This book is written as an addition both to Darwin’s work and that of
molecular biologists on evolution, so as to include views from the point of view
of chemistry rather than just from our knowledge of the biology and genes of
organisms. By concentrating on a wide range of chemical elements, not just
those in traditional organic compounds, we show that there is a close
relationship between the geological or environmental chemical changes from
the formation of Earth and those of organisms from the time of their origin.
These are considerations that Darwin or other scientists could not have
explored until very recent times because sufficient analytical data were not
available. They lead us to suggest that there is a combined geo- and
biochemical evolution, that of an ecosystem, which has had a systematic
chemical development. In this development the arrival of new very similar
species is shown to be by random Darwinian competitive selection processes
such that a huge variety of species coexist with only minor differences in
chemistry and advantages, which is in agreement with previous studies. By way
of contrast, we observe that on a large scale, groups of such species have
special, different energy and chemical features and functions so that in fair part
they support one another. It is more difficult to understand how they evolved
and therefore we examine their energy and chemical development in detail.
Overall we know that there is a cooperative evolution of a chemical system
driven by capture of energy, mainly from the Sun, and its degradation, in
which the chemistry of both the environment and organisms are facilitating
intermediates. We will suggest that the overall drive of the whole joint system is
to optimise the rate of this energy degradation