Wyniki wyszukiwania - BazTech

1

Gracilaria gracilis – A Review of Ecological Knowledge, Chemical Composition, Cultivation, and Applications

Mouedden Rajae, Abdellaoui Souad, El Madani Faid, El Ouamari Najib, Slimani Douaa, Kasmi Khaoula, Taibi Mohamed, Zahir Ilham, Chaabane Khalid

Ecological Engineering & Environmental Technology

|

2024

|

Vol. 25, iss. 1

276--287

EN

Gracilaria gracilis is a benthic, intertidal red macroalga (Rhodophyta) of the commercially important Gracilaria genus. It is highly valued in scientific research for its ability to produce high-quality agar, a valuable polysaccharide widely utilised in various industries. This review serves as a guide to G. gracilis, encompassing various aspects of its biology, chemical composition, cultivation methods, and the main environmental factors influencing its growth as well as its different uses. The method used involved a descriptive analysis of the articles sourced from Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, and Springer. The results of the review showed that G. gracilis is one of the best candidates for cultivation, giving an excellent resilience to salinity and temperature fluctuations as well as offering ease of vegetative reproduction, among others traits. It can grow at temperatures ranging from 20 to 30°C, salinities between 25–35‰ and up to 42‰, depths ranging from 0.5 to 2.5 m, as well as light intensity of around 70 and 210 μmol photons m-2·s-1. On the basis of its chemical composition, G gracilis has many potentials as a source of high-value compounds and extracts for various uses in cosmetic, food, pharmaceutical, and biomedical industries. It is also used as a raw material or nutritious dietary item in the human diet, and can be suggested as a potential novel commercial source of phycobiliproteins.

2

Mass Occurrences of Millipedes in Times of Global Climate Change

Nieradko-Iwanicka Barbara, Jung Monika

Polish Hyperbaric Research

|

2020

|

nr 4(73)

81--88

EN

There had been recorded a rise in global average temperature by 1.5°C since pre-industrial times. It promotes the spread of diseases carried by vectors and mass occurrence of arthropods. Millipede can carry infectious agents, invade homes and farms, cause skin irritation in case of exposure to their excretions.The aim of the study was to find information about mass appearances of millipedes and identify the places and periods where it happens. A systematic review of publications available in online scientific databases and the library of the Medical University of Lublin was performed. As many as 5 reports about mass occurrence of millipede were from Japan, 3 from Brazil, 3 from Australia 2 from Germany and Hungary, and single publications from Romania, Norway, Poland and Madagascar. In Japan the 8-year periodicity of millipede outbreaks was observed. Japan and Australia encounter problems at railway due to these organisms. In other countries they are nuisance to people when they enter their dwellings and pose a burden in farming and gardening therefore mechanical, chemical and biological methods of millipede control are tested. On the other hand millipede help in composting organic waste. In conclusion: global climate change is accompanied by an increase in frequency of mass occurrences of millipedes.

PL

Od czasów przedindustrialnych odnotowano wzrost średniej temperatury na świecie o 1,5°C. Sprzyja to rozprzestrzenianiu się chorób przenoszonych przez wektory oraz masowemu występowaniu stawonogów. Krocionogi mogą przenosić czynniki zakaźne, atakować domy i gospodarstwa, powodować podrażnienia skóry w przypadku kontaktu z ich wydzielinami. Celem badań było znalezienie informacji o masowych pojawach krocionogów oraz identyfikacja miejsc i okresów, w których to się dzieje. Dokonano systematycznego przeglądu publikacji dostępnych w internetowych bazach naukowych i bibliotece Uniwersytetu Medycznego w Lublinie. Aż 5 doniesień o masowym występowaniu krocionogi pochodziło z Japonii, 3 z Brazylii, 3 z Australii, 2 z Niemiec i Węgier oraz pojedyncze publikacje z Rumunii, Norwegii, Polski i Madagaskaru. W Japonii zaobserwowano 8-letnią cykliczność masowego występowania krocionogów. Japonia i Australia mają problemy na kolei z powodu tych organizmów. W innych krajach są one uciążliwe dla ludzi, gdy wchodzą do ich mieszkań i stanowią obciążenie w rolnictwie i ogrodnictwie, dlatego testowane są mechaniczne, chemiczne i biologiczne metody zwalczania krocionogów. Z drugiej strony krocionogi pomagają w kompostowaniu odpadów organicznych. Podsumowując: globalnym zmianom klimatu towarzyszy wzrost częstotliwości masowych pojawów krocionogów

3

Laboratoria Instytutu Biologii Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku

Maciak S.

