus giving birth to the proteinaceous DNA-RNA complex, currently responsible for genetic transfer.

  From its appearance, life profoundly modifies the conditions of the environment. Certain living forms, taking the upper hand in some way, destroy other less ‘fit’ forms. Animated matter thus ‘chooses’ more evolutionary and better-adapted paths. Natural selection begins.

  It was still necessary to be able to reproduce this famous ‘primordial soup’ in a laboratory. This was achieved more than twenty years ago.

  In 1953, the American chemist Stanley Miller produced a gaseous mixture comprised of 18% hydrogen, 26% methane, 26% ammonia, and 30% steam. He kept it all at 60° Celsius (representing the temperature of the earth billions of years ago) and submitted it to an intense ultraviolet radiation. A few hours later, dozens of amino acids were spontaneously formed in the flask, with a good number of other organic compounds, like formaldehyde. Submitting the resulting broth to ultraviolet rays again, Miller saw the nitrogenous bases, notably adenine, guanine, and some sugars like ribose and deoxyribose appear, that is to say, the bases and the sugars used in the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (ribonucleic acid) of living cells.

  It remains to be known if the sugar, the phosphate, and the nitrogenous bases could be linked in such a way as to form a nucleotide, that is, a complete element of the spiralled ladder of DNA and RNA, the celebrated ‘double helix’ of the genetic code, bearer of inheritance. Yet the true links of nucleotides have been able to be synthesised, always under the action of ultraviolet, by Dr. Schramm at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute. (We have synthesised, for example, the ATP or adenosine triphosphate and smaller-sized proteins).

  Numerous experiments of the same kind have been menées after Miller, both in the east (Pavloskaïa, Passynski) and the west (Ponamperuma, Sidney Fox). They have allowed us to recreate in laboratories the conditions of appearance of most of the compounds of fundamental biological interest existing in living matter in the free state (micromolecular) or the condensed state (macromolecular).

  The importance of these works is obvious. The fact that, among the millions of a priori compounds susceptible to be formed under the action of ultraviolet radiation, only the amino acids specific to proteins (which are themselves the most specific constituents of living systems) are actually formed — this fact lets us suppose that life does not have the exceptional character that Lecomte du Noüy lent to it; rather, it is the logical, quasi-necessary consequence of environmental conditions which are probably not peculiar to our planet.

  The consequences that can be drawn are not only of a scientific order. Christian Léourier also insists on the ideological ‘benefits’.

  Around the Notion of ‘Emergence’

  At first sight, a serious blow has been carried to ‘vitalism’, that is to say to the belief in a mysterious ‘principle of life’ radically foreign to the physical world. For the vitalists (who Jacques Monod calls the ‘animists’), the appearance of life cannot be explained by a simple complexification of matter. For this reason, the most cannot come out of the least (cf. Claude Tresmontant, Comment se pose aujourd’hui le problème de l’existence de Dieu ? Seuil, 1968).302 They even admit to creation ex nihilo when it comes to the existence and power of God.

  Max Planck nevertheless affirms that ‘a whole is always distinguished by something from the sum of its parts’. ‘In fact’, adds Professor Louis Rougier, experiment shows that every composed system manifests new properties distinct from those of the elements composing it’. Thus, the chemical compound H20 manifests new properties (those of water) which are quite different from the hydrogen and oxygen that constitute it. To say that these ‘emergent’ properties were contained ‘in potential’ in the elements of the compound does not say anything significant. The characteristic taste of sugar is not ‘potentially’ in its three components, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, which are wholly devoid of flavor.

  This philosophical-biological clash reaches its greatest intensity around the notion of emergence. For the �
�vitalists”, emergence is an outbreak of an almost miraculous character. For the “reductionists”, it simply refers to a link of a causal order, which a thorough study of biological phenomena shall allow us to determine with precision.

  Among the anti-vitalists, some, like Jacques Monod, assert that the process by which the evolution of life began was initially the result of chance. The others, like Ernest Kahane (La vie n’existe pas, Ed. Rationalistes),303 respond: ‘Recourse to chance is almost as vain as recourse to metaphysics; it is a lazy conception which requires no confirmation, which does not lead to any hypothesis, and which leads to no experiment’ (Finalité en biologie, in Les Cahiers rationalistes, December 1965).

