What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes BiologyIn his famous 1944 text What is Life? Erwin Schrodinger pointed out how strange living systems appeared to be when viewed from a strictly physical standpoint. All living systems are highly organized and the emergence of these organized systems would seem to contradict the most basic tenets of physics and chemistry, which say that systems tend toward chaos and disorder. What is even more remarkable is that despite dramatic developments in molecular biology in the half century since Schroedinger's remarks, we still don't understand what life is or how it relates to the inanimate world. In addressing Schrodinger's classic question, the author offers a radically new approach to these fundamental questions of biology, what is life and how did it emerge. He examines these issues from a chemical perspective, providing a new understanding of how the sciences of chemistry and biology relate to one another. He shows that recent developments in a new area of chemistry called "systems chemistry" now allow researchers to outline the chemistry-biology connection, shedding light on how and why some prebiotic chemical systems are able to make the magical transformation from inanimate to animate. Through the application of these simple chemical concepts, this book reveals the essence of the animate-inanimate connection, explains the strange properties of living systems in chemical terms, and offers profound new insights into classical biological issues, such the mechanism and driving force for evolution and the origin of altruism. Here the author reveals that the emergence of life on Earth and classical Darwinian theory are intimately related; that Darwinian theory is just the biological expression of a more general chemical principle, one that Darwin himself predicted would likely be uncovered in time. -- From publisher's description. |
Contents
1 Living Things are so Very Strange | 1 |
2 The Quest for a Theory of Life | 32 |
3 Understanding Understanding | 43 |
4 Stability and Instability | 58 |
5 The Knotty Origin of Life Problem | 82 |
6 Biologys Crisis of Identity | 111 |
7 Biology is Chemistry | 122 |
8 What is Life? | 160 |
References and Notes | 193 |
Index | 199 |
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Common terms and phrases
abiogenesis Archaea autocatalytic bacteria bacterial cell bacterium behaviour billion biological systems biologists building blocks capability Carl Woese catalyst chapter characteristics chemical reactions chemical systems chemist chiral competitive exclusion principle complex complexify components Darwin Darwinian defined definition difficulty discussed dynamic kinetic stability energy energy-gathering essence evolutionary explain fact far-from-equilibrium field final finally find first fitness forms function fundamental Gerald joyce greater DKS highly historical holistic homochirality individual insights kind of stability life’s living cell living systems living things material metabolic molecular replication natural selection non-living nucleic acid nucleotides organized origin pattern physicists population prebiotic chemistry prebiotic earth principle problem process of complexification protein question reductionist replicating entity replicating molecule replicating systems replication first replication reaction replicative world RNA molecule scientific Second Law self-replicating sequence significant Sol Spiegelman species specific stability kind systems biology systems chemistry teleonomic character theory thermodynamic tion understand unstable world of replicating