Laboratorium - Przegląd Ogólnopolski

|

2018

|

nr 1

67--72

PL

Prowadzone w Instytucie Biologii badania odzwierciedlają najnowsze światowe trendy i są wykonywane w oparciu o nowoczesny sprzęt wysokiej klasy naukowej.

4

Cladotanytarsus molestus Hirvenoja, 1962 in Poland : toward the identification of bioindicative Tanytarsini (Diptera: Chironomidae)

Puchalski M., Zimny F., Giłka W.

Oceanological and Hydrobiological Studies

|

2016

|

Vol. 45, No. 3

316--323

EN

A rare chironomid species, Cladotanytarsus molestus Hirvenoja, 1962, collected at Lake Straszyńskie (the drinking water reservoir for the city of Gdańsk), was recorded from Poland for the first time. The adult male of the species is redescribed, and intraspecific morphological variations of diagnostic structures are presented in detail. Data on the species’ biology are also provided.

5

Organizmy modelowe w rozwoju biologii i medycyny na przykładzie muszki owocowej

Cal M., Zegan A., Filik K.

Laboratorium - Przegląd Ogólnopolski

|

2016

|

nr 9-10

21--26

PL

Badania na organizmach modelowych, takich jak muszka owocowa, zarówno te prowadzone w przeszłości, jak i te aktualne, są niezwykle istotne w naukach podstawowych, jak również w innych dziedzinach biologii, medycyny oraz szeroko pojętego środowiska.

EN

Studies of model organisms such as the common fruit fly, both those conducted in the past and the current ones, are extremely important for basic sciences, as well as other fields of biology, medicine and the environment.

6

Fitoekstrakcja wspomagana czyli szansa zwiększania efektywności procesu fitoremediacji poprzez połączenie działań chemii i biologii

Szczypior S. K., Krasnodębska-Ostręga B.

Analityka : nauka i praktyka

|

2015

|

nr 3

42--47

PL

Wspomaganie fitoekstrakcji poprzez połączenie metod chemicznych i biologicznych, czyli zastosowanie jednoczesne dodatku chelatorów wraz z augmentacją wyselekcjonowanymi szczepami bakterii, wydaje się jedynym sensownym rozwiązaniem, umożliwiającym komercjalizację technologii remediacji z użyciem roślin.

7

Określenie wieku kozy (Cobitis taenia) i kozy złotawej (Sabanejewia aurata) z wykorzystaniem niektórych struktur twardych

Lampart-Kałużniacka M., Pietraszewski D., Marszał L., Heese T., Przybylski M.

Rocznik Ochrona Środowiska

|

2013

|

Tom 15, cz. 2

1041--1052

EN

Age is one of the most important life history variables of fish used to estimate growth rate, mortality rate and production. Age determining is usually carried out by analyzing any of several calcified structures, such as scales, otoliths (more frequently) or fin rays (rather seldom). Scales are easy to collect and this is the reason why this structure has been widely used, but for several reasons annuli may be ambiguous to discern on scales, especially in the loaches. The material was collected in May 2010 in the Pilica River. A total of 29 fish individuals, including 16 spined loach and 13 golden loach, were examined. The range of total length (TL) of the fishes in the sample studied was 43–102 mm in the former and 35 do 70 mm in the latter species, respectively. The precision of ageing using the cross-sections of dorsal, caudal, anal, pectoral and ventral fins rays were compared with age determination on the basis of otoliths. The analysis of the annuli of the investigated structures revealed that individuals aged 2 to 5 years (golden loach) and aged 3 to 7 years (spined loach) occurred in the material (Table 1 and 2, respectively). The obtained results indicate that in natural water bodies older individuals than formerly presumed may occur. Microscopic slides of the cross sections of otoliths and fins are most reliable for ageing such structures. The anal fin (A) it the most reliable structure for ageing, i.e. the age obtained from the fin is least divergent from the age obtained from the otolith. While planning the investigations of the age structure of populations it is necessary to establish the periods of sampling in a way that will be most congruent with the period of annuli formation.

8

Jaskinie Polski - nowy internetowy serwis Centralnej Bazy Danych Geologicznych PIG-PIB

Grodzicki J., Machalska E.

Przegląd Geologiczny

|

2011

|

Vol. 59, nr 10

678-680

EN

The Caves of Poland is a popular science internet service about Polish caves. It is based on first Polish open access database containing data on localization, geology, biology, hydrology and history of all Polish caves as well as their planes and cross-sections. As the new data from exploration and case studies appear, the database is continuously verified and supplemented. Project Caves of Poland is a result of collaboration between Polish Society of Friends of Earth Sciences (PTPNoZ) and Geoinformation Management PGI-NRI. The project has been carried out on request of theMinistry of the Environment and financed by the National Fund for Environment Protection and Water Management. The service Caves of Poland is run by the Central Geological Database of the PGI-NRI (http://jaskinie.pgi.gov.pl).