  The question is more fundamental than it seems. If compounds are “something more” than their parts, they are also something other than these parts (and not simply the same thing in another form). Can we say, under these conditions, that the passage from the inert to the organic, from the inanimate to the living, from the living to the conscious, is not equivalent to the passage from one form of reality to another? Living matter may well have originated from physical matter, but it is not only of physical matter. Born of the physico-chemical, it is not only physico-chemical (otherwise, how would it be alive?) And while it is true that the physico-chemical phenomena which manifest themselves in living phenomena have not gained anything specific, it is also true that their organisation is peculiar to living systems. Thus, are we actually in the presence of one and the same matter appearing in different forms? Of a matter which would not differ in nature, but in degrees? Which would not imply a qualitative “leap” but a quantitative “leap”? In short, as Steven Rose says, “where exactly does the border occur that separates flowers, dogs, and yeast cells, on the one hand, and molecules of salt, urea, or amino acids on the other?”

  That this boundary will be, to a certain degree, somewhat blurred is demonstrated by the experiments on the tobacco mosaic virus that were simultaneously carried out in 1955 by Fraenkel-Conrat and Williams in the United States, and by Gierer and Schramm in Germany.

  This virus consists of a small cylindrical stick with a central spiral of RNA surrounded by a sleeve of proteins. By simple methods, the RNA nucleic acid is separated from the sleeve and each of these two parts of the virus is broken down into hundreds of biologically inert components. Now, if all of the fragments are left intact, the basic structure of the RNA is reconstituted spontaneously. And the same is true of the protein sleeve. The complete synthesis of the virus is finally obtained. “Thus reassembled like a watch mechanism’, writes the professor Louis Rougier, ‘the virus recovers 50% of its original virulence: it comes back to life” (Nouvelle Ecole, 1968). Having isolated the virus from the mosaic pattern on the tobacco, Stanley will proceed to crystallise it into an ordinary chemical product, and then, having re-inoculated it to tobacco, makes it propagate and become infectious again. Thus, the experimenter can now progress at will from the organic to the physical-chemical, and then from a biologically inert body to one endowed with one of the essential characteristics of life: self-reproduction. (With this restrictive condition, however: that the body in question must be inoculated to an [innoculé à un] appropriate living being).

  The problem of the relationships between living and non-living is not completely resolved. Thus, when Steven Rose declares that there is no more “essential” difference between the organic and the physical-chemical than there is “between a raw egg and a hard-boiled egg”, he forgets that between the “raw egg” and the “hard-boiled egg”, something other than the egg intervenes.

  Charles Sadron, Professor at the National Museum of Natural History, Honorary Director of the CNRS’s Centre for Research in Molecular Biophysics at Orléans-La Source, who was President of the Rationalist Union, at the same time that he sides with a reductionist conception of the phenomena of life, also recognizes that none of the manifestations of consciousness are reducible to a physico-chemical level. ‘We cannot say that a pain or a pleasure is a magnitude, is a category of phenomena which falls within the physico-chemical. (Les Cahiers rationalistes, July 1975). The answers of the reductionist theorists are therefore no more satisfactory than those of the metaphysicians. And one wonders if the language of biochemistry is yet to be invented.

  *

  L’origine de la vie. Théories contemporaines, a study by Christian Léourier. Laffont, 172 pages.304

  La chimie de la vie, a study by Steven Rose. Gauthier-Villars, 302 pages.305

  *

  On the problem of emergence, Pierre Thuillier published an important article (Qu’est-ce que l’émergence ?)306 in the review Atomes (March 1968). He emphasises that the ‘reductionism versus emergence’ debate is not necessarily identical to the ‘mechanism vs. vitalism’ debate, and even less to the ‘monism vs. metaphysics’ debate. He also observes that discussions about the ‘unity of science’ (a theme cherished by the advocates of ‘physicalism’) are frequently distorted, for there can be a methodological unity of science without there being any unity (or reducibility by mutual conversion) of the different objects and levels of objects that scientific inquiry concerns itself with.

