The Gene Material as the Initiator and the Organizing Basis of Life

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Outstanding developments in the evidence, conceptions, and speculations concerning the origin and basis of life are considered, with special reference to whether primacy in these respects should be attributed to some form of "protoplasm" in general, or of "gene material, " or whether neither of these should be considered to have primacy over the other. The view of the gene material''s primacy is defended. Accordingly any living thing must have the following 3 faculties: that it can form more bodies after its own pattern; that in this process, changes can occur, which nevertheless allow the changed successors to form more bodies of these still newer types; and that these different kinds of successors can differently and significantly affect materials or conditions other than their own, and can thus possess different possibilities for the continuance and extension of their own or still later successor types. Anything having the above 3 faculities and the external conditions for exercising them will possess the potentiality of almost unlimited evolution by natural selection. The gene material itself has the properties of life. The criterion for life is the potentiality of evolution by natural selection. The great modern findings concerning the chemical structure and workings of the nucleic acids and of other material of organisms, as well as findings concerning prebiotic possibilites of synthesis of organic materials, are held to strongly substantiate the above concepts. The concept of the uniqueness of structure of gene material is included since even in diverse cytoplasmic structures having these properties, nucleic acid was present. These modern findings however, also raise certain difficult problems: one is how the protoplasmic organization common to all cellular organisms, with its complicated circularity of gene-protein production, evolved; and the other deals with how the gene material itself became further organized and stabilized until the enormous genes of higher forms were achieved.