As you know, in the theory of evolution, various researchers put forward and considered the most diverse causes and circumstances of the origin of species in the animal world and their genesis, mainly based on the concepts of variability, mutational laws, heredity and evolutionary adaptation of organisms to the environment.
The fact of sequential complication of the nervous system of the animal series in itself leads to the idea that the biosphere and man are subject to certain spontaneous impulses of evolution itself, which are independent of the external environment. While there is no final scientific concept explaining this improvement, it still requires its own history and theory of the issue. Vernadsky suggested that the revolutionary variability in the morphology of living beings depends on the critical periods of the geological history of the planet, the impulses of which go far beyond the boundaries of earthly phenomena proper. The intensity of the process, in his opinion, may consist in a cosmic effect that has not yet been completely investigated, and therefore not understood by us.
It is interesting that it was among geologists that the scientifically expressed idea of the significance of man and his activity in the rational transformation of the Earth first appeared. The very problem of the biosphere and man, precisely because of their active work, has become a problem of a truly scientific nature. For example, the American researcher Charles Schubert and the Russian scientist Alexei Petrovich Pavlov, independently, concluded that it was necessary to distinguish the era of the appearance of man on Earth in a special geological era. Pavlov gave her the name of anthropogenic, Schubert - psychozoic. Academician Vernadsky himself pointed out that even the founder of glaciology, J. L. Agassi, wrote in the nineteenth century about the era of man, and before him, in the XVIII century, Buffon - about the "kingdom" of man.
But even in the history of philosophical thought, long before that, Vernadsky sees thoughts related to understanding the place and role of life in the Universe. He also connects them with ideas about living matter. Suffice it to recall in connection with this topic two remarkable thinkers of the eighteenth century, who long before Darwin and Dan were motivated in their discussions about the essence of man and his place in nature with deep evolutionary ideas. One of these thinkers was Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev, who in his work “On man, his mortality and immortality” wrote that man is the upper stage of the never-ending process of improving nature, and the influence of human activity on the biosphere is unlimited, because this effect is creative in nature. This property in itself contributes to overcoming physical imperfection and appears to some extent as a compensating factor that determines a person’s place in the biosphere.
Another such scientist was the German enlightener Herder, who, in his work “Ideas for the Philosophy of History,” argued that it is man who is the farthest from all creatures living on Earth in achieving his purpose in the universe. The objectivity of its further development comes for Herder and Radishchev from the force that determines the formation of the world, its acquisition of its life forms.
The same problem - the biosphere and man, like the dream of the predecessors, sounds in the works of V.I. Vernadsky in a different, rational and evidence-based manner. Rejecting the utopianism of certain views, but preserving evolutionary logic, he affirms the objective orientation of the development of the living, which cannot be limited to the appearance of man in the present, very imperfect habitat.
The idea that the biosphere and man are only an empirical generalization of the evolutionary process opens up a huge layer of problems for science, which were previously considered either already solved or unscientific. According to this logic, Homo sapiens cannot be a model of a perfect thinking apparatus. This is only a certain link in the chain of beings to which evolution has prepared both the past and the future.