(Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 12:23 PM)
Keeping it simple, there are essentially two types of order.
• One type of order is that of patterns, of which the best illustration are periodic crystals and the way they can grow, all of which may appear deceptively similar to the type of order of the biochemical components (nucleic acids and proteins, in particular) inside the cell. Patterns, in fact are a repetitive type of order, that require very little information to be specified.
• Another type of order is that found in coded structures, like information bearing texts, S/W programs and living structures. At the biochemical level, the two fundamental types of components of the cell (nucleic acids and proteins) may appear deceptively similar to the type of order of periodic crystals, but there is an essential difference: both nucleic acids and proteins are crystals, BUT a-periodic crystals, which, unlike patterns, unlike periodic crystals, require a great quantity of information to be specified. In his groundbreaking paper What is Life? (Dublin, 1944), Erwin Schrödinger had already intuited that the genetic code must be based on an a-periodic crystal. This paper was a fundamental inspirational source for both James D. Watson, and Francis Crick, leading to their discovery of the DNA double helix structure in 1953.
It can be shown that while patterns can (and commonly do) arise spontaneously in nature, through the simple operation and interplay of physical and chemical forces, it is virtually impossible (or as the Russian-Belgian scientist Ilya Prigogine put it, "vanishingly improbable") for coded structures to arise spontaneously, from the interplay between matter and energy, for various reasons: chemical properties, thermodynamical basis of information exchange, and others that are quite clearly detailed in the freely downloadable PDF paper linked herebelow:
“Entropy, free energy and information in living systems”, Andy C. McIntosh (@ chfpn.pl)
Keeping it simple, there are essentially two types of order.
• One type of order is that of patterns, of which the best illustration are periodic crystals and the way they can grow, all of which may appear deceptively similar to the type of order of the biochemical components (nucleic acids and proteins, in particular) inside the cell. Patterns, in fact are a repetitive type of order, that require very little information to be specified.
• Another type of order is that found in coded structures, like information bearing texts, S/W programs and living structures. At the biochemical level, the two fundamental types of components of the cell (nucleic acids and proteins) may appear deceptively similar to the type of order of periodic crystals, but there is an essential difference: both nucleic acids and proteins are crystals, BUT a-periodic crystals, which, unlike patterns, unlike periodic crystals, require a great quantity of information to be specified. In his groundbreaking paper What is Life? (Dublin, 1944), Erwin Schrödinger had already intuited that the genetic code must be based on an a-periodic crystal. This paper was a fundamental inspirational source for both James D. Watson, and Francis Crick, leading to their discovery of the DNA double helix structure in 1953.
It can be shown that while patterns can (and commonly do) arise spontaneously in nature, through the simple operation and interplay of physical and chemical forces, it is virtually impossible (or as the Russian-Belgian scientist Ilya Prigogine put it, "vanishingly improbable") for coded structures to arise spontaneously, from the interplay between matter and energy, for various reasons: chemical properties, thermodynamical basis of information exchange, and others that are quite clearly detailed in the freely downloadable PDF paper linked herebelow:
“Entropy, free energy and information in living systems”, Andy C. McIntosh (@ chfpn.pl)
No comments:
Post a Comment