What is Life?
How chemistry becomes biology
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 27 September 2012
- ISBN 9780199641017
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages224 pages
- Size 223x149x17 mm
- Weight 388 g
- Language English
- Illustrations Approx. 10 black and white illustrations 0
Categories
Short description:
Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrödinger posed a profound question: 'What is life, and how did it emerge from non-life?' Scientists have puzzled over it ever since. Addy Pross uses insights from the new field of systems chemistry to show how chemistry can become biology, and that Darwinian evolution is the expression of a deeper physical principle.
MoreLong description:
Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrödinger 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.
Strikingly, [Pross] 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.
Table of Contents:
Prologue
Living things are so very strange
Historic quest for a theory of life
Understanding, understanding
Stability and instability
The knotty origin of life problem
Biology's crisis of identity
Biology is chemistry
What is Life?
