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Answering Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?”

In his “What Is Life?” Schrödinger poses three questions: (1) What is the source of order in organisms? (2) How do organisms remain ordered in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (3) Are new laws of physics required? He answers his first question with his famous “aperiodic solid”. He leave...

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Autor principal: Kauffman, Stuart
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7517386/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33286586
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22080815
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description In his “What Is Life?” Schrödinger poses three questions: (1) What is the source of order in organisms? (2) How do organisms remain ordered in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (3) Are new laws of physics required? He answers his first question with his famous “aperiodic solid”. He leaves his second and third questions unanswered. I try to show that his first answer is also the answer to his second question. Aperiodic solids such as protein enzymes are “boundary conditions” that constrain the release of energy into a few degrees of freedom in non-equilibrium processes such that thermodynamic work is done. This work propagates and builds structures and controls processes. These constitute his causally efficacious “code script” controlling development. The constrained release of energy also delays the production of entropy that can be exported from cells as it forms. Therefore, cells remain ordered. This answers his second question. However, “What is life?” must also ask about the diachronic evolution of life. Here, the surprising answer to this extended version of Schrödinger’s third question is that there are no new entailing laws of physics. No laws at all entail the evolution of ours or any biosphere.
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spelling pubmed-75173862020-11-09 Answering Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?” Kauffman, Stuart Entropy (Basel) Article In his “What Is Life?” Schrödinger poses three questions: (1) What is the source of order in organisms? (2) How do organisms remain ordered in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (3) Are new laws of physics required? He answers his first question with his famous “aperiodic solid”. He leaves his second and third questions unanswered. I try to show that his first answer is also the answer to his second question. Aperiodic solids such as protein enzymes are “boundary conditions” that constrain the release of energy into a few degrees of freedom in non-equilibrium processes such that thermodynamic work is done. This work propagates and builds structures and controls processes. These constitute his causally efficacious “code script” controlling development. The constrained release of energy also delays the production of entropy that can be exported from cells as it forms. Therefore, cells remain ordered. This answers his second question. However, “What is life?” must also ask about the diachronic evolution of life. Here, the surprising answer to this extended version of Schrödinger’s third question is that there are no new entailing laws of physics. No laws at all entail the evolution of ours or any biosphere. MDPI 2020-07-25 /pmc/articles/PMC7517386/ /pubmed/33286586 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22080815 Text en © 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Kauffman, Stuart
Answering Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?”
title Answering Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?”
title_full Answering Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?”
title_fullStr Answering Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?”
title_full_unstemmed Answering Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?”
title_short Answering Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?”
title_sort answering schrödinger’s “what is life?”
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7517386/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33286586
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22080815
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