Scientific biography: 1969 to 1978

THE EVOLUTIONIST TREATISE OF BIOLOGY. PART ONE. THE ORIGEN, NATURE AND EVOLUTION OF PROTEINS AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS

Part One of the Treatise, a study of the process of origin and the nature of the protein

Dur­ing this decade Cordón wrote Part One of the Trea­tise, whose title in the first edi­tion was La al­i­mentación base de la bi­ología evolu­cionista (Nu­tri­ent as the Basis for an Evo­lu­tion­ist Bi­ol­ogy). It was ded­i­cated to the ori­gin, na­ture and evo­lu­tion of the pro­teins and its as­so­ci­a­tions.

Part One starts with a long Gen­eral In­tro­duc­tion (pp. 3-131), in which Cordón pre­sents his view of the bi­o­log­i­cal con­cepts that had been de­vel­oped until that time.

His in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the liv­ing being as an agent ca­pa­ble of ac­tion and ex­pe­ri­ence, whose na­ture can only be un­der­stood by its ori­gin in the process of evo­lu­tion, forced him to de­fine very pre­cise con­cepts about:

• Ex­pe­ri­ence, as a field of forces of a spe­cific phys­i­cal na­ture, the es­sen­tial qual­ity of liv­ing be­ings.
• Ac­tion, as an ef­fect re­sult­ing from the co­or­di­nated and joint ac­tiv­ity of the liv­ing be­ings of its soma.
• The soma, as the sets of liv­ing be­ings of a lower level co­op­er­at­ing in es­tab­lish­ing the phys­i­cal fields of ex­pe­ri­ence, of ac­tion and of the stim­uli of the higher liv­ing being.
• The medium, as the en­vi­ron­ment in­flu­enced by the ac­tion of the liv­ing being in each mo­ment.
• The en­vi­ron­ment, as the scope of the bios­phere that is the po­ten­tial ob­ject of ac­tion and ex­pe­ri­ence of each liv­ing being, with its nu­tri­ent at its core.

After this in­tro­duc­tory pre­sen­ta­tion, the au­thor de­vel­ops his pro­posal on the evo­lu­tive process that must have taken place from the cul­mi­na­tion of the evo­lu­tion of the mol­e­cule on the earth's sur­face to the first cell: the process that gave rise to the pro­tein and to the evo­lu­tion of pro­teins and their as­so­ci­a­tions.

At the In­sti­tute of Ap­plied Bi­ol­ogy (IBA). Madrid, 1978

Today we have no di­rect data on the process of ori­gin of the pro­tein or the process of evo­lu­tion of free pro­teins, but the na­ture of all pro­teins can be in­duced from the struc­tural and func­tional data that are com­mon to cur­rent pro­teins, which are all in­tra­cel­lu­lar or stem from cells. In this stage of his life Cordón was able to ex­plain with rigour, from the ex­per­i­men­tal data that are com­mon to all pro­teins, the three types of rea­sons that in­di­cate the na­ture of the pro­tein:

1. The pro­tein soma is al­ways formed by polypep­tides folded by in­ter­mol­e­c­u­lar forces (and some­times also in­tramol­e­c­u­lar ones) in a way that is per­fectly de­ter­mined in the soma of each type of pro­tein;

2. The pro­tein ac­tion, guided by the pro­tein psy­che, is al­ways an in­ter­mol­e­c­u­lar force field that rec­og­nizes and ma­nip­u­lates its spe­cific mol­e­cules one by one; and

3. The pro­tein en­vi­ron­ment is al­ways formed by mol­e­cules dis­solved in still water.

Cordón took as a basis his con­cept of the na­ture of the pro­tein, and the known data on the evo­lu­tion of the mol­e­c­u­lar com­po­si­tion on the Earth's sur­face, to in­duce a pre­lim­i­nary hy­poth­e­sis of the process of mol­e­c­u­lar evo­lu­tion in the ex­ter­nal zone of the Earth's crust up to the ori­gin of the first pro­tein, ex­plain­ing the se­lec­tive ad­van­tage of each stage that he pro­posed.

“The evo­lu­tion to­wards the pro­tein was un­der­stood through the in­creas­ing dy­nam­ics of mol­e­c­u­lar as­so­ci­a­tions (polypep­tides). At a given mo­ment it made a qual­i­ta­tive in­flec­tion. These as­so­ci­a­tions ac­quired a spe­cific phys­i­cal field of sec­ondary va­lences, of chem­i­cal affini­ties, that was ca­pa­ble of guid­ing the en­vi­ron­ment of loose mol­e­cules and of ac­quir­ing some and dis­pos­ing of oth­ers when suit­able. This is the first time that a being gov­erns mol­e­cules and in­cor­po­rates them in its soma.”

Cordón then in­duced the fol­low­ing evo­lu­tive order of the large types of glob­u­lar pro­teins and their as­so­ci­a­tions lead­ing up to the ori­gin of cell: first there emerged the het­erotrophic glob­u­lar pro­teins that fed on more com­plex mol­e­cules -small polypep­tides- that they in­cor­po­rated in their soma to re­plen­ish it; when these were ex­hausted, the au­totrophic glob­u­lar pro­teins that learned to feed on dis­solved at­mos­pheric methane and am­mo­nia orig­i­nated, and ended up form­ing as­so­ci­a­tions; this was fol­lowed by the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of neo­heterotrophic glob­u­lar pro­teins, which adapted to liv­ing on residues of as­so­ci­a­tions of au­totrophic pro­teins, and ended up or­ga­niz­ing them­selves in as­so­ci­a­tions; and fi­nally, a cul­mi­nat­ing as­so­ci­a­tion of neo­heterotrophic glob­u­lar pro­teins, which Cordón called the pre­cel­lu­lar het­erotrophic as­so­ci­a­tion, must have given rise to the first cell. Evo­lu­tions Trea­tise of bi­ol­ogy. Part One (pp. 139-602).

The rea­soned and de­tailed in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the evo­lu­tion of pro­teins up to a cul­mi­nat­ing as­so­ci­a­tion spe­cialised in feed­ing on de­graded residues of as­so­ci­a­tions of au­totrophic pro­teins al­lowed Cordón to con­sider the ori­gin of the first cell (a sim­ple cel­lu­lar mem­brane) from pro­teins.