  From a methodological point of view, we can say that effort of reduction is legitimate when it seeks to establish relations or correlations between different phenomena (or orders of phenomena), but ceases to be so when it uses the pretext of these relations and correlations to assert that such a phenomenon (or order of phenomena) is nothing other than some other phenomenon (or order of phenomena) constituted in another form.

  Old and New Logics

  Logic, in intellectual matters, is the form of honesty and rigor, ‘declared Léo Hamon, after leaving the Council of Ministers on 25 August 1971.

  Traditionally, logic is the ‘study of the conditions of truth’. Today, it is in fact much more than that: a true science whose object is the systematic study of the conditions in which a statement can be considered coherent, endowed with meaning, and susceptible to verification. Logicians do not deal with the content of statements. They do not indicate whether they are accurate or not. But they do tell us whether these statements are admissible from a formal point of view, that is to say, if the rules that allow reasoning are correctly observed.

  These rules differ from those of grammar and syntax. It is thus so, writes the British philosopher Alfred J. Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic), that certain grammatically correct statements are ‘of an excessive modesty’. ‘If I learn, for example’, he adds, ‘that lions are or are not carnivores, I know something true, but I do not fully know whether I will be eaten’.

  It was long believed, with Kant, that logic was geschlossen und vollendet (closed and completed’). ‘In reality’, says Robert Blanché, a former Professor at the faculté des Lettres in Toulouse, ‘it is the renewal of logic that has, over the past century, sparked as a reaction a renewal of its history’.

  The old logic, bequeathed by Aristotle, was based on simple principles: the principle of identity (A = A), the principle of the excluded middle (all that which is not A is not A) and the principle of contradiction (the same concept cannot be defined as both A and not A). These principles were declared to be true a priori, at all times and places, and it was said that they pre-existed human understanding and reasoning. In this way, the distinction between the truths of experience drawn from observation, and formal truths deduced solely from intellectual connection to certain eternal laws, was introduced into western thought: the ‘common notions’, of Aristotle, and the ‘evident principles’ of Descartes.

  Situated at the intersection of science, philosophy, and the analysis of language, modern logic breaks completely with this Aristotelian doctrine.

  The rupture between what German logician Rudolf Carnap called ‘the old and the new logic’ is sometimes situated around 1850, a period when ‘logic escaped the philosophers in order to be taken up by the mathematicians’. In fact, according to Blanché, the origins of modern logic (also called logicism or symbo
lic logic) go back to Leibniz, indeed even to the Presocratics.

  ‘The Word Dog Does Not Bite’

  The evolution of logic has followed that of physics and the life sciences. Blanché has outlined the principle steps. The logic of Aristotle is succeeded by that of the Stoics, which take a dialectic form, then by medieval logic, illustrated by Thomas Aquinas and the famous quarrel of Universals. The Logique de Port-Royal, 1662, embodies the Jansenist and Cartesian spirit. Leibniz, who discovered at the same time as Newton the bases of differential calculus, imagines the system of ‘monads’. Meanwhile, the foundations of classical empiricism are laid by Francis Bacon, David Hume, and John Locke, and are furthered by Stuart Mill.

  In the eighteenth century the ‘evident principles’ of Aristotle had taken refuge in mathematics. Independent of circumstances, it seemed that two and two always made four, that the sum of the angles of a triangle was always equal to two right angles, and that the shortest route from one point to another was always the straight line, etc.

  The discovery in the nineteenth century of non-Euclidean geometries, non-Cartesian kinematics, and non-Pythagorean arithmetic, exploited by the theory of relativity, showed that this was not the case. The length and weight of a body change in space. If we draw a curvilinear triangle on a world map, the sum of its angles will be greater than two right angles. In a ‘geometry of navigators’, the shortest path from one point to another will not be the straight line, but the arc of the great terrestrial circle that passes through the two chosen points. In quantum mechanics, the logic of the excluded middle must be replaced by a weakened logic, practically devoid of contradiction. There is therefore a plurality of possible systems, and their choice depends on the conditions of the experiment.

  At the beginning of the century, David Hilbert could write ‘Mathematics is nothing more than a game played according to certain simple rules, with signs devoid of meaning written down on paper’.