9

Początki ekologii roślin w czasach renesansu - kolekcja akwarel Libri picturati (a18-30)

Zemanek A., Zemanek B., Ubrizsy Savoia A.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

|

2005

|

R. 50, nr 3/4

87--122

EN

During the Renaissance ecological thinking emerged both in printed scientific works as well as in pictures showing plants against the background of their natural environment. A unique source to the history of plant ecology is the Libri picturati (A 18-30) collection of watercolours kept at the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow (Poland). This collection consists of 13 volumes of plant pictures, and contains c.1800 specimens (over 1000 taxa) coming mainly from north-western Europe, Mediterranean region, and also from Asia and America. Some of these pictures match with woodcuts in various works by the famous Flemish-botanists, mainly Charles de L’Ecluse (Carolus Clusius) (1526-1609). Both illustrations of plants and their short annotations provide a synthetic review of ‘the ecology of the Renaissance period’. The paper deals with ecological issues which could be found in the collection, such as: information on the climatic-and edaphic requirements of some species, and on plants occurring in various habitats (such as aquatic and bog plants; plants of banks of inland water courses and wet meadows; halophytes occurring along sea coasts; plants of forests, meadows, edges of forests; plants of mountains; and anthropogenic plants – ruderal and segetal). For many species, information is given about them being cultivated in gardens and fields, and on some requirements of cultivation. In addition, phonological data is provided, mainly about flowering periods including the flowering of alien species acclimatized in north-western Europe. Many facts presented in the collection are probably the first accounts ever in the world, e.g. the information on halophyte communities of sea coasts, including illustrations of species and description of habitats which were described in terms o f plant sociology only in the 20th century. Also provided are correct assessments o f the way o f life of parasitic flowering plants. The level of ecological knowledge contained in pictures and descriptions of the Libri picturati, when assessed against the background of recent knowledge! of the topic, must be regarded as very high. In the collection, one must note a striking-absence of superstitions and magic, so often presented in the Renaissance treatises on plants (even the beliefs in magic attached to ‘the rose of Jericho’ – Anastatica hierochuntica, are discarded as untrue by applying ‘an experimental test’). Most o f the data provided in the collection is corroborated by recent knowledge, although obviously on many occasions we find the information from the Libri picturati incomplete. The vast array of ecological issues contained in the collection, illustrates well the process of the emergence of modern knowledge about the relationships between plants and the environment. It seems that such a high level of knowledge resulted not only from the theoretical research interest of the creators of the collection, but also from the searches in the field aimed at finding new cultivated plants. An additional source of information was provided by horticultural practice, which in the Netherlands of the late 16th century reached a very high level. It was the marriage of theory and practice, and art and science, this cradle of modem science, which gave such a magnificent offspring in the form of the ‘painted garden’ in the Libri picturati.

10

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) i jego koncepcje biologiczne. W dwusetną rocznicę śmierci. Część I

