What is life? : how chemistry becomes biology
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Bibliographic Information
What is life? : how chemistry becomes biology
Oxford University Press, 2012
- : [hbk.]
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-197) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrodinger posed a simple, yet profound, question: 'What is life?'. How could the very existence of such extraordinary chemical systems be understood? This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists both before, and ever since. Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology? Did life begin with replicating molecules, and, if so, what could have led the first replicating molecules up such a path? Now, developments in the emerging field of 'systems chemistry' are unlocking the problem. Addy Pross shows how the different kind of stability that operates among replicating entities results in a tendency for certain chemical systems to become more complex and acquire the properties of life. Strikingly, he demonstrates that Darwinian evolution is the biological expression of a deeper and more fundamental chemical principle: the whole story from replicating molecules to complex life is one continuous coherent chemical process governed by a simple definable principle.
The gulf between biology and the physical sciences is finally becoming bridged.
Table of Contents
- Prologue
- 1. Living things are so very strange
- 2. Historic quest for a theory of life
- 3. Understanding, understanding
- 4. Stability and instability
- 5. The knotty origin of life problem
- 6. Biology's crisis of identity
- 7. Biology is chemistry
- 8. What is Life?
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