Voeikov professor at Moscow State University lectures. Voeikov V.L.

We met with Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor of Moscow State University Vladimir Leonidovich Voeikov to talk about water, which remains a mystery of mysteries for scientists even in the 21st century. True, water was the least talked about.

- Vladimir Leonidovich, what kind of phenomenon is this - water?

First of all, it must be said that the word “water” usually means completely different phenomena. For example, there is fresh water, salt water, sea water, physicists are now keen on computer modeling of water. Usually people characterize water by assuming that it is H2O plus something else. I am interested in water, which is related to life, since everything that we call life is, first of all, water.

Water is a complex system, or rather, a huge collection of systems that move from one state to another. It’s even better to say: not a system, but an organization. Because a system is something static, but an organization is dynamic, it develops. Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky by organization meant something that, on the one hand, is conservative, and on the other, changeable. Moreover, these changes do not occur randomly, but purposefully.

The manifestations of water are diverse. For example, there are known cases when water burned a radar: the radar beam, reflected from a cloud and returning, burned the receiving device. Consequently, incomparably greater energy was returning from the cloud! Modern science cannot explain this. A cloud is water particles. There is always some part of liquid water that forms coherent domains, that is, areas in which water molecules vibrate coherently and behave like a laser body. The radar beam, hitting the cloud, makes the water in it unbalanced, and this excess energy is either given back to the radar by the cloud and burns it, or is dissipated.

- Why did nature create such unbalanced water?

The question “why?” goes beyond science.

- It turns out that we know very little about water?

One more example. We know that mountain rivers are always cold: even if it is hot in the valley through which the river flows, the water still remains cold. Due to what? This is usually explained by the fact that there are glaciers in the mountains, springs along the way, and in general it moves. But there may be another explanation. What do we mean by the words “cold”, “warm”, “hot”? Temperature. Where does the temperature that we measure with a thermometer come from? The molecules of the medium move, collide with each other, and energy is released, which is what we measure with a thermometer. Now let's see at what speed the molecules move in one direction and what the thermometer will show if we try to measure the temperature of the flow. The molecules begin to move at similar speeds and “suck” energy from the environment. It turns out that the temperature of the mountain stream is extremely high, and at the same time it is icy! Paradox! Temperature - and temperature... A fast river cools, although it should heat up due to friction... That is, the water is cold, because the molecules stop knocking against each other! But the temperature of the directional flow is another matter. This explains the lack of understanding of the processes occurring in water. Water by its nature is non-equilibrium, therefore, by its nature it can produce work. But in order for everything that is not in equilibrium to produce work, conditions must be created. But an organization can create conditions.

- There are ideal forms, for example Platonic solids. How is water organized?

The ideal bodies that Plato spoke about are unattainable in nature. These are abstract designs, ideas. If such bodies are considered in nature, they will begin to interact, knock against each other and cease to be ideal.

- But they strive to restore their forms?

They strive to strive, but when something strives to restore its form, this is already a dynamic phenomenon. And this is no longer Plato, but Aristotle. Aristotle has this desire and there is a causa finalis - the final goal, which has been thrown out of modern science.

It all started when scientists began to describe real phenomena and reduced everything to the study of cause-and-effect relationships. And now normal science is a science in which a paradigm has been established based on the idea that there is a cause-and-effect relationship and there is no desire.

- But not everyone thinks like this, probably there are other approaches?

Without aspiration, life is impossible, and it is very difficult to deny the existence of life, because, wherever you look, you observe life itself in one way or another. True, I immediately want to dry the flower, make a stuffed animal out of the gopher... And, of course, the most wonderful of all sciences is paleontology, because I put the skeleton in a museum, covered it with varnish, and it stands and will not be destroyed. And biology should deal with life and the most wonderful phenomenon of life - development. Development from simple to complex, from incoherent to coherent, from monotonous to diverse. And all this happens spontaneously.

- And the goal?

And the purpose of life is to preserve life. The goal is to increase life. Because the more life there is, the more difficult it is to destroy it. In 1935, Erwin Bauer published the book “Theoretical Biology”, in which he formulated three basic principles of life. Bauer's first principle sounds like this: all living and only living systems are never in equilibrium. And they use all their excess energy in order not to slip towards equilibrium.

- What then is the role of science, the scientist?

I'll tell you what the purpose of science is. Academician Berg, a Russian geographer, geologist, zoologist, introduced the term “nomogenesis” (that is, development according to laws) in opposition to Darwinism. According to Darwin, there was no development, since the word “development” means unfolding according to plan, unfolding. The same is with evolution, which, in essence, is purposeful development.

The scientist talks about how the world works and how man works. We are interested in studying the world, by and large, from an egoistic point of view: we want to understand our place in this world. Since a living person studies the world, he has a question about the purpose of existence. As soon as the question of the purpose of existence disappears, that’s it...

- What all"?

Life ends. Indifference, a person doesn’t care. There are different goals, and they stimulate life. Once a person loses his purpose in life, he ceases to exist. Darwin never used the word evolution. He was interested in the origin of diversity. Diversity is not the equivalent of evolution. You can build different buildings from the same bricks, but this will not be evolution...

- It seems to me that this is not the most popular point of view today.

I agree. Why is this approach unpopular? Science does not raise questions of morality and morality. What morality and morality are there in the laws of gravity, the laws of gravity? But the correct pursuit of science and clarification of the laws of the universe miraculously leads to the substantiation of deep-seated issues of morality and morality. Why do morals and ethics exist? What is the point of morality and ethics? What about maintaining life? Morality and morality are necessary for our life to be preserved.

- It turns out that Nature, God - say whatever you like - has it laid down for a moral law to live in a person’s soul?

Absolutely right. Another thing is that morality is not directly dealt with by science, but, for example, by religion. But the universe can be looked at from different points of view: from the point of view of the Creator, or from the point of view of creation. Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov spoke about this.

- Can religious knowledge be useful to scientists?

Is it possible to study astronomy or other sciences using the Bible?.. Let me give you an example. On the third day of Creation, God created the luminaries: great and small. For what? In order to separate day from night, so that there are signs. When did he create the flora? On the second day. Without the Sun? Is it complete nonsense? But no... About 30 years ago, so-called black smokers were discovered at the bottom of the ocean - entire ecosystems that had never seen any sun in their lives, and there are animals with a circulatory system there. So what, the Sun gave birth to these energy systems?.. Then we must assume that the Earth was also heated due to the Sun. Only here will geographers and geologists object. Because the Earth is warm not because the Sun heated it. It is written in the textbooks that all the energy comes from the Sun - photosynthesis, glucose, CO 2 and H 2 O + the sun and so on, you probably remember. But let's go down to the bottom of the ocean: there is no photosynthesis there, but there are animals, and they did not descend from land to a depth of five kilometers.

- Who gives them the energy to live?

Water! The synthesis of CO 2 and H 2 O occurs only when there is activation energy. And in water, which is initially structured unbalanced, this energy exists, regardless of whether there is sun or no sun. And, by the way, what preceded the flora? About the first day of Creation it is written: “And the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.” The translation, as I recently learned, is incorrect: “The Spirit of God moved upon the waters.” “Run” does not mean “rushed”; in its origin this word is related to the word “hen”. The Spirit of God energetically and informationally organized the water, that’s what this could mean. It turns out that water was conceived as the basis of the universe.

- Do you want to say that all modern scientific discoveries were once already known to someone?

A scientist discovers laws, but does not invent or invent laws. The tongue is very difficult to deceive. There is a word “invention”, it’s when you make something out of something. And there is the word “discovery” - I open a book and make a discovery for myself.

This happened to me once. I came across a book by academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, founder of modern embryology, Karl Bairn, “Reflections on Observing the Development of a Chicken,” written in 1834. The book was published in 1924, with uncut pages. I brought it to the embryology department and showed it to my colleagues - I made a discovery, discovered something unknown to them.

- What is this book about?

About that very final goal to which everything strives. Bern studied the development of the chicken embryo at different stages. And I discovered a paradox: the eggs are exactly the same, but the embryos are different. Where is the norm? If one embryo is normal, then all the rest are freaks? But what’s interesting is that then all the chickens hatch the same. It turns out that everyone goes their own way towards a common goal, and this has nothing to do with genetics. It is quite clear that they are initially in different conditions: one egg is on the edge of the clutch, the other is inside... They cannot be in the same conditions, this is the law of diversity. But everything then “pulls together” towards a single goal. In this case, we cannot say that the development of chicken No. 77 is correct, but that of chicken No. 78 is not. In reality, science often unifies everything.

- This is one of the problems of education...

This is difficult to avoid: you cannot assign your own teacher to each student. But you need to understand that sometimes we have to simplify, unify, and we do this not for the benefit of a particular person, but contrary to his individuality and in order to cover as much as possible.

- Let's get back to the mysteries of water.

Another interesting experiment. We take dry soil, fill it with water and place it in front of the photomultiplier - the device detects a flash of light. This means that if water falls on dry ground, in addition to moistening the soil, it also releases light! You can’t see it with your eyes, but all seeds, all microorganisms receive an impulse for respiration, for further development. Again we came to the same conclusion: water and the earth’s solids, when interacting, provide the energy of formation.

- Wow!

Another interesting observation. It is known that carbon exists in two crystalline modifications - graphite and diamond. Graphite is a more nonequilibrium state of carbon than diamond.

For a diamond to appear in nature, it requires exposure to colossal pressures, and in our body carbon has a diamond structure. Initially, carbon appears in the CO 2 compound, which does not have a diamond configuration, however, when combined with water, CO 2 and H 2 O are formed into glucose, in which the carbon is already “diamond”. And no high blood pressure! This means that in a living system (living organisms consist of up to 90% water), carbon turns from “non-diamond” into “diamond”, and this happens only due to the organization of water!

- Therefore, the diamond structure of carbon is needed for something in a living system?

Certainly! This is high energy! But water does not need monstrous energy costs to create high pressure and temperature for such transformations; it does this through organization. The most amazing thing is that Vernadsky thought about this fact at the beginning of the 20th century. I sometimes come to the conclusion that a lot has already been done to understand water, but not everything has been explained. We need to learn to explain.

- But there are specific facts, experimental data, and there are a great many interpretations (sometimes polar) of these data. Where does scientific evidence end and speculation begin? For example, can Masaru Emoto's experiments be trusted?

I personally know Masaru Emoto, I am familiar with his experiments and books. To a large extent, he is a popularizer and a bit of a dreamer. I see the enormous historical role of Masaru Emoto in the fact that he drew the attention of hundreds of millions of people to water. But his experiments do not meet scientific criteria. I was sent a scientific article with the participation of Masaru Emoto for review, and I must admit that the experiment was carried out incorrectly. For example, the question arises: what are the statistics of crystal formation after listening to this or that music? The statistics in the article are remarkable: the experiments are practically impossible to repeat. At least repeat the way he puts them. Moreover, does the nature of the resulting crystals depend on the photographer (experimenter)? Yes, it depends: for some things don’t work out, while for others everything works out great. But this is some other science. And in order to objectively judge Emoto's work, we must create a different methodology, a different language and a different means of evaluation. Then she can be judged differently.

- So we have to wait for the emergence of new science?

In fact, we already have such a science, it is... biology. It is very different from physics. No matter how many times Galileo threw a stone from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the probabilistic spread of results would be small. But if from this very tower you throw not a stone, but a crow, then no matter how many times you throw it, where it will fly is always a big question. Ten thousand crows need to be thrown to find out where, generally speaking, they are heading. This is completely different. Here we must consider a disproportionately larger number of introduced factors than is usually considered in science.

- It turns out that Emoto’s experiments are somewhat reminiscent of your example with crows?

But this does not mean that such experiments should not be carried out. This only means that today we need to build a new science. But when building it, you need to know the old one too. Let me give you an example that shows that science is never absolutely false or absolutely true. There once was a flat earth model. Today you can laugh at such ideas of ancient scientists. But excuse me, what model do we use when we mark out our summer cottage? Copernican? No, we need a flat earth model! Nothing else is needed to solve this problem, we are simply engaged in land management. But when it comes to launching a satellite into low-Earth orbit, this is a different matter. But the Copernican system is also imperfect. Does it explain the structure of the Universe? No! To clarify this issue, we need to build a new science, but we also need the old science - so that we have something to start from.

- This means that scientists will never be left without tricky questions and unsolvable problems.

Certainly! Here's how to explain why birds fly over Everest, at an altitude of 11,000 meters? Both from the point of view of physiology and from the point of view of bioenergy, this is impossible! What are they breathing there? But they fly, and they need something there! And here it is necessary, I would say, to pacify pride, to admit that we - ah! - there’s a lot we don’t know yet. But as soon as we talk about water, everything we already know about it can mislead us, at least today. We invent too much about water today. Water is our ancestor, the matrix of life, on the other hand, the global flood is also water, but it washed away everything from the face of the earth. And because of our ignorance or distorted understanding of water, we can inadvertently cause harm by engaging in all sorts of conspiracies, slander, and so on. If we consider that water is the progenitor of life and life itself, then this life must be treated with very great respect. If any life is treated with disrespect, the consequences will not be difficult to guess. So we admit that there is still a lot we don't know.

The questions were asked by Elena Belega, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences.

Professor of Moscow State University. Lomonosova, Doctor of Biological Sciences, biophysicist, water specialist (Russia)

In 1968 V. L. Voeikov graduated from the Biological Faculty of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov with a diploma with honors in the specialty “Biophysics”.IN 1971 theredefended his dissertation for the degree of candidate biological sciences. From 1971 to 1975 he worked as a junior researcher. C1975 - Associate Professor of the Department of Bioorganic Chemistry, Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov, andfrom 2003 to present – ​​professor . From 1978 to 1979, he performed research work at the Department of Biochemistry and Medicine at Duke University, North Carolina, USA, under the supervision of Professor Robert Lefkowitz (Nobel laureate 2014).

In 2003 he defended his doctorate at Moscow State University dissertation “Regulatory functionreactive oxygen species in blood and in water model systems” in the specialties of Physiology and Biophysics.

In 2007 he was awarded the 1st Prize named after. Jacques Benveniste at the 7th International Crimean Conference “Space and Biosphere”;In 2013 he was awarded the PRIGOGINE gold medal, established by the University of Siena and the Wessex Institute of Technology (Great Britain);

V.L. Voeikov supports and continues the ideas of such scientists as Erwin Bauer , Alexander Gurvich , Albert Szent-Györgyi , Simon Shnol , Emilio del Giudice, constantly collaborates with J. Pollack (University of Washington, Seattle, USA), M. Chaplin (Professor of Applied Science, London South Bank University, UK).

Main areas of scientific interests Vladimir Leonidovich: physical and chemical bases of biological activity, free radicals and oscillatory processes in water and their role in bioenergy. V.L. Voeikov is an honorary worker of Higher Education of the Russian Federation, a member of the Scientific Council of the International Institute of Biophysics in Neuss (Germany), a member of SPIE(International Society of Optical Engineering, USA) and the All-Russian Biochemical Society.

