What belongs to wildlife?.

It is customary to call nature everything that is not created by man, and it is the main object of the study of natural sciences. Nature is divided into living and inanimate. What belongs to living nature, and what to inanimate? As a first approximation, the answer to this question is obvious. However, the line between living and nonliving in nature is not a clear line, but rather a blurred line.

Living and inanimate nature according to the school curriculum

In elementary grades, in nature studies lessons, schoolchildren are taught to clearly distinguish: a flower, bear, bacillus are wildlife. Stone, cloud, star - lifeless. Probably, it is necessary to start studying the world around us in this way, otherwise an unprepared person will simply get lost in nuances and definitions, which will negatively affect the assimilation of the material. So, according to the school definition, wildlife is the totality of all living organisms that inhabit the world around us. Living organisms are able to grow, reproduce and carry hereditary information.

All inanimate is devoid of these signs. The bodies of living nature include organisms that are part of the five kingdoms: viruses, bacteria, fungi, plants and animals. This position is generally accepted and is shared by most scientists. But it is the majority, not all! For example, viruses, according to this classification, are considered living organisms, but they exhibit "living" properties only when they enter a living cell, and outside of it they are just a set of DNA or RNA molecules (or even just their fragments) that do not show any activity... That is, they are recognized as representatives of the aforementioned “blurred line”.

Noosphere

Noosphere, or the sphere of reason (translated from Greek), is, presumably, a new, higher stage of development of the biosphere, or the totality of all living organisms on our planet. It is clear that the classical definition of a living organism does not apply to the biosphere, since it contains neither DNA nor RNA. The doctrine of the noosphere was created by the Soviet scientist V. I. Vernadsky (1863-1945). In the structure of the noosphere and biosphere, he distinguished several types of matter:

  • living;
  • biogenic (that is, originating from living things);
  • inert (originating from the inanimate);
  • bio-inert (partly living, partly inanimate, that is, the same "blurred streak");
  • radioactive;
  • atomically scattered;
  • cosmic.

Thus, we see that there is little unambiguous in the world, and sometimes you cannot immediately determine what belongs to living nature and what does not. Undoubtedly, as the natural sciences develop, the criteria for defining "living" and "non-living" will change. Already today there is a theory according to which the whole Earth is a single living organism. A clear division into living and inanimate nature is acceptable only for the school curriculum as a base, as a starting point for studying the entire diversity of the world around us.

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