The Search for the Origin of Life: Some Remarks About the Emergence of Biological Structures
Mirko Di · InTech eBooks · 2012
Darwin's theses, as it is already known, have gradually influenced the entire progress of science.However it is necessary to underline the fact that, at the moment, nobody knows with certainty how life has begun.The question concerning the origins pervades, since the dawn of history, the most elevated exercise of human reason and it represents, for some aspects, a question that appears to interest the entire horizon of reason and, with it, the same dimension that is proper to the category of possibility.In this sense, from the dawn of civilization to the present, every human being and especially every scientist has measured himself within the horizon of that question, laying special emphasis, within his/her own intellectual limits, on offering a satisfying answer to that question itself.The apparent inexhaustibly connected to the question about the origin of life appears to exalt the Dantesque-like contradiction between the impetus towards the necessity for an objective knowledge of the nature of life and the limitation, instead, of the measures established by mankind in order to give a scientific explanation of said question.As a matter of fact, we might never be able to re-build the real historical sequence of the events which allowed the first molecular systems to evolve and reproduce more than 3 billion years ago.Still, if on the one hand the historical course is bound to stay, maybe forever, a mystery, on the other hand it is possible to develop structured theories and experiments to demonstrate, in an almost realistic way, how life may have first crystallized and later spread to the entire globe (Di Bernardo, 2007a, 2007b).In this sense, it is not entirely surprising then that the progress in the understanding of possible paths towards the origins of life extends across several scales www.intechopen.com