Main areas of work research group headed by V.L. Voeikov:

— model photobiochemical reactions, including the Gurvich reaction and Maillard reaction ;

— work with live blood, aimed at identifying systemic characteristics of blood, identified by the nature of biophoton emission and the parameters of the dynamics of erythrocyte sedimentation;

— influence on living systems and nonequilibrium aquatic systems of ultra-low concentrations of biologically active substances and ultra-weak electromagnetic radiation;

— redox and oscillatory processes in aqueous systems. The work is aimed at confirming the key role of waterin life processes, in particular in bioenergy.

Bratus B.S.:We are present at the next meeting of a general psychological seminar, but it is unusual because it is a joint seminar with institutions [ joint with the seminar of the Institute of Synergetic Anthropology under the leadership of S.S. Khoruzhy and O.I. Genisaretsky and the Laboratory of Neurophysiological Foundations of the Psyche of the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by Yu.I. Alexandrov], which are headed by two wonderful scientists. This is Professor Sergei Sergeevich Khoruzhy - philosopher, mathematician, theologian, and Professor Yuri Iosifovich Alexandrov - psychologist, psychophysiologist, thinker. Today we have an important task: for the first time in the seminar we are addressing global biological problems in the broad sense of the word - to biology as the study of life. And our speaker is Vladimir Leonidovich Voeikov, a wonderful professor at the Faculty of Biology at Moscow University. I am pleased to give him the floor.

Voeikov V.L.:Thank you very much, Boris Sergeevich. Before I start, I want to congratulate all the ladies here on March 8th, who look beautiful, and I hope that I won’t upset them too much today. And I also want to express my surprise and gratitude to the men present here, who took a break from preparing for the holiday and decided to listen to me. This is the first note.

The second point I would like to make is a complaint - a complaint against Boris Sergeevich [Bratus]. The fact is that the name “Biology of Being” was not invented by me. Boris Sergeevich called me about a month and a half ago and said that I needed to speak at a seminar on the topic: “Biology of Being.” At first I was dumbfounded, because, by and large, I don’t consider myself a philosopher, although I philosophize a little, like all other normal people, but philosophical concepts are somehow far from me. But when I thought about this topic and about those not very narrow biological problems that I deal with, it seemed to me that something could be said on this topic if we first look in dictionaries what is meant by the word “being”, which him enters. I had a general idea, and therefore I decided that I needed to write an essay on the topic given by Boris Sergeevich.

I started from a very specific concept of “being”; of course, many of those present will not agree with it and will give some kind of their own definition, but I chose one that is closer to me as a naturalist, as a natural scientist: “Being is a reality that exists objectively regardless of the consciousness, will and emotions of a person.” And the attributes of existence (named in the source that I used), according to materialistic philosophy, are time, space, energy, information and matter. I am a biologist, and the first question that arose for me was: where is the actual subject of my interest? Does this object belong to the attributes of being? Or does it somehow arise from the totality of all entities? In other words, is life an attribute of being? Or is life something that is happening? And indeed, as you have known since high school, the issue of the problem is constantly discussed in the most active way origin of life. This means that initially there is no life as such, but somehow is happening. But I think it is wrong to pose this question.

I personally believe that life is, perhaps, even the very first attribute of existence. Life as a concept is in the same row as time, space, energy, information and matter. Exactly in this row. Life as an essence. But we can talk about all these essences only by how they manifest themselves, that is, how life is “given to us in sensations,” as philosophers say, by how we feel it. And we, biologists, study this life by its manifestations, only by studying what, in the broadest sense of the word, can be called “living systems”: from the cell to the biosphere. There are people with an even broader philosophical view who say that the cosmos is “living” and so on, but this is no longer the subject of research for a biologist.

If we argue about the topic is happening whether life or life given from the very beginning, like all other attributes of being, then this is already a worldview question. That is, it is impossible to prove or disprove it. One can debate whether energy is an attribute of being or whether it originates from something else. Or is space an attribute of existence, or did it come from something? You can argue on this topic, philosophize for a long time, but, one way or another, any scientific research is based on some prerequisites.

Now, my starting premise, at least the one on which I base my study of life in all its manifestations, is that life happened, A living systems occur that we are studying. What are living systems? These are certain entities that are, as we say, in “ alive". If you look at what is " living state“, then we will not find a clear definition here in the biological literature, even at a fairly high level. But the living state is usually determined by its manifestations. These are reproduction, metabolism, reactivity, etc. You can list all the manifestations of the “living state” and further study them independently of each other, which is what the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University is doing, which today already has 30 departments, and each department has 3-5 laboratories. And each deals with its own specific “manifestation”, right down to the “molecular” - a single molecule. Recently I also had to think about the question: is the “living state” an active or a passive state? You will say that this is a strange question, because the living is active, and the dead, when it dies, becomes passive. This would seem to be self-evident. But from the logic of the materialistic worldview it follows (as I will now show) that living systems are passive objects, and we biologists study not active, but passive systems. At the same time, I am convinced that living systems (and I will try to prove this today) are active, interacting entities that purposefully develop according to objective laws. That is, by and large, they are subjects, not objects. Why is this contrast important to me: are living systems active, or are they passive?

Let's look at the difference between a living system and inert matter. In order for something to exhibit any activity, for example motor activity, it requires energy. Sources of free energy, that is, energy that can be turned into some kind of work (the simplest form of work is movement), for machines and inanimate systems lie outside their structures. Nonliving systems are passive transformers of free energy into work. On the diagram [ on the screen] on the left is a model - one of those models on which the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of Nobel laureate Prigogine was built. These are Benard cells.

Rice. 1. Bénard cells

Take a frying pan, pour a thin layer of water onto it and apply heat from below, creating a certain heat gradient. Energy along an external gradient passes through this frying pan, and structures of this kind begin to form from the water. What is called self-organization is taking place. These structures are not fixed, they move, they behave somehow, they have some behavior, but as soon as the heat source is turned off, and again we see simply a thin layer of water. In other words, this self-organization that we observe - as well as in many other cases of self-organization processes in nature - is carried out due to an external source of free energy, which turns into one or another form of work.

Now let's see what biology textbooks teach us, starting in high school. Here's the picture on the right. It can be found not only on the Internet, but also in any biology textbooks. On it we see how the biosphere exists.

Fig.2. Energy transformations in the biosphere

It exists due to the constant influx of solar energy. The sun shines on the earth, there is a flow of this energy. This energy is free energy. It is absorbed by photosynthetic plants. Plants, having absorbed this energy, transform it into chemical work to produce organic compounds. Some of the energy dissipates, they convert it into heat. Consumers – animals – feed on these organic compounds, which ensures their activity. They convert some of this energy back into heat. Then their waste is consumed by a wide variety of microorganisms, turning organic matter unnecessary for animals back into inorganic matter, and thus this cycle continues. In other words, the drive belt of the biosphere cycle, as depicted in any textbook, is external. This external flow of energy carries out the rotation of all life, the entire ecology on earth. Without a constant influx of solar energy, biological systems, according to this concept, will quickly die.

But life, as we know very well, is omnipresent. Recently, they have begun to study more and more that life that is extremely active and complexly structured - that is, these are not some anaerobic microorganisms, but active animals - but which live where there is no light or oxygen, and the ambient temperature Wednesdays range from 2 to 4 degrees Celsius. Such animals live on the ocean floor, all the way to the Mariana Trench. There are large living organisms there, which, by the way, are more active and even larger in size than their closest relatives living on the surface. There is no sun there, and yet life flourishes. It is quite possible that it originated there (many scientists now think so). And no sunlight is needed for this life to exist. These animals did not fall from above to the bottom of the ocean, but have existed there for the entire period about which we know anything. So where do they get their energy? Where does the energy come from? I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'll explain. They live in liquid water, and water is liquid because there is a small amount of heat, enough for the water not to be ice, but to remain liquid. This is already energy. And these living organisms transform small energy into extremely intense energy, with the help of which they carry out all their life activity, no less complex than the life activity of the biota that we see here, on the surface, with our own eyes.

It must be said that the idea that such active life exists at the bottom of the oceans appeared 25-30 years ago. And that is why this has not yet reached textbooks, and not at all because biologists overlooked it. They simply did not know and did not even suspect about it. Now numerous underwater expeditions are increasingly studying this amazing life that is there. You can give a lot of other examples of active life without an external engine - without such an external energy gradient that rotates the entire system. And this existence of life where there is no motor outside for it, in particular, testifies that life is truly a fundamental concept. And to realize the principle of life, a very narrow, very limited range of conditions is needed.

I could talk for a long time on this topic, but Boris Sergeevich [ Brother] invited me to speak at the Faculty of Psychology after all, and not at the Faculty of Biology or Physics or Chemistry, where I also have to speak. I have this attitude towards psychology. Boris Sergeevich and I wrote one book, where I considered an issue related, however, not to psychology, but to the relationship between science and religion. And I began to think about how we can talk about the biology of existence, that is, about “reality that exists objectively, regardless of the consciousness, will and emotions of a person” - in a way that would be interesting to everyone, so that it would affect at least the emotions of the people present here . And today it concerns something that is on everyone’s lips: the so-called “global crisis.” And so I would like, starting from the basic laws of biology, to show that this global crisis is one of the manifestations of the fundamental laws in psychology. Actually, this is what the main part of my speech will be devoted to.

But in order to talk about what the laws of biology are and whether there are such laws at all, of course, we need to find something that was done before us. And almost everything was done before us. Let me remind you of Vernadsky’s saying: “If you find something new and interesting, be sure to look for its predecessors.” If you don’t find predecessors, then the question arises: did you invent something new and interesting? Does it exist in reality? Our predecessors knew everything, and we only need to translate it into modern language and combine it with our other knowledge. So, is the fundamental concept of “life”, what living systems are? Or are living systems, according to a biology textbook, just a special case of physics and chemistry? There are physics and chemistry, and there are special cases, for example, there is geophysics, there is biology. This is approximately the same concept. So, there was such a great scientist XX century Erwin Simonovich Bauer. It would be possible to devote a whole lecture and more than one to a story about him and what he did, but there is no time for that. And so I will simply outline here the main points that we will need for the next discussion.

In 1935, the publishing house of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine in Leningrad published a book by Erwin Bauer entitled “Theoretical Biology.” In it, he formulated the fundamental principles or axioms that laid the foundation for the general theory of living matter. He created theoretical biology based on an axiomatic principle. He put forward three postulates, three axioms, three principles, as he called them, from which all manifestations of life could follow, which he showed. And like any other theoretical science based on axiomatic principles, it is an independent science, and not a section of some other sciences. For example, modern and not so modern physics and chemistry are based on the laws of motion of inanimate matter.

What are these Bauer axioms? We'll need them. I can’t go into depth here, I’ll just give a general idea about them. The first and main axiom, the first and main postulate, that is, a position that can be rejected if something contradicts it is found, but it does not follow (at the axiomatic level) from something previous - this is the principle of stable disequilibrium: “All and only living systems are never in equilibrium and constantly perform work using their own free energy against the equilibrium required by the laws of physics and chemistry under existing external conditions.” (E.S. Bauer. Theoretical biology. M-L., 1935. P.43). Here I am standing before you, and this is clearly an unbalanced situation. Obviously, lying on the sofa with your nose to the wall would be more balanced. And in order to hold on, so as not to fall, I have to continuously do some kind of work, that is, work against balance. This is the simplest example. The definition of what a living system is comes down to a simple thesis: living systems continually work to stay alive. If they stop this activity, then they cease to be alive. That's all that concerns the essence of living systems. Another thing is, how do they carry out this work? Where do they get the energy to constantly remain in a non-equilibrium state? These are issues that require serious consideration.

Here are pictures on the left and right of the screen that show everything clearly. You don’t have to be a biologist, a physicist, or a chemist to understand that we have a living organism on the left, and a former living organism on the right. Nowadays it is bone matter in itself.

So, in order to constantly do your work against equilibrium and be a source of free energy all the time, you need to draw this free energy from somewhere, receive it from somewhere, and, moreover, you cannot stop there. In order for living systems to continue to exist continuously through time, their growth and development are required. From the first principle of sustainable disequilibrium, growth and development do not directly follow. This principle speaks about the current state of every living system. But if she only fights against balance, then sooner or later her strength will run out and she will become lifeless. There are many such systems, but they are no longer of interest; they are inanimate systems. In order for life to persist in the form of living systems and, moreover, for life to develop in the form of living systems, a continuous and constant increase in their free energy is required to carry out external work.

What is meant by “outside work”? This is the work of extracting matter and energy from the environment and transforming them into their non-equilibrium state. If you think about it, no one throws dumplings in our mouths. Only Gogol described such a situation. In order to extract something from the environment, it is necessary to work hard, to carry out external work. If external work is carried out without an additional bonus, then again the living system will turn into a non-living system. Therefore, the very fact of the existence of living systems, at least in that area of ​​the cosmos that is quite well known to us, requires the implementation the principle of increasing external work, the principle of growth and development. In fact, this is the principle of evolution, and it determines the vector of movement of living systems at all levels of their existence. These are the two principles that we need. We must either accept them or reject them: that, they say, no - if a living system of growth and development does not carry out, it still remains alive; if she stops working against balance, she will still remain alive. Someone may express such a point of view, well - free will. I proceed from the fact that without these principles a living organization does not exist.

This means that these are the basic biological laws; I give a course of lectures on this topic. As Sergey Sergeevich [ Khoruzhy] tried last time to present a course of lectures in 15 minutes, introducing the main material, so I have to go along approximately the same path. And now I am moving from the idea of ​​the fundamental biological laws laid down by Erwin Bauer to the main question: does the global crisis into which all of today’s humanity has entered have any biological prerequisites? Does this global crisis have anything to do with the laws of life that manifest themselves in living systems? I think no one doubts that man and humanity as such are also a “living system.” At least, this is a system that meets both the first and second principles of Bauer: that is, it is nonequilibrium and constantly does work against equilibrium; and this is a system (both man and humanity) that is growing and developing - this cannot be denied.

We have now entered a state that everyone calls a “global crisis.” Well, talking about the global crisis mainly comes down to discussing financial, economic, social problems that will arise sooner or later. So I pulled out a picture from the Internet that clearly shows what is happening - not just with cars (factories are closing or not closing), but with something without which it is generally difficult for us to exist, that is, with food. Oil prices... sorry, I misspoke, rice prices. Oil prices, I think, should interest us little, but rice and grain prices should interest us much more. And what happened to world prices for rice and grain can be seen from this graph [ on the screen]. From 2000 to 2006, prices hovered somewhere within the stationary level, and suddenly, since 2008, they have skyrocketed 5-6 times. And this, of course, is a manifestation of a serious global crisis affecting what a person lives on. I just gave one example to remind you of what is meant by a global crisis in world literature today.

