Christian de Duve was a Belgian medical doctor and biologist. In 1974, he was awarded with the Nobel Prize of medicine and physiology for his work and discoveries of lysosomes and peroxisomes.
Throughout his lifelong career, he develops a rich philosophical thought notably regarding the origin of life, publishing several number of books on that subject. He claimed that chemistry deals with deterministic phenomena and consequently that the origin of life depended on the initial conditions in which it arose. Therefore, he claimed that there are probably numerous cases of life in the universe.
Moreover, he distinguished two sorts of evolution: the horizontal evolution that is responsible of diversity of species and depends of environment and the vertical evolution that is responsible for the increase of complexity of organisms and does not depend of environment. For example, for him, the development of the brain is independent of the environmental conditions. For that reason, de Duve...
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Tirard, S. (2023). De Duve, Christian. In: Gargaud, M., et al. Encyclopedia of Astrobiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-65093-6_5317
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