Bednarczyk A.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

|

2003

|

R. 48, nr 1/2

33--56

EN

The textual analysis of J.G. Herder’s main work, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, which is conducted in the present article focuses on historicism as a method of Herder’s natural research, and on historicism and naturalism as a method of his research on man as a social being and on the regularities of the historical process. In his historicism, Herder followed the ever more frequent historical approach in natural research (Descartes, Buffon, Kant). In more general terms, Herder derived his concepts of man and society from the extensive natural knowledge of the times that he had acquired. Both the natural process and the historical process were subject to laws of a causal nature, the most general of which, according to Herder, was the law of emergence of order out of chaos. The thesis on the causal unity of the history of nature and humankind was accompanied in Herder’s approach by the thesis on the unity of the animate world, the view that animals and man were linked through a significant similarity in their morphological-anatomic structure, which was expressed in the concept of morphological type. The concept, which Herder developed in close collaboration with the poet-naturalist J.W. Goethe, has been reconstructed in detail in the current article. The article emphasizes some of the characteristic solutions adopted by Herder, such as the modification, through the introduction of discrete transitions, of Leibniz’s law of continuity (lex continui), which rules the great chain of being. The unity of morphological type was masked by a remarkable diversity of animate forms. Just as Goethe, Herder accounted for the rise of this diversity, accompanied by the preservation of stable type, by the operation of a compensatory mechanism, described as a principle of compensation. The principle related to both nature as a whole (macrocosm), as well as to man, to whom Herder referred as microcosm. The notion of type found in Herder’s concept is correlated with the notion of analogy. The link between the two notions is that what is expressed by the type, i.e. the stability of morphological structure of animate bodies and the unity that is manifest through this stability, arises from the similarity discovered between the particular forms compared, that is from the analogy that links them. The very process in which organic forms emerge was subjected to the necessity of preserving the analogy between them. The analogy held not only between the way in which spatial forms were shaped, but also between the ways of sensing and cognising, which were a function of the former. In the animal world, man became a form in which stability, conceived as morphological type, manifested itself in a pure manner, vis-a-vis other organic forms, man performs the function of tertium comparationis. This was confirmed by Goethe’s discovery of os intermaxillare in man; however, this was a discovery that Herder was reluctant to recognize. Herder tried to put order into the diversity of living beings in two ways: firstly, by resorting to a typological operation and reducing such diversity to one type, which he held man to be; secondly, by creating a sequence of living beings according to their increasing degree of perfection, that is according to their degree of proximity to the fullest and most balanced realization of the type - man. In this way, a scala naturae, or the already mentioned great chain of being appeared. The uniqueness of Herder’s great chain of being (as contrasted to the concepts of other naturalists) consisted in the fact in its successive steps - in an ascending motion and at a relatively constant pace -, the realization of the same type was taking place. The motion involved was marked for progress, in the sense that it brought closer the appearance of man, in whom the type came forth to the fullest; man was thus the goal towards which nature was oriented. However, the forms through which nature finally achieved its goal, were not phases of an actual, constant process occurring in the world, but they constituted isolated elements of the sequence. This picture of linear ordering of living beings that Herder outlined has tempted some historians of biology to join the independently emerging elements of the sequence together, turning the sequence into a process, and forcing such elements to transform from one into another and to acquire a greater degree of perfection along with time. Thus Herder was, quite falsely, found to be an eighteenth century precursor of Darwin. Meanwhile the original organic form, representing a successive element in a chain, emerged in a separate, independent, precisely successive creative act of nature, which thus was oriented towards to the final and most important act - the creation of man. Herder excluded the possibility that the structural type of a living being could change, and thus he excluded the possibility a process of transformation of one organic form into another over time. The stability of the structural type was conceived by Herder as the precondition of life. Within the type, however, Herder did allow for the variability of forms, with the causative factor behind such changes being climate, which in those times was a factor that was most frequently regarded as a source of variability. The most interesting thing was that the mechanism of change that Herder described made him a Lamarckist at a time when the original views of J. B. Lamarck (1744-1829), presented in his Philosophie zoologique (1809), were not yet known. The antitransformationism that characterized the naturalist views of Herder is testified to at many points in the text of his Ideen. Herder expressed his theoretical attitude in a variety of ways, one of which consisted in his categorical and unequivocal view that there is a fundamental difference between ape and man, the origin of which was to be found in the nature of individuals of the two species. By producing successive organic forms, nature has been preparing to create man by means of repeated trial and experiment, so that the ultimate result - man - could turn out as well as possible and could become a perfect creation. Thus the species of plants and animals that exist on the Earth are traces of those trials and experiments left by nature to their own devices, whenever it turned out that the products did not meet the expectations of the ceaselessly creative nature. Thus, it is not only (higher) animals that are according to Herder the older brethren of man. One could say that the whole animate world of the Earth, all living beings are the numerous siblings of man, whose shared mother is nature. Among those siblings man came last, and turned out to be the youngest of the siblings: man thus shares similarities with the whole of the animate world. Both Herder and Goethe described this significant affinity with the help of the notion of morphological type. As for the diversity of organic forms, they described it by means of the compensation principle, and accounted for it by reference to the particular conditions of the environment in which type was realized. Herder was not satisfied to limit himself to a description of the creative nature. He made an attempt to explain the basis on which the process of creation was taking, to explain its mechanism. Here Herder resorted to his theory of forces, making use of a notion which was in common currency in 18th century science, both in science concerned with animate and inanimate nature. He believed that he did a good job of the task he posed before himself. However, the theory is far inferior to other scientific achievements of Herder’s: its theoretical and methodological aspects were not very carefully developed, it was superficial and of dubious cognitive value, it was very reminiscent of the speculative naturalist concepts of German romanticist philosophy, to which in fact it had given rise. This theory will be the subject matter of the second part of the present article.