Where did the global crisis come from? Where did he come from? Today you can read a lot of accusations against those, fifths and tenths, specific individuals and individual states that allegedly provoked the global crisis. In fact, the global crisis was clearly predicted back in 1960. Then the journal Science published an article by Heinz von Foerster, one of the founders of second-order cybernetics, under the flashy title “Doomsday: Friday, November 13, 2026 after the Nativity of Christ” ( Foerster, H. von, P. Mora, and L. Amiot. 1960. Doomsday: Friday, November 13, A.D. 2026. At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia. Science 132:1291–1295). In this article, Heinz von Foerster analyzed the growth curve of humanity on earth and came to the conclusion that this curve does not grow according to an exponential law, as everyone thought, based on the a priori theory of Malthus (that reproduction - both humans and bacteria - goes to geometric progression), but according to a law called “hyperbolic”. What does "hyperbolic law" mean? And this means that if something increases according to the hyperbolic law, then at some point in time it something will become infinite in number. And Förster calculated this moment in time when humanity should become infinite in number, and it turned out: Friday, November 13, 2026. It turns out that humanity will die not from hunger, since this moment comes very quickly, but from stampede. This is, of course, someone's joke.

What is the “hyperbolic law” in relation to the size of humanity? Here are data on the number of people on earth, and we are talking about humanity as an integral system, excluding migrations, an increase in numbers in one place, a decrease in another, and so on.

Rice. 3. Correlation between empirical estimates of world population dynamics (in millions of people, 1000 - 1970) and the curve generated by H. von Foerster's equation

The dots show how the number of people increases from the birth of Christ to the year 2000. And, pay attention, this is the same - that is, hyperbolic - curve that tends to infinity. Moreover, the critical point is very close to us - in 2026. There's not long to wait. But this is absurd! Absurd, if only because this cannot be, since it can never happen. A mathematical function can go into a singularity, but physically no process ever ends with infinity. Something must change dramatically - this is called “the system goes into aggravation mode” - in order for the physical system, perhaps modified, but to remain. But the same applies to a living system, which is humanity: this living system must change very much. Von Foerster writes that near a critical value, the system as a whole becomes extremely unstable, and the presence of a singularity is an alarming signal that the structure of the system will be broken. This hyperbolic law is especially clearly visible if you draw a graph in reciprocal quantities. On the vertical axis, mark the reciprocal of the number of people, and on the horizontal axis, mark the years. And then the number of people grows and grows, and the inverse value falls and falls. Accordingly, in the year 2025-2026 the number of people should become infinite, [ and the reciprocal value will tend to “0”].

Von Foerster published this article in 1960, and it caused a huge surge of interest in this topic in 1961-62. They began to accuse him of not respecting comrade Malthus, that all these figures were pulled out of nowhere, although he took 24 independent sources to draw this number, and clearly showed that these sources were independent. But, one way or another, this whole matter was forgotten until the early 90s, until the well-known, wonderful physicist Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa drew the attention of all of us to it. His attention was attracted by the work of von Foerster, and he began to explore the problem of human population growth in more depth. Kapitsa also drew the same curve. It is given in his book published in 1999 (S.P. Kapitsa. How many people have lived, are living and will live on earth. Essays on the theory of human growth. M., 1999), although a number of his articles were published earlier. This is the same curve as Förster’s, only with a certain kind of kinks.

Rice. 4. 1 – world population, 2 – exacerbation regime, 3 – demographic transition, 4 – population stabilization, 5 – ancient world, 6 – Middle Ages, 7 – modern and 8 – recent history, the arrow points to the period of plague – “Black Death” , circle – present time, double-sided arrow – scatter of estimates of the world population during R.H. Population limit N oo=12-13 billion

(Source: S.P. Kapitsa. How many people have lived, are living and will live on earth. Essays on the theory of human growth. M., 1999.)

It's not just a "smooth" curve. What is she talking about? There was a plague pandemic in Europe, when more than a third or almost half of the population died out. And the number decreased, and then it took off and returned to the same curve. If we take the 20th century, then according to Kapitsa’s demographic estimates, about 300-400 million people died in and around the two world wars - this is another bend, and nevertheless, the curve again returned to the trajectory along which it had moved before. And now, according to Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa, 2025–2026 is the very year when the denominator of this simple equation turns to zero, and then the number of humanity should become infinite, but this is meaningless, and therefore some event must occur. It's called demographic transition- this is the period in which we are now living, and for several decades now, without noticing it very well.

What's happened demographic transition? This is braking. This is the transition of a function from one law to another. The law of hyperbolic growth has ceased to apply. And, according to Kapitsa, this happened in 1964. This year, relative population growth reached its maximum, and then began to decrease. And on the border of the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade XI centuries and absolute population growth also began to decrease. In the 90s of the twentieth century, 874 million people were born on earth, and in the 2000s, 874 million people will also be born. That is, the population will also grow, but the rate of its growth will become completely different from what it was not only for the last two thousand years, but also, according to updated data, generally since the emergence of humanity. Back then the growth rate was generally very slow. Actually, this fact was noticed because the curve turned into exacerbation mode. And now people have noticed this.

This means that the demographic transition is a slowdown in absolute population growth, which then begins to develop into a phenomenon called depopulation. I think we, living in Russia, have heard a lot about depopulation, since it is constantly reported that every year the population of the Russian Federation decreases by 700,000, 1,000,0000 people, etc. - what a nightmare! Generally speaking, there is nothing good about this, since in Russia such intensive depopulation occurs for a reason related to the short life expectancy of people. But in fact, depopulation is not just our feature. It’s just that we pay a lot of attention to ourselves, but we don’t see what our neighbors are doing in terms of depopulation. To show this, I will provide some graphs.

Fig.5. The overall population growth of the CIS countries,
1950-2050, average version of 2008 recalculation, % per year
Source: website Demoscope.ru http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2009/0381/barom05.php

This is the population since 1950 of the union republics of the former Soviet Union. And here, the blue curve is the population of the Russian Federation. The bend here occurred in 1992, it began to decrease. Here, if I'm not mistaken, is Kazakhstan, and here is Georgia. True, there was a war there, there was a very sharp decline, but then the curve rose, and then began to decline again and continues to decline. In all republics, regardless of their numbers, economic potential, regardless of anything, they are depopulating. Today, numbers continue to increase only in three former republics - Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Replica: It is also growing in Kazakhstan.

Voeikov V.L.: No, there is depopulation there too. I took the data from the Demoscope.ru website, this is the latest data that is given.

Replica: There was depopulation there when the Russians left, but according to new data the population there is growing.

Voeikov V.L.: Maybe, but let’s not argue too much about this, because we are talking about depopulation as a explicit manifestation of the phenomenon of growth inhibition, that is, this is the next step, the next manifestation. So, if we take the European continent or the United States, then depopulation has not yet been observed there for one simple reason. Although the rate of human reproduction there is significantly lower than what is required for simple reproduction (for example, in Spain it is lower than here: there are 1.1, we have 1.3 children per family), but due to the very long life expectancy, a certain stasis is observed there. And the ratio of population growth and mortality depends precisely on the ratio of life expectancy and reproduction rate. And now life expectancy plays a major role. Sooner or later, the average life expectancy will reach its limit, and then depopulation will begin everywhere.

These are demographic problems, and they arise from the law of human growth. Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa formulated the demographic imperative. Why does humanity grow according to this law? According to his demographic imperative, the leading variable of the demographic law is the number of people. Why does it grow according to the hyperbolic law? Because people interact informationally with each other, and this interaction leads to growth other than geometric or exponential. Only systems that are weakly connected into a whole grow exponentially; the “explosion” usually occurs exponentially; the proliferation of bacteria in a dilute environment occurs exponentially, in a geometric progression. But people, in the view of Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa, interact with each other, and due to this information exchange, their numbers do not grow exponentially, but depending on the square of the number of people. There were two people, and the number increases 4 times. There were four people, their number increased 16 times, it became 16, their number increased 16 2 times, and so on.

But not all researchers working on this demographic problem agreed with Kapitsa that the spring of population dynamics and stabilization is information. If you follow this law, then humanity grew continuously when there were a million people on earth, and 10 million, and 100 million people, but then the question arises, what kind of information transmission channel was this, a channel of interaction? The point is that we are talking about a holistic developing system. And in such a system, each part must know about the state of the whole and behave in accordance with the state of the whole. This means she should receive information about this. But how? It's not very clear. And relatively recently, a young employee of the Institute of Applied Mathematics named after. Keldysh Andrey Viktorovich Podlazov put forward a more rational explanation for both the geometric growth in numbers and the demographic transition, that is, the inhibition of this growth. Podlazov formulated "technological imperative". What is it connected with? Human population growth is becoming hyperbolic due to the fact that people's life expectancy is increasing. Statistically, if life expectancy increases even by a small amount, then a significant increase in numbers occurs. And it increases due to what Podlazov called “life-saving technologies.” He writes: “The quadratic dependence of the growth rate of a population on its size is due to the fact that those who would have died if there had not been effective mutual assistance between its members remain alive.” And further: “Man became a man at the moment when the available life-saving technologies became sufficient for saving on average at least one person per generation" ( Podlazov A.V. Theoretical demography as the basis of mathematical history. M., 2000). This means that the more life-saving technologies develop, the more nonlinear, the more acute the increase in the number of people on earth.

The first life-saving technology was the mastery of fire. This was the first, or at least one of the first, of such technologies. When man mastered fire, fewer people began to die for various reasons. They began to live longer, and they had more time to invent new life-saving technologies. So one thing clings to another. These technologies can arise in different places independently of each other and spread throughout the population because they are life-saving. According to Podlazov: “The limit to the growth of humankind, as well as the development of life-saving technologies, is determined solely by the ratio of the characteristic biological times of a person and the size of the population of his ancestors.” In other words, what should cause this turning point? And due to the fact that it is not possible to ensure the average life expectancy of people above 84 years, at least for today. 84 years is in Japan, but they are unlikely to provide more there. But even if they reach 90 or 100 years, it will still reach some limit sooner or later. Humanity will grow indefinitely only if people live statistically indefinitely. But this is an absurdity, just like the endless number of people.

All these technologies and, in general, all life activity (in fact, this is where I started) require energy. In order for the number of people to increase in this way, it is necessary (and for the existence of life-saving technologies too) to have a sufficient amount of energy.

And so, in 1991, John Holdren's work “Population and the Energy Problem” appeared. John Holdren - American energy and environmental scientist, Obama [ President of the U.S.A] has now appointed him as his advisor. So, John Holdren discovered another very interesting law in this work. It is difficult to derive this law directly from anything in advance. Holdren discovered the following. It turns out that the amount of energy that humanity owns and can use to carry out this or that work (that is, free energy) grew from 1850 to 1990. And it grew like this: the volume of this energy increased in proportion to the square of the number of people. Namely: proportional not to the number of people, but to the square of the number of people. In other words, if you compare 1850 and 1990, the population has grown 4.3 times, and the amount of energy that humanity has mastered has grown 17 times. That is, the amount of energy per person (it is clear that the amount of energy consumed is distributed unevenly across the earth, but we are looking at purely statistical data) has increased in proportion to the square of the number of people. And, by the way, if this law is observed, then the demographic transition and further depopulation will accordingly affect the amount of energy that humanity possesses. By the way, where does all this noise and fuss about energy come from these days? Not because there is not enough of it, but because per capita growth began to occur more slowly than before, and we felt this - not even a deficit, but, as it were, an approaching deficit.

Where does all this energy come from? And it comes from the fact that a person develops. That in 1700 there was no oil and gas? Were. Did people use them? Almost never used it. What happened in 1850? This is the middle of the industrial revolution, when people first invented heat engines, then electricity appeared, then they began to use oil, gas, nuclear energy, and so on. Where does all this come from? It's all there. But a person converts bound energy, which is more than enough, into free energy for himself. He does it all himself. And this absolutely contradicts the postulates of Darwin's theory of evolution. I don’t mean neo-Darwinism, which is not a theory at all, but Darwin’s theory of evolution, according to which humanity multiplies exponentially, according to Malthus, in conditions of resource scarcity. In fact, the curves I presented show that, in principle, there is no shortage of resources. When necessary, we begin to find these very resources, extract energy and transform them into what we need to continue our life.

This is still an introduction. There's no biology here yet. There is demography here, which physicists have taken up. By the way, these physicists were strongly criticized by many demographers for “getting into the wrong sleigh.” But in fact, these physicists did wonderful things, although, as a biologist, not all of their statements are close to me, let’s say. For example, Joseph Samuilovich Shklovsky in his famous and wonderful book “The Universe. Life. Mind”, back in 1980, remembered Holdren’s work and published all this data. He firmly believed in Malthus's laws and wrote that the current vital hyperbolic law of increasing the population of the entire globe is determined not so much by biological as by social factors. This has nothing to do with biology. Kapitsa writes: “... due to the peculiarities of the development of man and humanity, his special path, one should not transfer the examples of the rest of the animal world and biocenoses to the case of man, whose development is subject to completely different physical, biological and social laws.” ( P.S. Kapitsa. Quote op. P.24) Podlazov also approaches the fundamental difference between animals and humans: “Animals can only use those patterns of collective behavior that are genetically embedded in them, at the level of instincts, while people are able to develop new ways of joint action as their numbers grow” ( Podlazov A.V. Quote op.). And so on.

Generally speaking, I believe that the universe is one, and nothing that was before disappears today, but simply more and more new floors are built on. You just need to look at how the characteristics of a person emerged from what preceded him. And again I return to Bauer's principle - the principle of increasing external work, growth and development, the principle of evolution. Humanity, and each person individually (otherwise he would not have developed), corresponds to this principle. And this principle determines the vector of movement of living systems at all levels of their existence. Until now, we have been talking about humanity, about people, about the geometric progression of their growth and development, which is characteristic of them due to social and other reasons. But look, here is the growth curve of animal energy, if it is superimposed on the time of the first recording of these animals in the fossil record.

Fig.6. Change energy metabolism of living organisms during biological evolution and at the initial stage of human civilization:
1 – coelenterates, 2 – crustaceans, 3 – mollusks, 4 – fish, 5 – amphibians,
6 – insects, 7 – reptiles, 8 – mammals, 9 – non-passerine birds,
10 – passerine birds, 11 – primitive man, 12 – man who uses fire.

Such work was carried out by Alexander Ilyich Zotin, a wonderful biodemographer, bioenergetics specialist; unfortunately, he died some time ago. Look what happens. If we look at the Phanerozoic period, we get this growth curve of energy progress. That is, if we look at the change in energy characteristics that are characteristic of representatives of one or another class of living organisms, we will see that growth clearly follows a hyperbolic law. This means that energy progress follows a hyperbolic law. But where is human sociology in the evolutionary process? By the way, this evolutionary process follows a special law - it is nomogenesis or orthogenesis, but not Darwin’s theory of evolution. These are just real physical data.

