Related papers: Foundations of biology
We apply the theory of learning to physically renormalizable systems in an attempt to develop a theory of biological evolution, including the origin of life, as multilevel learning. We formulate seven fundamental principles of evolution…
In this essay the ontological structure of reality is explored. The question of reducibility of biology to physics is considered in the context of their ultimate principles. It is shown that biology is an ontologically autonomous science…
The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of quantum mechanics as an inherent characteristic of life. During the last ten years the problem of the origin of life has become an innovative research subject approached by many authors. The…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of…
Physical emergence - crystals, rocks, sandpiles, turbulent eddies, planets, stars - is fundamentally different from biological emergence - amoeba, cells, mice, humans - even though the latter is based in the former. This paper points out…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
Living organisms have some common structures, chemical reactions and molecular structures. The organisms consist of cells with cell division, they have homochirality of protein and carbohydrate units, and metabolism, and genetics, and they…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…
Embryogenesis, the process by which an organism forms and develops, has long been and still is a major field of investigation in the natural sciences. By which means, which forces, are embryonic cells and tissues assembled, deformed, and…
Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first"…
The origin of cellular life can be described in terms of the transition from inorganic matter: solids, liquids and gases, to the emergence of cooperative assemblies of organic matter, DNA and proteins,capable of replication and metabolism.…
The origin of life is shrouded in mystery, with few surviving clues, obscured by evolutionary competition. Previous reviews have touched on the complementary approaches of top-down and bottom-up synthetic biology to augment our…
This short text summarizes the work in biology proposed in our book, Perspectives on Organisms, where we analyse the unity proper to organisms by looking at it from different viewpoints. We discuss the theoretical roles of biological time,…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
Nearly all cell models explicitly or implicitly deal with the biophysical constraints that must be respected for life to persist. Despite this, there is almost no systematicity in how these constraints are implemented, and we lack a…
The search for what differentiates inanimate matter from living things began in antiquity as a search for a "fundamental life force" embedded deep within living things - a special material unit owned only by life - later transforming to…