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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Developmental biology
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A World Beyond Physics - The Emergence and Evolution of Life (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R752
Discovery Miles 7 520
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A World Beyond Physics - The Emergence and Evolution of Life (Hardcover)
Expected to ship within 18 - 22 working days
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How did life start? Is the evolution of life describable by any
physics-like laws? Stuart Kauffman's latest book offers an
explanation-beyond what the laws of physics can explain-of the
progression from a complex chemical environment to molecular
reproduction, metabolism and to early protocells, and further
evolution to what we recognize as life. Among the estimated one
hundred billion solar systems in the known universe, evolving life
is surely abundant. That evolution is a process of "becoming" in
each case. Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess
reality. But physics alone cannot tell us where we came from, how
we arrived, and why our world has evolved past the point of
unicellular organisms to an extremely complex biosphere. Building
on concepts from his work as a complex systems researcher at the
Santa Fe Institute, Kauffman focuses in particular on the idea of
cells constructing themselves and introduces concepts such as
"constraint closure." Living systems are defined by the concept of
"organization" which has not been focused on in enough in previous
works. Cells are autopoetic systems that build themselves: they
literally construct their own constraints on the release of energy
into a few degrees of freedom that constitutes the very
thermodynamic work by which they build their own self creating
constraints. Living cells are "machines" that construct and
assemble their own working parts. The emergence of such systems-the
origin of life problem-was probably a spontaneous phase transition
to self-reproduction in complex enough prebiotic systems. The
resulting protocells were capable of Darwin's heritable variation,
hence open-ended evolution by natural selection. Evolution
propagates this burgeoning organization. Evolving living creatures,
by existing, create new niches into which yet further new creatures
can emerge. If life is abundant in the universe, this
self-constructing, propagating, exploding diversity takes us beyond
physics to biospheres everywhere.
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