Recently, a joint work by paleontologist A.V. Markov and historian and sociologist A.V. Korotaev “The dynamics of the diversity of Phanerozoic marine animals corresponds to the hyperbolic growth model” ( Journal of General Biology. 2007. No. 1. P. 1-12). And last year an article was published that talks not only about marine, but also about terrestrial animals. What is growing hyperbolically here? Generic diversity is growing, and genera are growing. Genera consist of species. Generally speaking, “genus,” as many biologists believe, is a kind of fiction, a product of biological taxonomy. You can’t hold a genus in your hands, and neither can a species. You can hold in your hands only representatives of certain species. But it turns out that both genera, which consist of species, and species formed by individuals, that is, material substances, also increase in number exactly according to the hyperbolic law, and this over the course of 600 million years. Of course, there are some fluctuations here. But, by the way, fluctuations are also visible on the human growth curve, but this does not mean that the basic law is not observed, there are simply fluctuations in it.

Another example from a completely different story. The previous article discussed the evolutionary process according to the hyperpobolic law of growth, which lasts hundreds of millions of years. Korotaev and Markov find an explanation for this, and in particular, very similar to the explanation of this law for humanity, namely: the life expectancy of younger births significantly exceeds the life expectancy of earlier births, and in connection with this a hyperbolic dependence is obtained. I rummaged through the literature, and it turned out that, unfortunately, biologists, blinded by the geometric progression of growth according to Malthus, are everywhere fitting their dependencies, as a rule, to exponentials. But it turned out that there are scientists who find hyperbolas in fairly short-term processes, such as [ above]. If, God forbid, a person has cancer and was treated with chemotherapy or radiotherapy, then with such treatment his entire immune system is knocked out. This system needs to be restored. And they restore the immune system by injecting a person with his own (or a close relative’s) stem cells or cells of a close relative, which stimulate his bone marrow and multiply themselves. Thus, the immune system is created almost from scratch, and cell growth begins anew. What is the law of growth of these white cells planted in humans? Here is a 2002 paper on this topic. After these cells are replanted, there is no growth at all for 7 days. Then comes a burst of growth. This is, in double logarithmic coordinates, an exact fit to the hyperbolic curve. Here growth happens in the system and it happens this way. With this example I want to say that the hyperbolic law of growth is not the prerogative of only humans. It is connected with some deeper biological reasons for the existence of this form of growth.

Why did biologists begin to pay attention to this fact only recently? Because there is a well-known example of growth and development - embryonic. We all know very well that embryonic growth and development must follow some law, otherwise there will simply be no procreation. And it turned out that the embryo grows and develops not according to a hyperbolic, although also according to a nonlinear law. And this is not an exponent, but another function. It's called a "power function". If we put it in inverse logarithmic coordinates, then, as in the case of the hyperbolic law, it will be a straight line. But unlike a hyperbola, which goes to infinity when approaching the limit point, here, on the graph of the growth of the mass of the embryo, the power function goes to infinity only in infinite time. But we know that it never goes to infinity, since at some point in time a person is born.

The fact that the law of embryonic growth corresponds to a power function was discovered back in 1927 by our compatriot, the great evolutionist Ivan Ivanovich Schmalhausen. But the power function also requires its own explanation. Why does embryo growth follow a power function? And this happens, in particular, because when the embryo grows, the biomass grows not only in time, but also in space: the size of the embryo increases. But the embryo is not a homogeneous system; it consists of organs, tissues, cells, and so on. How do they grow? It turns out that when an embryo grows according to a power law, all its parts - organs, tissues and cells - grow in proportion to the logarithms of each other's sizes and the logarithm of the mass of the entire system, that is, they grow harmoniously. They also grow according to a similar power law. What does it mean? This means that each individual organ grows in the same way as long as other organs that it knows about grow and as long as the entire organism that it knows about grows. Everything matches each other. And, in particular, this was shown by Schmalhausen in 1927: here we were talking about how the mass of each part changes depending on how the masses of other parts change. Julian S. Huxley, using such an exotic biological example as the fiddler crab, in which one claw is always disproportionately larger than the other, showed that the growth of the mass of this claw depends on the growth of the crab’s body mass according to a power law, that is, it is disproportionate growth. This is the so-called allometric, but not isometric the law of growth, that is, not everything grows in a linear relationship with each other.

Question:Are all logarithms related linearly?

Voeikov V.L.:Logarithms are linearly related, absolutely true. This is the law of embryonic growth. There's a lot of people doing it, and there's a lot of interesting stuff there, but it's not hyperbolic growth. Although there is one weak point in embryology. Before this report, I had to talk with embryologists. I asked when does allometric growth of an embryo begin? The fact is that when fertilization of an egg occurs in animals, the egg does not grow at first, it is crushed. Fragmentation occurs into 2, 4, 8, 16 or more eggs, and no increase in mass occurs, or at least it is stated that it does not occur. Thus, allometric growth, which is observed in embryos of different animals, is preceded by a certain lag phase when cell growth does not occur. But from what moment does the countdown of embryonic growth begin? Embryologists begin to measure the mass of this very embryo from about two grams. Those who are more nimble start measuring from one and a half grams. But what was the mass of the egg? And it was 0.005 milligrams, that is, 5 micrograms. Thus, according to some data, exponential growth in a human embryo can begin to be measured only 40 days after fertilization, and according to others - after 60 days, that is, when this mass becomes two grams. What happens during these 30-60 days when this mass increases from 2-5 micrograms to two million micrograms? Moreover, at the beginning there is no growth at all. Isn't this stage, which precedes the growth of the embryo according to allometric or harmonic law, hyperbolic growth? There is a very high probability that this process also follows a hyperbolic law - that is, a process that precedes the growth and development of the embryo, which is already quite well known.

Here [ graph on screen] in double logarithmic coordinates, two stages are shown. It is written in numbers: here - 5 micrograms, on the 7th day - 100 micrograms, the 10th day is marked - this is just some kind of reference point; on day 12 - 380 micrograms, and on day 28 - already two million micrograms. There is such a rapid increase in this mass, which is very similar to the hyperbolic law. In humans this period is longer, about a third longer than in a horse or monkey. That is, I showed that the hyperbolic law is not something unique to humanity, as physicists claim (this can be forgiven for them, they do not know biology, especially the kind that needs to be rummaged through, since this is not in textbooks).

But still, a person is something special among the entire living world, a special living system. How is it different from other living systems? There is another biological law - the law of dependence of the number of animal species on the mass of individual representatives of each species.

Rice. 7. The number of animal species depending on their mass

(Source: S.P. Kapitsa. How many people have lived, are living and will live on earth. Essays on the theory of human growth. M., 1999. P.)

For example, a small animal - mice, a certain species. How many mice are representatives of this species on the globe? Their number on the globe is somewhere around 10 9, that is, approximately a billion individuals. If we look at some animals closer to us in size - for example, a bear, a horse, and so on, then the number of representatives of these animal species will be significantly smaller. For example, what is the population of chimpanzees? Or gorillas? Or macaques? This will be a value of the order of 100,000 pieces of a given species (not monkeys in general, but belonging to a specific species with the corresponding specific mass). The number of people today already exceeds by five orders of magnitude the value that they should have as a representative of the corresponding biological species. This is the peculiarity of a person, only he flies out of this, again hyperbolic, dependence. (Man and, of course, domestic animals, which simply cannot exist on their own; they, in general, are tools of man, he created them).

How else does a person differ from all other living systems? Let's return to Bauer, to his theoretical biology, which is based on special energy. This is the energy of the living system’s own internal activity. From Bauer’s theory (the theory of increasing external work that ensures evolutionary growth and development) it follows that as evolution progresses, if you climb higher and higher on the evolutionary ladder, the energy of biological species increases. How can this energy be measured? Bauer introduced such a parameter, which he called the “Rubner constant”. Max Rubner is a German physiologist who at the end XIX - At the beginning of the twentieth century, he first took up the problems of biological energy in animals. By the way, he also derived the allometric law that the amount of energy that an animal consumes, divided by a unit of mass and multiplied by its lifespan, is a more or less constant value for animals. For example, for mammals, this will be one value. If you go down to a lower level, go to marsupials, then this will be a lower value, but nevertheless approximately the same for all representatives of marsupials. And only man stands out from this ratio.

Bauer correctly calculated this Rubner constant. What is she like? This is the life expectancy of a representative of a given species in years, multiplied by the intensity of oxygen consumption (in fact, respiration is the main source of energy) per unit of mass. That is, how much energy a given living creature transforms during its life. And it turned out that in primates the Rubner constant is 2200, and in homo sapiens - 3700. In pinnipeds - 1800, in proboscis - 1100. That is, in animals this constant grows according to the same law, and man also turned out to be out of this dependence. It is energetically completely different. Moreover, this constant for humans is greatly underestimated, since by life expectancy here we need to mean the period biologically meaningful life, that is, the period required to leave viable offspring. A person does not need to live 100 years for this, an average of 25 years is enough. You cannot take less, because then the offspring will not be viable. And a monkey needs to live much shorter in order to leave viable offspring. And if we now look at the constant from this point of view, it will be an order of magnitude different in humans compared to all other mammals. This is the physiological difference between humans and animals according to Rubner’s constant, that is, according to the measurement of his energy - the energy of the individual. This is one difference that Rubner discovered back in the 1920s, and in 1935Bauer confirmed it.

There is one more indicator that is very different in humans from animals. Why, after all, is man so energetic compared to all animals? Due to a certain organ that all animals have, but in humans it is very different in some way. How is it different? The ratio of the rate of oxygen consumption by the human brain to the rate of oxygen consumption by the body together with the brain is 2.3 times greater than in primates, and in dolphins and everyone else. This is a reduced quantity, everything is reduced to mass. What does this mean - increased human energy? In general, what is energy needed for from a biological point of view? It is needed in order to accumulate so much energy during a biologically meaningful life so that it is possible to leave viable offspring, which will again accumulate the same amount of energy to leave viable offspring, and so on. And the person has an excess. As a result, a person has O a greater supply of free energy than is needed for its survival as a biological species.

Where did this excess come from? That's another question. This is the problem of human origins. Man came into being when he had this very excess. And he can begin to spend this excess not only on leaving viable offspring, but additionally on all sorts of other purposes. And in particular, another goal that a person can achieve is to invent and invent life-saving technologies. The first such technology is the mastery of energy, which no other species living on earth can master. This is the energy of fire. If we calculate the Rubner constant taking into account this human energy, then it will increase not by an order of magnitude, but by orders of magnitude compared to all other species. This will increase his lifespan and allow him to master everything. O greater and b O more energy.

Returning to the curve of the growth of human free energy (depending on the number of people), I would like to draw one more picture here. Free energy increases as the square of the number of people, so there is more and more energy available for each person. And in 1990, there was 4.2 times more energy per capita on earth than in 1850. That is, that free energy that can be used to continue, to transform the world for yourself. This means that it was 4.2 times more (compared to 1850) in 1990. However, note that starting in 1970, this curve begins to bend.

What is the amount of energy per unit mass? This is, generally speaking, potential. There is such a concept that means not just the amount of energy. Energy may vary. It can be very “smeared”, or it can be “concentrated”. This is potential. For example, if 100 amps are multiplied by 1 volt, it is 100 watts; and if 100 volts are multiplied by 1 ampere, it will also be 100 watts. But “100 volts * 1 ampere” and “1 volt * 100 amperes” are completely different energy quality. Quality energy is concentrated energy. And so, in the course of his growth and development, man not only mastered the amount of energy that can be measured in watts, but he also mastered more and more expensive energy, more and more valuable energy. He started with the energy of fire, which, from a physical point of view, is much more valuable than just the energy of ordinary heat. And he reached nuclear energy. And, God forbid, he gets to the thermonuclear room. In principle, we don’t really need it, but these are completely different energy potentials. With the help of high-potential energy you can get heat, light, and anything else. And with the help of a central heating battery it is impossible to illuminate the room, although it will be quite warm. This means that, among other things, there was also a transformation of energy.

So, we see what happened at the moment of the appearance of humanity on earth. I leave out the question of the origin, how this very moment came to fruition. I don't know this, and I don't know anyone who knows this. And those who discuss this topic, well, freedom is free, from my point of view. But we know that at the moment of human origin a phase transition occurred. And what does this phase transition look like from an energy point of view?

Here [ Fig.6] this energy potential that this or that living system possesses. Here are 100 million years before the origin of man. The energy potential grew in the process of evolution. But it reached man, and a phase transition occurred, a new way of mastering this very energy arose. Where are we now? And we are now in a place where the potential appears to have reached its maximum. That is, the previous stage of human development was associated with the fact that the energy potential grew and grew. For what? Back to Bauer again. According to the principle of stable disequilibrium: “All and only living systems are never in equilibrium and constantly perform work at the expense of their own free energy against the equilibrium required by the laws of physics and chemistry under existing external conditions.” (E.S. Bauer. Cited op. p.43) Free energy can be of different qualities. Free energy can be of low potential, or it can be of high potential. The higher the potential, the more reliably and efficiently it will be spent on external work to extract bound energy from the environment and convert it into one’s own energy. This means, according to Bauer, the growth and development of living systems is ensured by the initial supply of their free energy. Here is the function: the reserve of free energy is equal to the product of live mass and its potential. What is the biomass of humanity? Of course, the crowd is scary, everywhere and everywhere. But if each person is given one square meter, then all of humanity will fit on one quarter of the Moscow region. About 80 square kilometers are required to accommodate all of humanity living on earth. It’s very easy to calculate: there are now 5 billion of us. If we compare the biomass of humanity with the biomass of all other biota that exist on earth, it is practically nothing. But the potential is gigantic. This is the gigantic potential of this Nothing is a condition for further growth and development. Using this potential, you can begin to grow according to the power law according to which the embryo develops.

And this is where I express hope. My hope is that the previous stage of growth and development of humanity can be called preimplantation stage - as in embryology, the stage before the growth and development of the embryo began according to a power-law harmonic law. At this time, by the way, the egg increases and increases its potential. I won’t go into detail about why this happens, but I can say it in a nutshell. This occurs due to the fact that the egg cell that splits and grows in this way breathes mainly due to burning. There are two processes of breathing: one of them is smoldering or mitochondrial respiration; is there a process similar to burning - direct oxygen reduction. I won't go into these details. In the early stages of development, the egg cell is mainly lit, figuratively speaking. We can formulate this strictly chemically, but we will not go into details. By the way, the same leukocytes that are given to a person with a ruined immune system and which then begin to grow according to the hyperbolic law - they provide their breathing, that is, their energy, again due to burning, unlike most other cells, which do this facultatively. That is, if you look at the examples of hyperbolic growth that I spoke about, then we will see approximately the same thing that we see in the history of mankind. A man became a man when he mastered “burning” and began to extract resources from the external environment using this method. But when the embryo reaches the blastocyst stage and developed tissue rudiments appear, it stops so much burn and begins to use its potential for further allometric growth.