11

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) i jego koncepcje biologiczne. W dwusetną rocznicę śmierci. Część II

Bednarczyk A.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

|

2003

|

R. 48, nr 3/4

57--78

EN

J.G. Herder’s work, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1791), features, alongside a naturalist-based historiographic conception explaining the mechanism of the historical process, also a theoretical approach - partly naturalist and partly philosophical in origin - of a more restricted scope: namely the theory of organic forces, which Herder intended as part of the naturalist research programme and expected, inter alia, to throw some light on the unity that characterizes animate and inanimate nature. One striking characteristic of the view of the world presented in the Ideen consists in the fact that this world was deterministic, in the broad sense of the word, i.e. it was subject to laws. A deterministic attitude became widely accepted in 18th-century science; in Herder’s works it found a very distinct philosophical expression. The view of the nature was by formulated by Herder in the shape of (a) a methodological postulate, which obliged scientists look for causes of the phenomena that occurred; (b) the principle of the conservation of force, or action, e.g. also the conservation of life; (c) the principle of the morphological unity of living beings. The theory of organic forces was intended as a universal conception of a significant degree of generality, which was to encompass physical and psychic phenomena, and to resolve fundamental metaphysical questions, but it turned out to be unclear, made use of notions with a fuzzy scope, and reflected a variety of doubts of different origin that its author had. It was probably as a result of these features of the conception that it has never been subjected to detailed analytical research, nor has its origin and the meaning of the concepts that constitute ever been satisfactorily explained. The scope of the textual research described in the article has been restricted to one, conceptually relatively homogenous work of Herder’s, namely his Ideen. The Ideen document a certain period in Herder’s work and the naturalist field of his interests, which he shared and on which he closely cooperated with Goethe. The first component of the notion of organic force - the organic - was frequently used in 18th-century science (eg. by Buffon, Bichat). In Herder’s text it is used in the following senses: (a) in the oldest sense, which makes a direct recourse to how it was used by Aristotle, being organic may be described as being ’’connected with the organ and dependent on it; originating and located in the organ”; (b) being organic is also acting in a spontaneous way, carrying a source of action within, and not merely reacting to a stimulus acting from without; being organic is being primarily active, and not reactive (the latter feature is shown by mechanical creations, which are opposite of the organic); this sense is in line with the whole theory of forces, as the essential features of force are also creativity and spontaneity; the seat of the organic force was thus an organ; the force acted from within that organ in a spontaneous way, giving rise to manifestations of life within that organ and the organic whole that contained it: (c) being organic is both being a whole (an organic whole), as well as forming an indispensable (organic) part of the whole, belonging to the whole; (d) being organic relates to what is animate, what is endowed with the features of life (cf. Bichat). All the aforementioned features of the organic were attributed by Herder to the force which he called organic and made the central concept of his theory. Herder made the second component of the theory of organic forces - the concept of force - much more definite, putting it in the foreground, and attempting to present it in a more comprehensive way; he thus supplied more textual material for study. A closer analysis of the text reveals that Herder’s explanation by recourse to force could be reduced in fact to a framework of causal explanation. The force-cause as such, however, remained unknown; the organic force was also unknown in its ’’pure” form, outside and independently of the organ. That such a force existed could be proved by observing the working organ and the form that this working of the organ took. The working of the organ, just as the force, was also unknown in its ’’pure” form, as such; it always occurred in the body and could be cognized through the body: it was the working of the body. Thus, category of the property (of the body) could be used in the description of the change observed within the body as the results of the working of the force. For instance, if the body was alive, this meant that present within it was the vital force postulated by Herder; and such a statement in fact exhausted the explanation of the peculiar phenomenon of life formulated by Herder. The concept of force used by Herder, as well as by 18th century biology in general, did not derive from Newton concept of force (or even less from Leibniz’s concept of monade), but rather from the concept of dynamis, which had its origins in Aristotle’s philosophy and was introduced into medicine by Galen. The interpretation of the concept of organic force as an explanatory tool is not the only possible interpretation. This explanatory function of the concept may be regarded only as Herder ”force”-related way of expressing himself, and the concept may be used only in a descriptive manner. Indeed, all of the Ideen have this kind of basically descriptive character. It could be said in fact that the theory of organic forces and some equally general conceptions constitute a metaphysical digression in the naturalistic and scientific description developed by Herder. The concept of organic force in the descriptive function would then serve to describe the function of bodies endowed with specific properties, such as life, spontaneous activity, wholeness, etc. In the description the focus moves away from what a living being is towards the mode in which it works; it reveals in particular the dynamism of vital processes so prominent in Herder’s thinking. Such an interpretation would make Herder’s work appear more strongly embedded in the naturalist tradition. The beginnings of individual life were to be sought, according to Herder, in the organization of forces, or in other words, in the way whereby processes taking place in a morphologically uniform substance were ordered in time. As the body developed, this primary organization of processes was subject to transformations and it became an increasingly mechanic organization of spatial creations, or organs. The solidified morphological structure now began to have a feedback effect on the processes that were taking place within it: it changed their direction and the effect that they produced. The former, most highly plastic, dynamic organization of processes had by now lost so much of its plasticity and was solidified in the state it had reached, that it now deserved to be called a machine; a living body had become a machine. While a change in the kind of ordering - from a dynamic ordering of processes to a static ordering of morphological processes had taken place - the structure, the emergent organ and the whole anatomical structure did not remain in an immutable state, but conversely it found itself in a state of ’’flow”; the organism remained in state of dynamic equilibrium, exchanging its building stuff with the environment. The dynamism of an animate body was also manifested in another way, once the organs had been formed: namely in the working of the organs determinated by their anatomical structure and described in terms of function. A full description of an organ should contain a description of its morphological structure, or form, and the description of the way it worked, or its function. Herder combined the principle of the unity of form and function with the principle of the primacy of function with regard to form (as opposed to the mechanistic principle, which claimed the primacy of form with regard to function). In the principle of the unity of form and function, one can see a concrete expression of another principle formulated by Herder - that of the correspondence between the internal and the external. The theory of organic forces used to explain (and to describe) the morphological unity of the animate world, i.e. to explain what it had been designed by Herder to do, is bound to lead to disappointment, which is inexorably to be expected of any explanation in terms of forces. According to Herder, information on the morphological structure of any organism is carried by that hypothetical force. Explaining the unity of animate nature in terms of organic forces can also be formulated in another way: the cause of the observed unity of the animate world is to be found in the organic forces stable mode of functioning, which is dependent only on these forces. The insignificant cognitive value of such an explanation will be more distinctly seen if the explanation is reformulated: animate nature preserves (morphological) unity, for this unity forms its essence. To sum up, it is only appropriate to add that the interpretation of the concept of force presented above is not the only interpretation possible. There are traces in the text of the Ideen that Herder hypostasized the concept of force, that he subjected force to substantialization and treated it as an a distinct being, independent of material substance. He resorted to this when he moved away from naturalism and entered what might nowadays be termed psychology. The naturalist interpretation proposed in the present paper fits in an unprompted way into the general naturalist current characteristic for the science of the European Age of Enlightenment.

