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The evolution of life on earth, the appearance of man, and social and historical progress are viewed as stages in a single process of development of the surface of the earth. Using the forum of a popular-science journal, a Soviet geographer noted for his theoretical work on regionalization envisages a time when the natural geographic envelope of the earth (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere) will be so saturated with man-made engineering structures as to become a new entity called anthroposphere. This entity will have the characteristics ot a world-wide city with its municipal institutions. It will be highly organized in combined functional-nodal regions, benefitting from a multilevel system of services and a hierarchy of transport centers. It will be a “superorganism” with remarkable analogies to a living organism.

A Marxist philosopher questions the premise stated during the debate over a unified geography [1960–1964] that the natural sciences must be concerned with the study of the laws of nature and the social sciences with the study of the laws of society, and the two may not be mixed. He develops the concept of the noosphere as the sphere in which man interacts with nature (called by others the anthroposphere, technosphere, or sociosphere) and suggests the need for the elaboration of a general theory of the man-nature relationship. The first steps leading to such a theory should involve the study of society by the techniques of the natural sciences, the study of nature by the techniques of the social sciences, and the elaboration of parameters characterizing the actual man-nature relationship.

The development of the anthroposphere exerted a serious influence on the population structure of parasites of synanthropic animals, in certain respects occupying an intermediate position between zoonoses of domestic and wild animals. Nevertheless, synanthropic animals, developing according to the laws of primeval nature, form populations in the anthroposphere and enter into the composition of its biocenoses (community of species of synanthropic and semisynanthropic animals). In connection with this also, true parasites of such animals are fellow members of the biocenoses of the anthroposphere. At the same time the formation of enzootic foci among synanthropic animals comes under the influence of the practical activity of man, which brings them together with enzootic foci of zoonoses of farm animals.