I believe that we are now at a stage when humanity has finished growing hyperbolically, has accumulated absolutely gigantic potential and must move to development according to a different law. That is, the growth of humanity will not stop, it will simply follow a different law - according to the harmonic law. Both growth is impossible without interaction, without interconnections, without mutual assistance, without cooperation. Speaking in physical language, all living systems are not just cooperative, they coherent. And the degree of their coherence, that is, the mutual consistency of all the processes that take place in them, increases in the course of their growth and development. So I'm very optimistic about the stage we're at now. But, by and large, nothing can be predicted. The main trend is this: there must be a transition to a completely different harmonious world. But man is a complex creature. Psychologists and psychiatrists know this much better than I do. And here, how quickly and effectively he will move to the next stage of growth and development depends on his personal freedom of choice, free will. And it will not be the last either, if we start from embryogenesis. Because embryogenesis ends with birth. After birth comes infancy. After infancy comes adolescence. And so on and so forth. But I don’t think we will live to see that. May God grant us to survive this period of implantation. Thanks a lot.

DISCUSSION OF THE REPORT

Bratus B.S.:Dear colleagues, we have half an hour for questions. Let's do this: ask all the questions first. Vladimir Leonidovich will remember them, and then answer them. Who would like to be the first to ask a question?

Vostryakov A.P.:I am an employee of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology. By education - biologist, anatomist. I understand that you said that there is no free energy at the bottom of the ocean?

Voeikov V.L.:No, the energy is there. It's just of low quality.

Vostryakov A.P.:There is a “black smoker” there, as you know. There is a large flow of heat, chemical processes occur there that release energy.

Voeikov V.L.:I will answer briefly. Near the “smokers” there are indeed very concentrated and very diverse biospheres. I agree with you here. But these same animals exist not only there, but much more scattered. This is the first. Second, smokers give the water temperature about 300-400 degrees Celsius. Living organisms there exist at such a distance from smokers that the temperature corresponds to the same 2-4 degrees. As for the chemistry that is there, microorganisms really actively use this chemistry there. They provide organic matter that animals feed on. The problem here is different. There's no oxygen there.

Vostryakov A.P.:What about water decomposition?

Voeikov V.L.:Absolutely right. But the decomposition of water occurs at such a low intensity that deep-sea fish, which have pure oxygen in their swim bladder (which few people know) can decompose it only within themselves. And this again requires high potentials. But we are already going into details. The point was different. Our basic ecological paradigm is that without the sun, which shines and produces photosynthesis and everything else, there is no life. Why then do they fly to Mars, to Europa and look for liquid water there? Things are really bad with the sun there. That is, this is a contradiction with our textbooks.

Ovchinnikova T.N.(psychologist) : You reasoned as if in two logics. On the one hand, there is the self-developing, organic system that you spoke about. On the other hand, we take measurements and describe the process statistically. I'm interested to know where you personally stand? Do you use the logic of organic systems when you reason about living things? Or do you still use the logic of mechanical systems when you measure all this?

Voeikov V.L.:Perhaps I didn't really understand the question. But, naturally, I use the logic of organic systems, because I am a biologist. And the objects that I study are living systems. But lately I have been studying the most fundamental, as it seems to me, living system - water. The question is often asked: is there “living water”? Remember the jellyfish. There is a jellyfish, which consists of water, 99.9% by weight. This water (it is almost distilled) is much purer than the water in which the jellyfish themselves live. Naturally, this is not pure water. It contains organic matter, but in total it is 0.1%. All functions are performed by water that is organized in a special way by this organic matter. And function is energy, dynamics, and so on. So, I start from the fact that water produces the organic matter that organizes it. And organizes the organic matter that it produces, and so on. This is the process of self-organization - by the way, it can be observed experimentally. And, moreover, for example, Wilhelm Reich, well known as an interesting psychologist, but who made a colossal contribution to biology and was almost thrown out of life for this - and so he observed the supposed spontaneous generation of life. But there cannot be spontaneous generation of life, because the initial grain of life is water - not the kind that is in a glass, but that is organized in a special way.

Orlova V.V.(PhD) : You spoke about the biological and energy parameters of the global crisis. Tell me, what is the role in the global crisis of processes that belong not to the biological, but to the cultural component?

Voeikov V.L.:In fact, it is not very easy for me to answer this question, since a phase transition is a serious event in the life of any system. Freezing, thawing, boiling water, and so on are very serious processes that occur. And these are also phase transitions. Naturally, phase transitions at the level of man, human consciousness, will manifest themselves in a variety of ways. It all depends on the cultural context and so on. But the fact that now the entire society is in a much more excited state than it was in the more calm period of its existence according to the law is clear. Why? Because people will also have to move, along with the entire system, to another state - in this case, a worldview. Which one exactly? This is not my profession, here I can only reason as a layman: what a person should become in order to fit into the new law of growth and development. And my thesis was that this transition is inevitable, that it follows the objective laws of existence, and we are given the opportunity to unravel these laws. How can we continue to behave in accordance with these laws? This is what we have free will for. We can go against all laws. Nobody forbids it. But not for long.

Kavtaradze D.N.:Since words about inevitability sound unusually inviting, the question is: is your vision amenable to experimental verification at the model level? Since we know about the work of the Club of Rome, etc. To what extent are your ideas amenable to experimental modeling and anticipating the development of events?

Voeikov V.L.:Well, at the level of the unique experimental model called "humanity", I would not experiment. Yes, this is impossible, I’m joking. Naturally, the question is about the model. The model is always smaller than what we model. The transition from hyperbolic growth to power-law growth is also a phase transition. There are few such transitions - not because there are few of them, but because there are very few situations where they began to be studied. The same leukocytes that are given to a person - I gave this example. At first they grow along the hyperbole, and then they move to another state. There may be some stage of power-law growth, this can actually be seen, but then, if they take root and everything went well, the standard oscillatory regime begins, which we know very well for already developed systems.

Question:Did I understand correctly that you describe physical, biological, social phenomena in the same categories?

Voeikov V.L.:I would say this: I am not qualified enough to describe them in the same categories. But a qualified mathematician who knows physics, chemistry and biology will be able to describe all this in the same categories, because the hyperbolic law is characteristic of a wide variety of systems. The power law is characteristic of a wide variety of systems. Wave laws are characteristic of a wide variety of systems. That is, these are some fundamental laws. For example, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies, by the way, not only to the microworld, but also to the macroworld too. These are the most fundamental concepts, but I am not qualified enough to operate with them. I need to have some kind of material base, living or quasi- a living system that you can hold in your hands.

Shchukin Dmitry (graduate student of Moscow Higher Technical University named after. Bauman) : I have a question about the graph showing the growth of energy in global history. Was energy measured across all living things there? By type or what?

Voeikov V.L.:We look at energy by its manifestations. Rubner's constant was measured, what is it? This is the amount of energy that is converted from bound energy - food energy - into free energy. So, if this constant, if this reduced value...

Shchukin Dmitry:One for a representative...

Voeikov V.L.:Right. But then we can multiply it across everyone.

Shchukin Dmitry:On the chart - for a representative?

Voeikov V.L.:Yes, on the graph - a representative of this species.

Shchukin Dmitry:Then doesn’t it turn out that the energy of an ape is much greater than that of a huge dinosaur?

Voeikov V.L.:Absolutely right. We also divide by unit of live weight. The value is given per unit of live weight.

Question:I would like to ask a question as a social psychologist. Is it possible to interpret your idea expressed in this report as a transition of life from one type of determination, which can be called “causality,” to another type of determination, determined not by the laws of mass, but by the laws of interaction? This is a type of determination that Jung once described as the phenomenon of synchronicity, when events occur simultaneously. In other words, some events occur simultaneously, but their similarity is not determined by time or causal connection, but is determined by the general meaning that connects these events with each other. In this sense, there is a qualitative change in determination.

Voeikov V.L.:In general, this is very close to what I really wanted to say, that there is a change of determination happening here. As for cause-and-effect relationships or synchronicity, this is very close to what the small number of biophysicists working on this problem are talking about. This problem is related to the coherence of living systems. That is, living systems behave like interconnected oscillators within themselves. And when it comes to resonating systems, about systems that are in continuous resonance, then it is impossible to say who is first and who is second - in general, this is one system. But this is such a different approach to explaining biological mechanisms that it is difficult to achieve. Today we are terribly chemicalized. Our biology is based on a chemical concept. These wave, resonant, vibrational ideas and everything else make their way with great difficulty. But it is impossible to do without them. And this system is holistic, precisely because it sways as a single whole, and so many octaves are involved here!

Question:How do you explain that Rubner's constant was higher in pinnipeds than in primates? First primates, then pinnipeds, and then humans? This breaks your logic.

Voeikov V.L.:This doesn't violate logic. Both those, and others, and the third are mammals. For Rubner's constant, I gave three completely different representatives of mammals. And they have a certain kind of scatter in measurements. Maybe I just took not very successful examples from Bauer, but the differences between them are visible. Rubner's claim is that all mammals lie in the same group according to this constant. And, naturally, there is a certain spread between them. But it is not very natural. Man falls out of this group of mammals, although he is also a mammal. Its constant is orders of magnitude greater, up to 10 times. That is, according to physiology, he is no longer an animal.

Question:You take on different levels of energy organization. And in a biological sense, how do you feel about warm-bloodedness in mammals and birds? How does this relate to the development process in this sense?

Voeikov V.L.:I want to refer you to the book by Alexander Ilyich Zotin, where all this bioenergetics, thermodynamics, warm-bloodedness, etc. are very carefully analyzed on gigantic material. And there you will find the answer to your question. Conceptually, I don’t entirely agree with Zotin, but as far as purely empirical, technical issues are concerned, everything is very well written there. This is the best book in world literature, and it is on the Internet.

Alexandrov Yu.I.(neurophysiologist) : Thank you, Vladimir Leonidovich, for a very interesting report. I have a question about the connection between the first part and the rest of the material in your report. I mean that at the beginning you talked about activity and passivity and complained that this has not yet found its way into biology textbooks. I must say that all this has been contained in psychology and psychophysiology textbooks for decades, as a more or less banal thing. It’s unlikely that by activity you mean only coherence. In the end, this is the synchronization of processes; it exists even in quantum theory for distant particles. So I would like to know what do you mean by activity versus passivity? You then use this opposition. If possible, at least answer briefly. My question is related to the interpretation of hyperbolic curves. Because you say that they are characteristic not only of living systems, but also of other systems. Then does this mean that this curve is not a characteristic of activity?

Voeikov V.L.:Regarding the first question, I will try to formulate the following difference between passivity and activity. If we take Prigogine’s early models, then the system moves away from equilibrium, and self-organization occurs in it, provided that it is in a gradient external to it. This is the Benard cell, it was shown there. There are more complex systems where more complex organizational processes take place. In other words, the system is in an energy gradient that serves as a drive belt, and it is external to the system. I define such a system as passive. And according to the logic of the biology textbook, the entire biosphere is passive, well, and then one turns the other like gears. As for activity, the gradient is created by the living system itself. That is, there is a potential difference between it and the environment. And it does work on the environment. We can even take photosynthesis as an example. It would seem that the light is falling, and so it turns this whole machine. But for photosynthesis to begin, the seed must germinate (and there is no photosynthesis there). It must synthesize its chloroplasts, because if you spread a thin layer of chlorophyll on the fence, then naturally there will be no photosynthesis. And it should keep these chloroplasts in an excited state. And its potential must be higher than the potential of those photons that fall on this sheet. That's what activity is. That is, I do work, and the leaf does work on the environment in order to extract energy from it and raise it to its potential.

Bratus B.S.:Thanks a lot. We move on to discussing the report, please speak for no more than 3-5 minutes. And at the end we will summarize. Who wants to speak first? Nobody? Second then? Please.

Speech (Nikolai...?) : Very interesting message. But since our seminar is methodological, I am interested in methodologically understanding what we heard. And it seems to me that there is one tendency here: to explain complex phenomena using relatively simple natural scientific foundations. And in this sense, in any phenomenon, especially if it is multi-level, we can find a level that will be present in this phenomenon, but it itself is not exhausted by it. Therefore, I still have a problem in understanding existence, although, of course, the very idea of ​​​​finding a universal universal principle is, of course, fascinating.

Bratus B.S.:Thank you. Who else would like to perform? Please.

Chaikovsky Yu.V. (IIET RAS): In the wonderful report that we listened to, there is one thing that I would like to clarify, because for Vladimir Leonidovich [ Voeykova] it's too simple, and he thinks it's obvious. When he said that in the textbook only the sun is considered active, but in fact every living system is active, he missed something without which it is simply impossible to understand this the first time, namely: energy. Energy comes into a living system from only two places: from the sun and from the bowels of the earth. This has been said. So, activity is not energy. Without energy, activity cannot work. But activity is the very thing that distinguishes, for example, a thinking person from a weak-minded person who can only digest food. Activity is the basic property of all matter. Moreover, the more complex the system, the more complex the form of activity. The simplest form of activity known to everyone is gravity. Particles attract each other and create something new. A star emerges from a speck of dust - a qualitative novelty appears due to the fact that they were attracted. The activity in this case is the gravitational field. From my point of view, each activity can be associated with a field. Who knows, who - no, I can’t explain it now.

The great thing that was not said today, although it was meant, is that as the earth and life on it develop, more and more new forms of activity appear. Vladimir Leonidovich put fire first. This is simply because he lives in a cold country. And man, as is commonly believed, originated from East Africa, where very little depended on fire. True, man very quickly got to the Arctic in the Paleolithic, where fire was indeed the main thing. But if you ask what made a person a person, then, of course, the fire retreats for me to some very distant place. And first of all, this is the fact that people began to take care of each other. Man is the only animal that cannot reproduce without outside help. He needs obstetric care. And this is as important a feature of humanity as the burial of the dead. And the question is, what made the primordial people care about each other? This is a new type of activity. Today we have been told, as an apocalyptic conclusion, that we have ended the past way of being and are beginning a new one. This, from my point of view, is evidence that the previous type of activity (as we know it: it occupied the entire planet, and the rest had nowhere to live) - this method of activity, indeed, led humanity to a dead end. Moreover, interestingly, this happened simultaneously both due to the circumstances of the emergence of the global crisis, which we were told about today, and due to those that can be read about in the newspaper, where they write about the economic crisis. These are two manifestations of the same process, and indeed, humanity, in all likelihood, will not be able to maintain its current status. Let me remind you of one single example that I have in my memory. This happened once before when the Roman Empire collapsed. Indeed, the former infrastructure collapsed within 2-3 centuries. And after that came the so-called “Dark Ages,” when the human population fell by 7 times in one generation, according to paleodemographers. That's the worst thing. Yes, Vladimir Leonidovich, a new humanity will apparently arise, but before that we will all die.