12

W pułapce krótkookresowego myślenia. Krytyczna ocena społeczeństwa i gospodarki Irenäusa Eibla-Eibesfeldta

Kośmicki E.

Ekonomia i Środowisko

|

2002

|

nr 2

170--180

PL

Profesor Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt należy do najwybitniejszych współczesnych biologów zajmujących się problematyką zachowania się ludzi i zwierząt. Do najbardziej znanych jego prac naukowych należą podręczniki poświęcone zachowaniu się zwierząt, a także zachowaniu się ludzi. Obok wielu opracowań ściśle naukowych I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt jest też autorem kilku interesujących książek o charakterze filozoficzno-społecznym, gdzie podejmuje on także podstawowe problemy ekonomii i ochrony środowiska. W swoich pracach - ten znany na całym świecie naukowiec - nie unika nigdy trudnych problemów społecznych i ekologicznych związanych z gwałtownymi zmianami ludzkiego zachowania w wyniku rozwoju kultury, zmiany miejsca człowieka w przyrodzie i w społeczeństwie. Podstawowym problemom współczesnego społeczeństwa poświęcona jest także ostatnia książka I. Eibla-Eibesfeldta W pułapce krótkookresowego myślenia, w której podejmuje problematykę perspektywy czasowej w procesach ewolucji biologicznej i funkcjonowaniu ludzkiego społeczeństwa.

13

Pierwsze organizmy w dziejach ziemi. Komentarz biologiczny do Epok natury G.L. Buffona

