Related papers: Stephane Leduc and the vital exception in the Life…
"Self-organization" has become a watchword in developmental biology, characterizing observations in which embryonic or induced stem cells of animals replicate morphological steps and outcomes seen in intact embryos. While the term was…
It is often stated that there are no laws in biology, where everything is contingent and could have been otherwise, being solely the result of historical accidents. Furthermore, the customary introduction of fundamental biological entities…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
Development from egg to embryo to adult is a fascinating instance of biological self-organization for which genetics has supplied us with a parts list. It remains to find the principles organizing the assembly of those parts. In the last…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
During the development of an organism, cells must coordinate and organize to generate the correct shape, structure, and spatial patterns of tissues and organs, a process known as morphogenesis. The morphogenesis of embryonic tissues is…
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,…
Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…
The esteemed physicist Erwin Schroedinger, whose name is associated with the most notorious equation of quantum mechanics, also wrote a brief essay entitled 'What is Life?', asking: 'How can the events in space and time which take place…
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 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…
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 article frames the relation between biology and physics by characterizing the former as a subdiscipline rather than a special case of the latter. To do this, we posit biological physics as the science of living matter in contrast to…
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…
Trying to identify the entropy production within a cell has been part of debates and studies in the last century. First the idea was to make a resemblance of a cell with a Carnot engine, which is the most thermodynamically perfect machine.…
Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in 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…
The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth in understanding of the pivotal roles of mechanical stresses and physical forces in cell biology. As a result an integrated view of cell biology is evolving, where genetic and molecular features…