Replica: Well, yes, this is the opinion of an optimist and a pessimist!

Bratus B.S.: Dmitry Nikolaevich Kavtaradze. Let me introduce him here, since he was recently elected professor of the Faculty of Public Administration at Moscow State University, for which we congratulate him.

Kavtaradze D.N.:Dear colleagues, first of all, we must say why we are all here today. Vladimir Leonidovich [ Voeikov] he delicately made it clear to us that when they talk about the global crisis and other Armageddons, then in fact this audience is discussing the problem of changing the picture of the worldview. And it begins, as always, with heresy, and Moscow University is located opposite for this... here... The point is that we see the world differently, including thanks to the attempts that the speaker made today. I learned a lot from the report today.

I remember the work of Vernadsky, where he wrote that you and I live in a physical picture of the world. And the metro, and the timetables, and even the cloakroom attendant downstairs work according to these same hours. And further Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky wrote that in the physical picture of the world there is no place for the living. And there is an old picture of the world - naturalistic, which Vladimir Leonidovich presented to us today, but at the same time he boldly began to borrow elements of the physical picture. I think this is the most wonderful event of this evening. A new union of worldviews is emerging. They are apparently reassembling themselves somehow. And so there were alarming questions from colleagues: “Where is the person?”; “Is it possible to integrate it before N to a certain degree?" etc.

Replica: Humans are not allowed, but humanity is possible...

Kavtaradze D.N.:Well, yes, but humanity can. Therefore, it seems to me that a change in the picture of the world is a much more global event than the global crisis that is currently being talked about. Thank you very much.

Krichevets A.N.(Professor of Psychology) : I want to point out one of the last proposals of Vladimir Leonidovich [Voeikov] that humanity should switch to growth according to a new law. I would like to ask Vladimir Leonidovich what the word “should” means in this context? I don't require an answer at all. The ontology of the report is a little strange. I think that this is really a biological ontology. Biology now (and, probably, for a long time) is going through, in my opinion, a kind of perestroika period, in which it does not really understand how to use words. I hope that Vladimir Leonidovich will not be offended at all by my words. “Living systems are subjects” was written on one of the pictures that we were shown. Who are the “subjects”? How do we use the word "subject"? How can I introduce the word “subject” to an audience without talking about history where it had a different meaning than it does now (for example, in Kant)? Now it is a word in everyday language. And it does not point to anything, but to a certain point, which in our communication is responsible for its existence. So I propose this formula for the “subject”. But then what does it mean living - subject? This means - as Vladimir Leonidovich just said - that "leaf is trying". It’s not chlorophyll that processes something, but Leaf is trying. What does it mean? Do you remember that Pavlov forbade his laboratory assistants and assistants to say: “the dog wants” or “the dog is trying”? And now we see that already leaf can try. I agree that there is some effort behind this. I can quote Piaget here, who certainly characterized life this way in one of his last great works. Of course, not under Sergei Sergeevich [ Let's get married] to make this risky speech, but, nevertheless, What there tries? Does it subject of effort the leaf itself? A whole tree? Biocenosis? Or something else? We can definitely only feel some kind of effort in him and join our souls to this effort. But what I would rather ask Sergei Sergeevich to say here is: is it legal to use the word “subject” in relation to you and me in exactly the sense that I’m talking about? We we try, but, it seems to me, Sergei Sergeevich will better explain that we try not by ourselves, but by the Lord God, by external energy, which can also be divided by qualities or levels.

In relation to psychology, I tried (there is my article on this topic in “Questions of Philosophy” last year) to build some centaur categorical approaches in psychology, where this subjectivity is combined with a deterministic description. I tried to describe and systematize them. It seems to me that this is the right direction of work for biology. In fact, we are presented with empirical patterns here. Vladimir Leonidovich also said that he would like mathematicians to come up with a kind of mathematical ontology for hyperbolic laws. Really, right? And then it will sound like a thing similar to natural science, and not just an empirical law. But even if we see ontology, how can these approaches be correctly combined, or at least intelligently and usefully? But imagine if Vladimir Leonidovich brought all this under the ontology with which Yuri Viktorovich Tchaikovsky has now frightened us: after the hyperbolic pattern, heavy shooting begins, the system naturally moves to a new level of relations, and then everything is fine again. How would I feel about this? Maybe it will be good, but I don’t want to shoot. I don’t want this transition to be carried out with the help of such operations. Therefore, when Vladimir Leonidovich says that humanity must move on, I consider this word “should” to be key here. This must cannot be understood in the following way: they observed empirical laws, mathematicians brought ontology under hyperbolic laws, and must- because these patterns flow into one another and everything will be fine with us. I feel like we're talking about something else here." must" Even if this crisis, through a two-year recession, goes back to the stage of sustainable growth, then behind this I still see that the duty here is addressed to literally each of us and to the human community, and to the authorities, etc.

In conclusion, I want to say that, in my opinion, it is important not only for psychologists, but also for biologists, to work on the question of who the actual subject is, what is the distribution of responsibility and what is the purpose of scientific descriptions, which are addressed, among other things, to certain subjects, for which the word must quite confidently interpreted in the ordinary sense.

Father Andrey Lorgus: I am a priest, psychologist and anthropologist - only in a different sense.

Bratus B.S.:Graduate of the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University.

Father Andrey Lorgus: Yes. It seems to me that those two principles that were expressed by Bauer have a certain human dimension that was not discussed today. I understand why: he had no place here. Man, as a living system, can choose whether to fight against balance or maintain balance. Live or die. A person has such a choice. And the vast majority of people use this choice. They give up life or choose life. And the further humanity lives, the more and more people accumulate who do not want to live. They choose the principle of balance. The human form of life has freedom against both these principles. And a person may not observe the principle of stable disequilibrium if he chooses to do so. If he refuses to earn his own bread, refuses to accumulate potential, then the question arises about the life of an individual and the life of humanity. Is it possible to raise the question that humanity as a whole refuses to live any longer? Or, if humanity as a whole is a system that has neither opportunity, nor obligation, nor freedom, if it is only a biological system, then humanity as a whole does not have such a possibility. It will live according to these principles. But a person may not live. Then the main expectation is: what will a person choose at the end of these eras? Thank you.

Bratus B.S.:Thank you. We are coming to the final part of our seminar. We will listen to some of the views on the report of the chairpersons at our seminar. Let's start with Yuri Iosifovich Alexandrov, please.

Alexandrov Yu.I.: Dear colleagues, I would like to once again thank Vladimir Leonidovich [Voeikov]. I will say a few thoughts on the report, but first, so as not to forget, I would like to say about the speech of my colleague Yu.V. Tchaikovsky, who is a leading expert in the field of evolution theory. He said a strange thing: man differs from animals in that mutual aid has appeared in the human environment. I am sure that you remember very well Kropotkin’s work around the 20s on mutual aid in animals. And now there are reviews about mutual assistance for everyone, starting with elephants, about helping the disabled, and in general, whatever you want. So there is no need to make such hasty conclusions.

Now, regarding the actual topic of the report. I want to say something a little differently about activity. In general, I haven’t had such pleasure for a long time hearing my favorite word “activity”, which, in accordance with the paradigm to which I belong, has been defended for at least half a century, if not more, probably already closer to 70 years. If in psychology the theory of activity is a completely obvious and accepted thing, and this theory, in fact, is a theory of activity, then in the physiological and biological environment this science or neuroscience - and colleague Krichivets is absolutely right here - is currently experiencing a clear shift towards holistic and active approach. And it's very nice to see. Today's report is further evidence of this. However, activity can be viewed from different angles, including the way it was discussed in the report. But in the systemic paradigm to which I belong, activity is understood as anticipatory reflection. One of the main properties of activity is anticipation, that is, the construction of subjective models of the future, and not a reaction to a stimulus. By the way, an important thing. Vladimir Leonidovich said that from the logic of materialism it follows that living systems are passive. But as far as I understand, this follows not from the logic of materialism, but from the logic of the stimulus-response paradigm, in which the organism responds to the influence of the environment. And, by the way, our classic Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev quite clearly noted that reactivity exists both in living objects and in bodies of dead nature, thereby equalizing them. That is, indeed, in this system of ideas it is a passive object. But not every materialist ideology presupposes passivity. I attribute the idea that develops, say, in the theory of functional systems, in systemic psychophysiology, in particular, developed by Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bershtein, to materialist ideology. Here is a time paradox. How was it resolved? Teleological determination was known - determination by the future. This determination came into conflict with causal connections. How can the future determine the present? One way to solve this problem was to bring the future into the present by building a model. This construction of a model is, it seems to me, the main property of activity and the main property of living things as such, represented at all levels of its organization. And I completely agree that this property is represented differently at different levels, since the way it is reflected changes in evolution. And if we talk about a person, then I would approach the phenomena that the speaker spoke about from a different angle, which does not at all exclude what was discussed in the report. I would say that human activity is a prediction of appropriate results, a proactive reflection of the environment, since the result in culture is part of a cooperative, social result. That is, this is not an individual result, but part of a social result. Thus, what happens in society is, if you like, joint foresight. And the development of society, the development of culture is the improvement of social foresight and the properties of this foresight. The process of such improvement is based on the activity of the individual, which also exists at the social level. Powerful improvement occurs through adaptation to what is foreseen at the social level. Why is activity better than reactivity? The fact that she does not respond to a “poke from behind” when it is too late, but adapts to the changes that she foresees. Whether it adapts worse or better is another question.

And the last thing I wanted to say. A colleague speaking here used a term that I think almost all psychologists have in their heads - culture. So, the numbers that the speaker spoke about are, from my point of view, one of the ways to reflect culture. The construction of an increasing series of numbers is a specific way of describing certain cultural changes. What cultural changes? To understand this, we need to look at cultural specificity. From the graphs shown here, this cultural specificity follows. If we take these graphs for different crops, then we will get different curves. And then it will be possible to see how these numbers, the steepness of the graphs, correspond to cultural changes in certain societies. And I think this is a very interesting comparison. Thanks a lot.

Bratus B.S.:Thank you, Yuri Iosifovich. Sergey Sergeevich Khoruzhy, please.

Khoruzhy S.S.:Friends, I must say that our anthropological seminar has its own strategy associated with today’s meeting. I will modestly take credit for the fact that I very actively tried to act as an interested person, an interested authority, and pestered Boris Sergeevich with this. And he had in mind the real urgent conceptual need to begin a conversation of this kind within the framework of our long-standing several-year-old seminar on anthropology, broadly understood. One of the major tasks of such a modern broad understanding of anthropology in a new situation, of course, is to build an “anthropology-biology” interface or interface "AB", as we sometimes refer to it in internal discussions. So, this very interface should be built. And I really hoped that our meeting today would be the first step in this direction. The report was completely clear, and I am extremely grateful to Vladimir Leonidovich [ Voeikov] for the fact that a certain genus, a certain type of scientific position was presented in its purity. What kind of purity is this? Of course, this is a classic reductionist methodology. This is a very good place to start. This started from very far away, the path from below - from the hierarchical levels of large natural science systems. Today we have heard what can be said at this level about this tea interface “AB”. I think that I absolutely should not reproach our speaker for the fact that in this purity of the reductionist position there was not and did not even begin to form the position of the next level, the next generation. What kind of position is this? This is a position that at least takes the trouble to reflect on its own methodological boundaries. Reflection on methodological boundaries has not yet begun. Very correctly, pure reductionism does not do this; it assumes itself to be limitless. However, further, at the next stages, as I hope, of our cooperation, it is inevitable to ask the question, within what phenomenal area Are the patterns we have heard decisive? Some kind of boundaries of this kind certainly exist. They need to be identified. We were told about universal laws. But they, of course, are universal from now on. From one end - the natural science end, perhaps, these boundaries were outlined. But the conversation about the other end has not yet begun. What relation will all the universal laws that were presented to us today have to the life of humanity if a person implements the program that he has already begun to implement today, namely: the program of transhumanism? And in accordance with this program, it transforms itself into software ( software )? Will such software be implemented according to a universal law, or according to a hyperbolic law, or according to some other law? The answer is simple: all this universality will be irrelevant. So, at the next stage it is useful for us to ask exactly this question: where is everything heard relevant, and where does it reveal its insufficiency? Where are the boundaries at which biological discourse reveals its insufficiency, and where anthropological discourse should come into its own? And in the future we are talking not only about anthropological discourse. There is a fairly famous book of the twentieth century - “Being and Time” by Heidegger. It begins with Heidegger saying: there are three ways to talk about a person (he puts everything in one category) - anthropology, psychology, biology. But this is a poor conversation, says Martin Heidegger, and this is not even the beginning of the conversation. These are some pieces of conversation torn out from somewhere, but a real conversation is structured completely differently. Heidegger tells us that while we have not yet reached not only Being, but have not yet reached man, his authentic human specificity, anthropology has not yet begun. And I really hope that such tasks of our cooperation are still ahead. I am sure that in such our communication there is a very great potential for advancement towards a person. And there, if God willing, maybe to Genesis.

Bratus B.S.:Dear colleagues, I will try to be brief. And first I will express my emotional attitude towards the report. This is a long-forgotten feeling of enjoying science. Unlike our psychological conversations about personality, etc., which require gesture, there is gait. You can agree with it, or you can disagree, but there is a step, there is data, numbers, one follows from the other, one is built from the other. There is a certain support, there is something called scientific view. This is increasingly being forgotten. Now, as Kavtaradze’s colleague says, everything basically comes down to opinions. There are a lot of opinions, they are usually not supported by anything. And this “mess” is now called public opinion, including scientific opinion. We have forgotten that science is a disciplinary way of understanding the world and nothing more, really. As mathematicians say: there is a useful prejudice that mathematics is useful. To paraphrase this statement, we can say that we are even too entrenched in our prejudice that science is useful. Science is, first of all, a way of knowledge, behind which is the most mysterious d O false, which Anatoly Nikolaevich [Krichevets] spoke about. Science must study. Who said what she should study? And why is she studying? Why does she study with such persistence? Why does she pay for this persistence? And sometimes a very tough price. What lies behind it d O false?

It seems to me that, if we digress in this direction, we can then return to what was discussed here. So, I would like to say that this is what is written down in culture, - Yuri Iosifovich spoke about this [ Alexandrov], - or that this is a public prediction. But look: in fact, humanity is not following culture. It seems to pull out this culture in spite of this culture. What is the current, relatively speaking, superficial, but dominant culture of the modern world? She's monstrous. There is no need to even go into her criticism. So what makes us think that we will somehow pull it out? And if we talk about public foresight... (I apologize for these slightly simplified examples.) Now it’s March, and I remember very well that March when Stalin died. Many years have passed since he died, and the public perception is that he is a very popular personality, a creative manager, and so on. So what does public foresight have to do with whether we survive or not? Do you understand? What does it have to do with Christian civilization in general, with the Christian position? Which? What lies on the scales, what will outweigh? Social foresight? Or maybe culture?