Bednarczyk A.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

|

2001

|

R. 46, nr 3

31--54

EN

In G.L. Buffon’s multifaceted activity as a naturalist, geology is represented by two voluminous works: Histoire et theorie de la terre (1749) and Les epoques de la nature (1778). Both these treatises shared a cosmogonic hypothesis, according to which the solar system originated as a result of a collision between the Sun and a comet, in which a block of matter that was wrested from the Sun rushed through space and disintegrated into smaller fragments, thus supplying the necessary building material for the future planets. What the treatises differed in was that the second of them contained a much more detailed account of the Earth’s past and of the history of the ever increasing number of living organisms that inhabited the Earth. Les epoques de la nature, though concerned mainly with major cosmogonic-geological problems, dealt with many interesting theoretical questions relating to biology. One of them, namely the question o f how the first organisms in the Earth’s past had emerged, was not presented in the treatise in a sufficiently clear way: hence, the present paper is going to provide an elucidation of the views held by Buffon on that matter. In the third out of the six epochs distinguished by Buffon in the Earth’s past, the planet had cooled down to such an extent that the water vapour surrounding it could already be transformed into water, which filled all the hollow parts in the Earth’s crust, thus forming the seas; in those primeval seas there emerged the first living organisms. In Les epoques de la nature, however, Buffon let this remarkable act in the Earth’s history remain without any comment or explanation. In his biological deliberations in that work, he concentrated on completely different questions - those relating to palaeontology, biogeography and ecology; meanwhile some explanation concerning the origin of life could be provided by a conception whose subject-matter had to do with beings and events on the suborganismal level. Indeed, Buffon did develop such a concept and it is known by the name of the conception o f organic molecules. The conception was developed to explain physiological phenomena that take place in already existing organisms and that are the object of direct experience. However, the conception can be extrapolated and used for phenomena that occurred in those epochs in the past where no organism had yet existed; this can be done in order to explain the origin of living organisms, i.e. to do what is clearly missing in Les epoques de la nature. The present article tries to justify the possibility of using the concept of organic molecules in such a way. Above all, it draws attention to the easily noticeable and notable tendency in the way that the conception evolved and it also highlights the fact that, in describing events from the Earth’s past, Buffon did introduce (albeit only at one point in Les epoques de la nature) the motif of organic molecules. Buffon’s organic molecules, which constituted the building blocks of an organism, were endowed with life, were infinite in number, were indestructible and - at least in the first version of the conception - showed no qualitative differentiation; the only variability that they exhibited related to motion. The peculiarity of Buffon’s conception was that matter was primarily (and not derivatively) divisible into non-living matter and living matter, for life as such constituted a property of matter. Life was thus not a state into which non-living matter passes when subjected to the action of hypothetical forces that endow it with biological organization. Hence, life should not be treated as a function of that organization, for it is an irreducible (in all the senses of the word) property of mat mass, attraction etc. Matter endowed with life thus appears in the form of an assemblage of organic molecules which are carriers of that specific quality. In Buffon’as early version of the conception, the molecules were qualitatively homogeneous, i.e. all of them simply had life ascribed to them. Later, the living organic molecules turned out to be also most highly differentiated in qualitative terms, for they carried full information on where in the organismal whole that they were forming they should have their place. They were thus endowed with generic specificity (they made up an individual of a particular species) and they were specific with regard to the organs they formed (they formed muscles, bones, nerves, etc.) An important part o f Buffon’s conception was the never explicitly formulated principle of conservation (constancy) of life, according to which the molecules not only were not subject to disintegration and did not undergo internal transformation, but they did not come into being de novo either; the principle thus excluded the possibility of spontaneous generation. The notion of spontaneous generation found in Buffon’s works did not embrace the generation of living organisms from inorganic substances or even from organic ones (in the contemporary sense of those terms). What Buffon regarded as spontaneous generation was the formation of random conglomerations of organic molecules that did not use the information, which they were carrying, on their place in the organism; in that way there also formed the animalcula, which only a whole century later were to be refashioned as the contemporary spermatozoa. Thus, in the process that Buffon referred to as spontaneous generation, and which he conceived in a way different from the generally accepted one, there was neither the emergence of life as a new state or new quality of matter (for that state and that quality were a property of the organic molecules), nor was there any generation of entities called organisms, as understood at that time. In the period of over thirty years that spanned the time when Buffon developed his conception of organic molecules and the time when he started to work on Les epoques de la nature (1778), the scientist’s views on spontaneous generation had undergone a significant transformation. This transformation is documented in an article contained in the fourth supplement to the Histoire naturelle, which was published a year before the fifth supplement containing Les epoques de la nature. In that article Buffon introduced an idea of great theoretical relevance, namely the idea that spontaneous generation was the primary way in which living organisms originated. Buffon also put forward the following daring hypothesis (he made a mention of it also in Les epoques de la nature)', let us imagine that the Supreme Being has simultaneouly deprived all earthly organisms of life, by bringing about a disorganization of the organic molecules that formed them, without, however, the molecules undergoing any change - either in terms of their number, or in terms of their specific properties (the principle of conservation of life). The molecules that remained at large would then begin to cluster and form new bodies, which would take on the form of organisms. Some of the less perfect ones, would be endowed only with the ability to feed, while others, the more complex ones, would be able to reproduce. In Buffon’s hypothesis we can observe the aforementioned evolution of his views on the conception of organic molecules: all the information on the spatial structure of the organisms (and of the features of the species) was now contained in the very molecules themselves. After that hypothetical catastrophe, new forms would emerge, not all of which would be perfect. Among them would be forms that were not perfectly organized, unable to reproduce, or simply those that were damaged; those would disappear. New beings that managed to survive would be slightly smaller than their predecessors, for in the period that separated the two acts of creation, there would be a significant dissipation of the the heat concealed within the Earth. Heat, in Buffon’s conception, played an important role in influencing the ways of formation and the size of the emergent living beings, but was not the factor that triggered their spontaneous generation. Under the influence of heat, the living organic molecules would only display more fully the specific features of life and would begin to participate in the physiological transformations of the organism that had become their habitat. Heat, it could be said, would „bring to life“ the organic molecules and set them in motion, while non-living matter would serve as the ground upon which their usual activity could develop: namely, they would generate living bodies by combining with one another due to their specific affinity. Thus, when the Earth cools off completely and there is no longer the heat to stimulate organic molecules to action, and when the organisms inhabiting the Earth perish, releasing at their death and disintegration the molecules that they contain within themselves, the molecules will not cease to exist, they will not be changed, and there will be no decrease in their number; they will only cease to manifest their presence in this excessively cooled-off world. Once the molecules are supplied with sufficient amounts of heat, they will regain their former mobility and will re-enter into the circulation of living substance. It can be assumed that as a result o f some successive cosmic catastrophe, the molecules could resume their function once again - that of generating living organisms, beings that they had once been forced to abandon. In the course of geological transformations life has not appeared on Earth, but only made manifest its eternal presence here (just as it did on other planets), whenever the conditions for that were favourable, and it was heat that had a crucial role to play in creating conditions favourable for the development of life forms. Life, according to Buffon, was as old as the same age as equal age with matter and shared its history; it constituted a form o f existence of one of the two varieties of matter - the one that had the form of organic molecules of living matter, which has always accompanied non-living matter on Earth (and in the Cosmos at large).

