Vladimir Vernadsky
(1863-1945)
Vladimir I. Vernadsky was a mineralogist and geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology. He was one of the founders and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Vernadsky is most noted for his 1926 book The Biosphere in which he inadvertently worked to popularize Eduard Suess' 1875 term biosphere and the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis by hypothesizing that life is a geological force that shapes the earth.
Vernadsky was a near contemporary of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose concept of an Omega Point and Cosmogenesis bear many similarities to Vernadsky's ideas on the evolution of life and mind in his "noösphere."
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