Ultimately, it seems to me that culture is just a set of signs. And here is Sergei Sergeevich [ Khoruzhy] - a person who has reached high levels in the field of natural science subjects (physical, mathematical) - rightly speaks of a certain reduction. Here is Yuri Iosifovich [ Alexandrov] he asked me (after Sergei Sergeevich’s speech) that reduction is bad or not bad? And this is just a statement. But then a question arises, for the sake of which today for the first time we held such a meeting of representatives of different fields of knowledge - philosophers, psychologists, biologists. This is a question of cross-level content. How to avoid reduction? Or how to find its boundaries? Where does a reduction say that it is a reduction? The moment we call a judgment a reduction, we overcome it. We say, for example, that there is a universal law. What does universal law mean? This means that this law extends beyond certain boundaries. But it will be modified. Or rather, it will not so much be modified as it will be expressed in a different language. It seems to me that this work by Vladimir Leonidovich [ Voeykova] is unique and very important in the sense that Vladimir Leonidovich is a representative of theoretical biology. But there are many biologists, but there are few people who come up with those laws that can be understood as universal. Here we are already entering the language in which those universal laws that Sergei Sergeevich spoke about will be formulated.

In this regard, there is a very clear and understandable definition given by Metropolitan Anthony, who says that science is “knowledge of the Creator through knowledge of his creations.” Modern science, at best, studies creations, forgetting that since there is a creation, it has a Creator. Since there is creatureliness, there is also a Creator. And in this case (in a certain scientific understanding) the way out to the Creator is, in fact, the way out to the plan, to the understanding of this plan, to its non-randomness. And so I think that these kinds of, these kinds of considerations are extremely important for any audience, because they are knocking on the main doors. Whether they will be opened and how they will be opened is another matter. Outside of this knock, everything falls apart, everything becomes a reduction that does not recognize itself as a reduction. Once again: as soon as we realize that we are reducing something, we have overcome the reduction. We seem to set our limit, but we mean something that is beyond this limit. There is scientific knowledge and there is scientific knowledge ignorance. And scientific ignorance is extremely important and valuable. There is no scientist outside of scientific ignorance, because the scientist who develops scientific knowledge is obviously limited. It must imply something that goes beyond the boundaries of this knowledge.

And, probably, I will express the general opinion and admiration for the work of Vladimir Leonidovich. I have known him for a long time; we actually worked together on the first monograph on Christian psychology, where Vladimir Leonidovich wrote a brilliant article related to the relationship between science and religion. And I hope that such growth in the activity and knowledge of Vladimir Leonidovich not only has not reached its apogee, but in general it is ongoing and delights us all, and will continue to please us.

In conclusion, I would like to say that thanks to the work of Alexander Evgenievich Kremlev, we have prepared discs with the performance of Sergei Sergeevich [ Khoruzhego]. In this regard, you can contact us at the department. We will have our next seminar in about a month. It will be devoted to the psychology of villainy [ speaker - S.N. Enikolopov]. This will be an experimental workshop. I thank all those present and the distinguished guests.

Voeikov V.L.:Thank you very much. Despite the fact that it is already 8.43 pm, the hall is still full. And I would like to hope that I managed to provoke some reactions that will force further thinking on this topic. When I was preparing for this report, I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know. And moreover, as Boris Sergeevich said, he also learned how much I still don’t know.

And about foresight. From studies of the evolutionary process, according to L.S. Berg, it is quite well known that in the course of evolution, predecessors appear that are absolutely unnecessary at this stage, but which then, after some millions of years, will turn out to be necessary. Moreover, at shorter time intervals the phenomenon of precognition is also observed. For example, for some birds, the laying of eggs will depend on what kind of summer and autumn it will be. All this data is there. This foresight is a property of the living world. Another thing is that we - at least some of us - have developed these properties into the properties of prophets. And here, at this level, perhaps there will be common ground. On the one hand, to be honest, Sergei Sergeevich, I am a little upset that there remains a certain border between us. These boundaries exist and remain in science today. But when we cross them, then they will inevitably blur. The boundaries between physics and chemistry, between chemistry and biology, between biology and psychology, between psychology and anthropology - they remain. But it is important to realize that these boundaries exist, and you need to look at how you can cross them, find coherence, cooperation, interconnectedness, interfusion and at the same time preserve individuality. For now we are very individual. But it's time to start thinking about increasing interaction. And I am very pleased with this evening, because it seems to me that this is another step towards stimulating interaction, at least within our Moscow University. Although he universe, but for now divided into a heap compactments. And the boundaries between these compacts needs to be washed out. Thank you everybody.

Workshop “Ultra-weak impacts on physico-chemical and biological systems. Relationship with solar and geomagnetic activity.” May 6-8, 2002, Crimean Astrophysical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

V.L. Voeikov

Lecture transcript

The role of dynamic processes in water in the implementation of the effects of weak and ultra-weak influences on biological systems

I am very glad to have the opportunity to be in this wonderful place. Everything is so beautiful here, everything is so unusual, everything is so exciting, but the only drawback is that there are open water sources quite far away.

My report will be devoted to the importance, the role that water plays in our lives, in the life of every individual person, in the life of all living beings. And everyone knows that without water “neither here nor here.” But it just so happened that if we talk about the role and significance of water in biological research, then, perhaps, until very recently, the sayings of Albert Szent-Györgyi regarding the fact that biology forgot about water or never knew about it and if we translate the second part of his phrase “biology has not yet discovered water,” then they were very fair until very recently.

Figure 1. Is water a reaction medium for life processes or a substance that generates them?

As you can see in Fig. 1 (left side), we are 70%, more than 2/3, made of water. The most important parts of the human body, the body of any other animal, plant, in general, all living beings is water. And so, indeed, biochemists know very little about water, just as fish that swim in water apparently know very little about their environment. Let's look at what very serious, advanced biochemistry, which has studied a lot of subtleties and details, is doing today. I will give as an illustration an extremely simplified picture (Fig. 2), which, probably, many students of biology, biochemistry, biophysics have seen and learned by heart about a wide variety of interactions, regulatory interactions that take place in the cell. Receptors perceive molecular signals from the external environment in the form of various kinds of hormones, then a lot of various regulatory factors and mechanisms are activated, to the point that the expression of genes in cells begins to change, and it reacts in one way or another to external influences.

Figure 2. Modern ideas about the molecular mechanisms of regulation of cellular activity.

But from this picture, which really illustrates the ideas of today's biochemistry, one may get the impression that everything The numerous interactions and carefully studied structural components of a living cell exist as if in a vacuum. What is the medium for all these interactions? In any biochemistry textbook, in any chemistry textbook, it seems to be implied that, of course, this is a liquid medium, of course, that all these molecules do not float independently of each other, although it is assumed that they merely diffuse in an aqueous medium. And only very recently has it begun to be taken into account that all these interactions of molecules with each other actually take place not just in some airless space, and not just in some abstract water - among the innumerable molecules Al there are two O, but that the water molecules and itself in itself, water, as a finely structured substance, plays a crucial role in what happens in a living cell, and in what happens in any organism, and water, quite possibly, is the main receptor, the main “listener” of what happens in the external environment.

Over the past 10 - 15 years, more and more data has begun to appear that water in water is not, in fact, a kind of gas with individual H 2 0 particles weakly associated with each other, which for vanishingly short periods of time with each other each other stick together through hydrogen bonds, forming so-called blinking clusters (right side of Fig. 1), and then scatter again. Until recently, the lifetime of such structures in water was considered extremely short and, therefore, naturally, it was not assumed that water could play any structural, important organizing role. Now more and more physical and chemical data have begun to appear, which indicate that in water, in liquid water, there are quite a lot of different stable structures that can be called clusters.

In general, recently a whole branch of chemistry has emerged – cluster chemistry. Cluster chemistry appeared not only in connection with water, or even not so much in connection with water, but it began to acquire quite important importance. And now, since we are talking about clusters, I would like to show you one example of clusters, now perhaps the most carefully studied, the so-called carbon clusters, which are called fullerenes, or another form of this carbon cluster is nanotubes.

What exactly are clusters? And when we talk about water, then what we learned in chemistry about the chemistry of fullerenes, or more precisely, the chemical physics of fullerenes, apparently can be related to water. It was well known to everyone until the mid-80s that carbon can exist in two main modifications: graphite - flat carbon panels and diamond with a tetrahedral carbon structure. And in the mid-80s it was discovered that under certain conditions, when carbon is converted into steam, and then this steam is quickly cooled, certain structures appear, which were called fullerenes or bucky balls, such balls named after the American architect, Buckmeister Fuller , who built houses long before the discovery of fullerenes, similar to the later discovered fullerenes. It turned out that a fullerene is a molecule consisting of several dozen carbon atoms connected to each other by their bonds, as shown in Fig. 3.

Rice. 3 Fullerene and nanotube – bulk polymers of carbon

The yellow ones here are the carbon atoms, the white and red sticks are the valence bonds between them. The most famous fullerene contains 60 carbon atoms, but very stable balls can be built from other sets of carbon atoms. Fullerenes and nanotubes are examples of clusters, and a cluster actually means such a closed, volumetric architectural molecule, which is not similar to the planar molecules known to us. Clusters of this kind have absolutely amazing properties in terms of their chemical activity, or more precisely, their catalytic activity, because chemically this molecule has extremely low activity, but at the same time it can catalyze a lot of different reactions. This molecule is apparently capable of acting as an energy transformer. In particular, it can act as a transformer of low-frequency radio waves into high-frequency oscillations, up to oscillations that can cause electronic excitations. Another form of such a cluster is a nanotube, which is now being intensively studied by engineers trying to create new generations of computers, since it has superconducting properties under certain conditions, etc.

Why did I settle on these two molecules? Firstly, they are very stable, they can be isolated, they can be carefully studied, studied, and they are now being studied a lot. Secondly, these molecules, these clusters, reflecting completely new properties of chemical, physical matter are such that even some consider them to be new states of matter. I spoke very briefly about these fullerenes, about these nanotubes only due to the fact that quite a lot of models of water have recently begun to appear, which are extremely similar in their organization to these same fullerenes and nanotubes.

Rice. 4 Possible structure of water clusters

Now in the literature on quantum chemistry, many different forms of water clusters are given, starting with clusters that include 5 water molecules, 6 water molecules, and so on. This is from the work of the English physical chemist Martin Chaplin (Fig. 4). He calculated what kind of clusters were most likely to exist in water and suggested that there could be a whole hierarchy of fairly stable structures of this kind. By blocking with each other, they can reach enormous sizes, including 280 water molecules. What is special about this kind of clusters? How do they differ from generally accepted, standard ideas about water molecules? Figure 1 on the right shows water molecules in a “standard” form. The red circle is an oxygen atom. The two black ones are two hydrogen atoms, the yellow sticks are covalent bonds between them, and the blue ones are hydrogen bonds that connect the hydrogen atom of one molecule to the oxygen atom of another. Here's one water molecule, another water molecule. A cluster is a three-dimensional structure in which each water molecule can be connected to other molecules either by one hydrogen bond, or two hydrogen bonds, or three hydrogen bonds, and a certain cooperative formation arises, similar to what we see in Fig. 4. Cooperative in the sense that if you take one water molecule out of this structure, it will not disintegrate, there are still enough bonds in it, despite the fact that the hydrogen bonds are quite weak. But when there are many of these weak bonds, they support each other, and if due to thermal movement one water molecule can jump out, but the cluster remains, and the probability that some water molecule will take this place before the cluster falls apart is much higher than the probability , that the entire corresponding cluster will collapse. And the more molecules combine into such structures, the more stable these clusters are. When these kinds of giant molecules appear, already polymolecules of water, in fact polymers, water polymers, they have high stability and completely different chemical physicochemical properties than one molecule of water.

Question (inaudible)

Answer: Just calculate the characteristic size between the hydrogen atoms and the oxygen atom - 1 angstrom. The length of the hydrogen bond is about 1.3 angstroms. But as for this giant cluster (see Fig. 4), its diameter is on the order of several nanometers. This is the size of a nanoparticle in a nanostructure

Question (inaudible)

Answer: Look, here you can clearly see: inside this particle, in fact, inside this octahedron, this dodecahedron and this giant icosahedron, there are cavities into which, generally speaking, individual ions, individual gas atoms, etc. can “fit.” These clusters, combining with each other, also create such a shell structure. In general, clusters form structures that are basically shells, and inside them, as a rule, there are cavities. And, in particular, regarding clusters, the following data have been obtained, let’s say there is a cluster of iron, and a cluster consisting of 10 iron atoms is capable of binding hydrogen 1000 times more actively than a cluster consisting of 17 iron atoms, where iron is hidden inside . Generally speaking, cluster chemistry is just beginning to develop. And when we talk about hydrogen bonds, it is assumed that a hydrogen bond is a weak electrostatic interaction: delta plus and delta minus. Delta plus on the hydrogen atom and delta minus on the oxygen atom. But recently it was shown that at least 10% of hydrogen bonds are covalent bonds, and a covalent bond is already shared electrons with each other. In fact, this very cluster is an electron cloud, which is somehow organized around the corresponding nuclei. Therefore, a structure of this kind has very special physical and chemical properties.

There is one more circumstance. Data from quantum chemical calculations of superpure water are often cited, i.e. Absolutely pure water, absolutely free of impurities, but we must understand that real water is never such water. It always contains some kind of impurity, it is necessarily in some kind of vessel, it does not exist on its own. Water, as is known, is the best solvent, i.e. if it is placed in a vessel, then it will somehow receive something from the vessel. Thus, when it comes to what can actually happen in water, a number of circumstances must be taken into account: where did this water come from, how was it obtained. Was it obtained as a result of melting, or was it obtained as a result of condensation, what is the temperature of this water, what gases are dissolved in this water, etc. and all this will influence in a certain way the composition of the corresponding clusters. I want to emphasize here once again that what is shown in this figure is one of the illustrations of how water clusters can be fundamentally structured. If we take Zenin’s clusters, if we take Chaplin’s or Bulyonkov’s clusters, then they will all give different pictures in accordance with different calculations. And one of the researchers of water, water, thank God, it has been studied a long time ago, said that today there are several dozen theories of the structure of water. This doesn't mean they are all wrong. All of them, perhaps, are correct theories, they simply show the diversity of this absolutely incredible liquid from which we, in general, are made.

