Vladimir I. Vernadsky is the Russian founder of Biogeochemistry. He died in 1945. On the occasion of his 150th birthday several scientific institutions met at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin for a conference on 15th March 2013 (at the same building Vernadsky held two lectures in 1927).

Wolfgang Hofkirchner compared Vernadsky’s concepts of the Geosphere, Biosphere and Noosphere to Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s ground-breaking idea of bridging the then-breach between mechanicists and vitalists in biology by establishing a systems approach. Vernadsky’s concepts prove to be implicitly system theoretical and share the same logic, in particular, as to the basic assumption of a hierarchy of levels (click here for the presentation slides).

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Prof. Dr. Heinz Kautzleben, Sekretar der Klasse Naturwissenschaften, Leibniz-Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, holds his lecture (photo: Wolfgang Hofkirchner)

For more information see Hofkirchner’s blog here.