14

Różnorodność biologiczna a rozwój zrównoważony

Michałowski A.

Ekonomia i Środowisko

|

2001

|

nr 1

169--183

PL

Stan i zasoby środowiska stanowią jeden z trzech najważniejszych - obok społeczeństwa i gospodarki - czynników, które będą determinować warunki i możliwości dalszego rozwoju w XXI wieku. W przyrodzie przebiegają wszelkie procesy związane z życiem, bytowaniem i działalnością gospodarczą. Stan środowiska warunkuje funkcjonowanie ekosystemów, ich zdolności do utylizacji antropogennych odpadów i innych obciążeń oraz możliwość zachowania pożądanej różnorodności biologicznej. Współcześnie do najważniejszych zadań należy zapewnienie bezpieczeństwa biologicznego, podniesienie jakości życia poprzez zapewnienie dobrego stanu środowiska naturalnego na całym obszarze kraju oraz zagwarantowanie, że polskie dziedzictwo przyrodnicze i kulturowe przekazane zostanie pokoleniom w stanie umożliwiającym realizację ich aspiracji.

EN

For many years now biodiversity has been stimulating the contemporary ecological thought. It has become the kind of a bridge between the ecology and many areas of natural sciences, nature conservation and environmental protection. More and more often people noticc that there is a threat of reduction of biodiversity on all levels of organisation: landscape, ecosystem, species and genetic. Science provides the basis for broader understanding of the point of environmental protection. The arguments put in favour of biodiversity preservation proved so important to the humankind that the international community decided on the necessity of an international convention to that effect. Reduction of various components of biodiversity on all levels of organisation affects the health and well-being of the society, the conditions of the conduct of business activity and on the long run it entails a serious reduction of the future generations' ability of sustainable'development. The Convention on Biodiversity is particularly interested in man and its well-being. In place of orthodox protection of biodiversity it provides for balanced utilisation of resources. At present the term biodiversity is one of the main paradigms of nature conservation, ecology and environmental policy. Biodiversity preservation means various activities consisting not only in the performance of the tasks related to direct protection in situ and ex situ but also in the creation of conditions for such protection. Biodiversity preservation is one of the preconditions of sustainable development. It ensures the balancing of economic activity with the natural environment capacity. It points to the need of supporting biodiversity preservation activities through adequately constructed sector policies and application ol the instruments of ecological policy and management procedures.