Topic: Carl Woese: Life is physics
едно потпури от цитати, взети от работа, която ме впечатлява (и за която по-късно може би ще има още)
Life is physics: evolution as a collective phenomenon far from equilibrium
by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese
(12 рages, 203 references, posted 18 Nov. 2010)
It is as limiting to view life as chemistry as it is to view condensed matter collective states as being primarily about the atoms. The fallacy of “superconductivity is chemistry” is more evident than the
fallacy in the logic leading to the conclusion that “life is chemistry”. This perspective redefines what we demand of biological understanding in two additional ways. First, the very existence of the phenomenon of life needs to be understood. Second, the realization or instantiation of it, on Earth, for example, needs to be understood. A consequence of the lack of fundamental understanding in biology is the failure to recognize that biology is a manifestation of evolution — not the other way round.
The evident tautology embodied by “survival of the fittest” serves to highlight the backwards-looking character of the fitness landscape: not only is it unmeasurable a priori, but it carries with it no means of expressing the growth of open-ended complexity[90] and the generation of genetic novelty. Thus, the "Modern Synthesis" is, at best, a partial representation of population genetics, but this on its own is a limited subset of the evolutionary process itself, and arguably the least interesting one.
Indeed, the textbook picture of a static genome composed of genes and junk DNA has now been superseded by recent findings, and it is arguably more appropriate to think of the genome as a set of
one-dimensional ecosystems, coupled together by horizontal transfer, and containing numerous genetic elements interacting with each other, creating niches for themselves, and evolving stochastically to create a community ecology[84].
The central aspect of evolution: it is a process that continually expands the space in which it operates through a dynamic that is essentially self-referential. Self-reference should be an integral
part of a proper understanding of evolution.Thus, the question really is how selfreferential dynamics arises as a universality class from the basic laws of microscopic physics, as an expression of
nonequilibrium physics. From a computer science perspective, one might say that the physical world can be thought of as being modeled by two distinct components: the program and the data. But in
the biological world, the program is the data, and vice versa.
Collective effects provide important and sometimes counter-intuitive influences in ecological and evolutionary interactions. Thus, although complexity is hard to define precisely and usefully, we regard the defining characteristic of complexity as the breakdown of causality[138]. Simply put, complex systems are ones for which observed effects do not have uniquely definable causes, due to the huge nature of the phase space and the multiplicity of paths.
Carl Woese видимо е доcтатъчно известен и на същото място има качени още две негови работи, контекст в който чудесно звучи финалният цитат от горното: "въпросът не е какво физиката може да направи за биологията, а в обратното"