And so, speaking about the presence of such clusters in water, I would also like to draw attention to the fact that I am still talking about the structure of water, which is somehow related to crystallography. Chaplin calculated (see Fig. 4) that the same cluster, consisting of 280 water molecules, can be in two different types of conformations. The conformation is swollen and the conformation is compressed; the number of particles in these conformations is the same. The density of this cluster will be lower; it will occupy less volume with the same number of atoms in it than the density of this cluster. A change in the properties of water according to Chaplin may be associated with what amount, what percentage of compressed and what percentage of swollen clusters will be in a particular water. The energy of jumping from one state to another is not very high, but there is some kind of energy barrier, it must be overcome, and certain influences on water can lead to the fact that this energy barrier can be overcome. When it comes to this, I repeat once again that water does not simply consist of water molecules that “rush” with colossal speed, diffuse at colossal speed relative to each other, colliding and scattering in different directions, but water can be like this “micro-ice” (this, of course, is not ice, which has a certain extent, these are actually closed structures of a certain kind, they can have dimensions), then at least there is a way to understand a whole series of phenomena that are completely incredible from a standard point of view, which related to the properties of water. These phenomena have been known for a long time.

For example, based on these phenomena associated with the properties of water, there is a whole medical direction, which at one time dominated, then went into the shadows under the name homeopathy, and a host of other phenomena associated with other properties of water. But our academic science, during the very 200 years during which homeopathy has existed, “swept such phenomena under the rug” because, based on standard, generally accepted ideas about the structure of water, or more precisely about the absence of any structure in water, it is impossible to explain them it is forbidden. It is impossible to imagine that in this ordinary water certain events, certain phenomena can occur that are described by such words as “memory”, “perception of information”, “imprinting”. These kinds of words and terminology were almost completely rejected by academic science. And finally, the emergence of new ideas about the structure of water makes it possible to explain a whole series of phenomena, or at least find a path along which to move in order to explain a whole series of phenomena that I will try to talk about here.

The next part of my message will be devoted to various kinds of amazing phenomenology, you know, like in the magazine “Wonders and Adventures”. Since the first report, the report of Lev Vladimirovich Belousov, was devoted to works related to the name of Alexander Gavrilovich Gurvich, I would like to talk about one more study, which until recently remained unnoticed because the discovery he made seems completely incredible. Gurvich, studying ultra-weak radiation, studying the interaction of biological objects with each other due to low-intensity, ultra-weak, ultraviolet radiation, began to descend somewhat lower in complexity, began to try to explore how radiation can influence any chemical reactions occurring in water. What kind of reactions can develop in water that is irradiated with a very weak light flux? In particular, back in the late 30s, then this work continued after the war, he discovered an absolutely amazing phenomenon, which he called the multiplication of amino acids or the multiplication of enzymes in aqueous solutions.

All those who have graduated from high school know that any biosynthetic processes occur with the participation of incredibly complex machines - ribosomes, a lot of enzymes are required in order to create something new. But in the experiments of Gurvich, and then in the later experiments of Anna Alexandrovna Gurvich, absolutely amazing things were discovered (Fig. 5). They took an amino acid called tyrosine (this is a complex aromatic amino acid) and placed it in an aqueous solution of an amino acid called glycine (the simplest amino acid), and a vanishingly small amount of tyrosine was placed there, i.e. They made an extremely high dilution at which tyrazine could not be determined by conventional chemical and analytical methods. This aqueous solution of tyrosine was then briefly irradiated with mitogenetic radiation, a very weak source of ultraviolet light. Some time after this, the number of tyrosine molecules in this solution will increase significantly, i.e. complex molecules will multiply due to the breakdown of simple molecules. What happens?

The process has not been fully studied, but it can be assumed, although from the point of view of a “classical” biochemist, what I will say is a monstrous heresy: a tyrosine molecule under the influence of light, preferably ultraviolet, goes into an electronically excited state, rich in electronic energy. Next, a certain stage occurs, it is not entirely clear what it is connected with, which leads to the fact that glycine molecules break up into fragments: NH 2, CH 2, CO, COOH. The glycine molecule broke up into fragments, which are called radicals, free radicals; we will talk about them later. And the most amazing thing is that from these radicals molecules similar to tyrosine begin to assemble, a much larger number of them than the original number of tyrosine molecules.

In order to assemble one tyrosine molecule from glycine molecules, 8 glycine molecules must be destroyed. Here there are enough CH 2 residues to build this one chain, but you only need one NH 2 fragment - it will sit here (Fig. 5) and just one COOH fragment - it will sit here and you need another OH fragment that needs to be placed here . Those. For some reason, a glycine molecule, under the influence of an excited tyrosine molecule, falls apart into fragments, and then for some reason, not just anything, but a tyrosine molecule is assembled from these fragments. But there remain extra fragments that cannot fit anywhere. Pieces appear that can combine, giving simple molecules like hydroxylamine - there is NH 2 OH, I will not go deep into chemistry, and in the experiments of the Gurvichs it was shown that not only does the number of tyrosine molecules actually increase, but such fragments also appear in this system . A complete mystery. In addition, if you take not tyrosine, but some other aromatic molecule that can be excited by light, then it is this molecule that will multiply. Let's say this is how nucleic bases will multiply if you shine light on them in this system. Apparently, without the participation of water, this type of experiment cannot be explained. I stopped at this as one of the miracles from the standard point of view.

The following miracles were investigated by the famous, unfortunately one might say, infamous, French biochemist Jacques Benviniste. He is notorious through no fault of his own; the pillars of Western academic science, so to speak, have created a scandal around his name. Jacques Benviniste, a classic highly qualified French immunologist, was engaged in purely immunological experiments in the mid-80s. He studied the effect on blood cells, called basophils, of protein substances that specifically act on these cells and cause their specific response, which is called degranulation. These substances are called anti-IgE, in general, it doesn’t even matter. It is important that these proteins bind to cells and cause some kind of biological reaction in them. The standard idea of ​​how a protein molecule will act on a cell is that it binds to a specific receptor on the cell surface, triggering one of the chains of events shown in Figure above. 2, which leads to a corresponding physiological response of cells. The higher the concentration of such proteins, the higher the rate of these reactions. The lower the concentration of these molecules, the fewer cells will respond. But for some reason, as always by accident, the staff of Benviniste’s laboratory dropped below a concentration that could have caused any effect at all. However, they got the effect. Then they began to study this effect more carefully. They took solutions of protein molecules (anti-IgE) and diluted them 10 times, 20 times, 70 times with distilled water, i.e. the degrees of dilution were absolutely colossal. With this kind of dilution, at concentrations of 10 – 30, i.e. below Avogadro's magic number (10 -23), meaning that this is one molecule per liter of water, if here is minus 30 degrees, this means one molecule per 10 7 liters of water, this can be imagined as a dilution, meaning that in the test tube where There should be cells, in fact there is nothing, even if we take the 20th dilution, 10 to the 20th power. And degranulation of basophils occurs as shown in Fig. 6.

Rice. 6. Degranulation of basophils in response to the addition of successive decimal dilutions of anti-IgE antiserum (according to J. Benveniste).

This figure is compiled from many points, and it is clear that when we go further and further along these dilutions, the effect either appears or disappears when, as they say, there are no longer any traces of the original molecules, or rather, it is precisely the traces of those molecules that exist in these solutions. But there are absolutely no molecules. For this discovery, which was published in the journal Nature, Belvinist was defamed for 15 years. And only now they began to cautiously recognize him; earlier he was excommunicated from scientific work in leading biological and medical institutions in France, where he worked and was even nominated for the Nobel Prize before he was terribly unlucky to make this discovery. There is a lot more that can be said about this, about how he moved forward with this story, but the report is not only dedicated to him - it is another illustration of what absolutely incredible phenomena, from the point of view of standard theories, can be observed when studying water systems.

Now I would like to talk about some of our “pseudoscientific” experiments, since we occasionally study the influence of people called psychics on various kinds of biological and aquatic systems. My approach here is, I would say, cold. If there is an effect, even if I cannot understand its cause, if I can state this effect, if it is reproduced, if I understand or have the opportunity to understand what is happening in the system on which some effect was exerted, I, according to By and large, at the first stage it doesn’t matter what caused this effect. The effect may be caused by heating or cooling, the addition of a chemical, or some other factor affecting the system. This other factor may be a person who claims to have healing powers and claims to affect the health of other people. If he claims that he can affect the health of other people, then, apparently, he can also affect biological or physicochemical objects. The challenge is to test its impact. We work quite a lot with blood and here in Fig. Figure 7 shows a diagram of one of two types of experiments that served as test systems for testing this kind of people. This is a well-known erythrocyte sedimentation reaction, since probably each of you has ever had your blood tested. Blood is drawn into a pipette, which is placed vertically, and the blood gradually begins to settle. We have created a device that allows us to monitor the position of the boundary of settling red blood with good time resolution. Anyone who has had their blood tested knows that the normal blood sedimentation rate is somewhere up to 10 mm/hour; if it increases by 30–40 mm/hour, then this is already bad. We record the kinetic curve, monitor the graph of blood sedimentation: see how it settles: monotonously, uniformly, or sedimentation occurs with accelerations and decelerations.

Rice. 7. The principle of measuring the dynamics of erythrocyte sedimentation. Above is a diagram of the sedimentation of red blood in a vertically installed pipette. Below is the change in time of the position of the boundary (curve with crosses) and the rate of its subsidence in each given period of time (curve with circles).

The idea is very simple, using a special electronic device, which will not be discussed here, the position of this border is recorded every 10, 15, or 30 seconds. At one point in time, the border was here, over a given period of time it moved here. We divide this distance by time and, accordingly, we get the subsidence rate for this period of time, then it slowed down, the speed became less, and now we get a graph (Fig. 7), which is a graph of the speed of movement of this boundary over time. Here we see that it settled quickly at first, and then began to settle more slowly. The other graph is simply a graph of the position of this boundary at one time or another from the beginning of the experiment. This method is very sensitive in the sense that it allows you to see very well, gives reproducible results and allows you to see very subtle changes in the blood, since they are all sort of integrated, any changes in the blood that happen one way or another will be reflected one way or another on the erythrocyte sedimentation rate. The request to the corresponding psychic or healer was the following: to influence the blood or influence the physiological solution, which we then added to the blood, after which we compared it with the erythrocyte sedimentation rate in the control sample, which was not affected. Here, taken from the same donor at the same time, who was in the same conditions, but outside his influence, for him it was also a control and for him it was a prototype or to influence the physiological solution with which we diluted the blood.

Vladimir Leonidovich Voeikov (b. 1946), a biophysicist with a chemical mindset, unexpectedly came to the conclusion that Oparin’s approach contains much more valuable than had been thought in the last half century. Of course, we are not talking about the “heffalump principle” (section 7-2*), but about the fact that, as it turns out, many reactions of biopoiesis could actually take place in the “primary broth”. First of all, these could be polycondensation reactions (polymerization with energy consumption and the release of water), the energy source for which is the mechanical movement of water. When it moves through ultrafine pores, it dissociates, and hydroxyls form hydrogen peroxide in unexpectedly large (over 1%) concentrations; it serves as an oxidizing agent. Part of the peroxide decomposes into O2 and H2.
For these reactions to be irreversible, a runoff of products is required. With polycondensation, it is achieved by changing environmental conditions; and during decomposition, O2 and H2 peroxides go into the atmosphere, where O2 remains below and serves as the main oxidizing agent (Voeikov V.L. Reactive oxygen species, water, photon, and life // Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum 94, 2001).
Polycondensation is one of the forms of primary self-organization, the possible mechanisms of which Voeikov examined in his doctoral dissertation (Biology Faculty of Moscow State University, 2003).
However, the problems of biopoiesis as a whole, of course, are not solved by this: we still need to understand how and why polymers can assemble into what is needed for life. Leningrad physiologists D.N. Nasonov (student of Ukhtomsky) and A.S. Troshin (a student of Nasonov), and soon Gilbert Ling (arrived in the USA from China), developed the concept of a cell in the mid-20th century, largely about
contrary to generally accepted views. The main thing for us in it is that the cell is not a solution held by its shell, but a jelly-like structure (gel), the activity of which determines the work of the cell.
Currently, this theory6^ is very advanced and provides insight into many issues of cytology. The basis for the operation of all cellular mechanisms (ion transport across the cell border, cell division, chromosome segregation, etc.) is recognized as a local phase transition.
If we recognize that the cell cavity is not a solution, but a gel, then the whole problem of biopoiesis changes: instead of idle thoughts about how the first set with the qualities necessary for a given model of biopoiesis could be formed from the molecules of the “broth”, a rather real task is posed - understand how the gel complex necessary for the birth of life was structured.
It should not be thought of as a cell and is better called an eobiont (this term was proposed by N. Piri in 1953).
The first difficulty of biopoiesis, which disappears in the concept of a gel: the required concentrations of substances and their ions are set not by the shell of the eobiont, but by its very structure. No “pumps” are needed to start life.
The second difficulty - how the first proteins and nucleic acids formed into the desired helical structures - disappears when one understands the fact that the helices are determined by the quasicrystalline structure of water.
The main thing is that water exhibits the very activity on which all living things are based. It appears in two completely different forms at once: firstly, the structure of water determines the spatial structure of macromolecules and organizes their interaction, and secondly, water serves as a source and carrier of reactive oxygen species (ROS) - this is the general designation for particles containing oxygen with unpaired electron (hydroxyl, hydrogen peroxide, ozone, C2, etc.).
The quenching of ROS, achieved by pairing two unpaired electrons when two free radicals combine, is, according to Voeikov, the main and historically first source of life energy (ATP appeared later - see paragraphs 7-7**). ROS arise all the time and immediately disappear - they are either used in the metabolic reaction, or, if there is no such need at the moment in a given place, they are simply extinguished; Moreover, there are special mechanisms in the cells of all organisms for extinguishing.
This process of birth and death of ROS reminds me of fluctuations of the quantum vacuum (Voeikov agreed with this analogy).
61 This is what the American physical chemist Gerald Pollack calls his construction (Pollack G.H. Cells, gels and engines of life; a new, unified approach to cell function. Seattle (Washington), 2001; Russian edition in preparation, edited by V.L. Voeikov). In fact, we are talking about one aspect of the future theory: an abstract cell is considered; cell diversity (eg modes of division) is ignored, and it is unclear how to include it in this concept. The role of the membrane and the early evolution of the cell are oversimplified.

The main oxidizable substrate of biochemistry is highly structured water, the oxidation product is weakly structured water, and the source of energy is the quenching of ROS. The act of structuring water is an act of energy accumulation; the act of its destructuring releases energy for a biochemical reaction. We can say that it was the inclusion of this process in the reactions of the geochemical cycle, which led to the complication of substances, that marked the transition of chemical activity to biochemical activity. For more details, see: [Voeikov, 2005]. If we remember that respiration refers to the oxidation of substrates for the purpose of metabolism, then Voeikov’s thesis

“Life is the breath of water” is quite acceptable. Of course, this is not a definition of life, but an indication of the first and main bioenergetic process, as well as the main direction of the search for a solution to the riddle of the birth of life.
To begin with, a coacervate is a tiny piece of aqueous gel, but the gel can fill a large structure (for example, a puddle). If we add that ROS abound above water, in water and in gel, then, as we will see, the problem of the initial stages of biopoiesis is greatly simplified.