Abstract

V. I. Vernadsky was a star of Soviet science. Applying a mineralogist's perspective to the phenomena of life, he founded the sciences of geochemistry and biogeochemistry and developed the concepts of “living matter,” “biosphere,” and “noosphere.” George Levit claims that Vernadsky's work has not been thoroughly organized or interpreted even by Russians. Accordingly, he devotes over half of this book to a “reconstruction and analysis” of Vernadsky's theoretical system, beginning with his notions of space and time as they apply to organisms. Vernadsky observed that living bodies escape entropy, that they are “dissymmetrical,” and that all their processes, including evolution, are irreversible.Levit contends that Vernadsky's views on the logic and methodology of science are vague and sporadic. He declares his philosophy of science to be a version of “radical empiricism,” which holds that scientific theories are merely forms of the description of one's sensations. He was a phenomenalist and a positivist. However, his notion of the noosphere was metaphysical and not empirical.Most significantly, Vernadsky claimed that the biosphere is a geological envelope that has determined the geochemical history of almost all of the elements of the earth's crust. Levit shows that Vernadsky viewed life as one of the general manifestations of reality alongside matter, energy, space, and time. Its properties are determined by such cosmic phenomena as gravitation and solar radiation. And so, Vernadsky believed, it must be cosmic in its scope. Once it comes into existence, it cannot die out.In the 1920s Vernadsky became convinced that the development of thought similarly was a natural phenomenon rooted in the very structure of the biosphere. He developed the notion of the noosphere in Paris in the company of Henri Bergson, Edouard Le Roy, and Teilhard de Chardin. Since the seventeenth century, he argued, the growth of scientific knowledge has been the main force influencing the geochemistry of the earth.In the latter third of his book, Levit compares Vernadsky's theoretical system to three related ones. With Teilhard, Vernadsky shared a basic terminology, methodological principles, and an implicit teleology. Unlike Vernadsky, however, Teilhard believed that eventually the noosphere would be replaced by a super‐mind that would release thought from its material matrix. In the 1960s James Lovelock introduced the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that the earth itself is a kind of homeostatic self‐regulating organism. Although Vernadsky would likely have been dubious, Levit discerns no fundamental differences between his biosphere and Gaia.Finally, V. N. Beklemishev, a Russian zoologist, also concluded that life controls the processing of matter in the biosphere. However, while Vernadsky interpreted the phenomena biogeochemically, as a flow of chemical elements, Beklemishev viewed it morphologically. There is, he argued, neither life nor death, simply more or less material organization. Most approaches to the biosphere, writes Levit, are located within the Beklemishev–Vernadsky spectrum of opinion.Levit admires Vernadsky's attempt to include biological, geological, social, and cultural processes as parts of a single planetary process. Nevertheless, he concludes that Vernadsky failed to show convincingly that the empirical basis of his biosphere theory supports his claims about the inevitable transition from biosphere to noosphere.This terse and dense book reads like a reworked thesis. It badly needs editing by someone whose first language is English. There is a substantial bibliography but no index. Instead of endnotes or footnotes, there are maddening references in parentheses. At least twice, I found that a reference had no corresponding bibliographic entry. It all makes for an ineffably tedious treatment of what is potentially a truly intriguing subject