What is Life?: How Chemistry becomes Biology PDF

Rating: (23 reviews) Author: Addy Pross ISBN : 9780199641017 New from $16.42 Format: PDF

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In his famous 1944 text "What is Life?" Erwin Schrödinger pointed out how strange living systems appeared to be when viewed from a strictly physical standpoint. All living systems are highly organized and the emergence of these organized systems would seem to contradict the most basic tenets of physics and chemistry, which say that systems tend toward chaos and disorder. What is even more remarkable is that despite dramatic developments in molecular biology in the half century since Schrödinger's remarks, we still don't understand what life is or how it relates to the inanimate world.

In addressing Schrodinger's classic question, renowned scientist Addy Pross offers a radically new approach to these fundamental questions of biology--what is life and how did it emerge. Pross examines these issues from a chemical perspective, providing a new understanding of how the sciences of chemistry and biology relate to one another. Pross shows that recent developments in a new area of chemistry called "systems chemistry" now allow researchers to outline the chemistry-biology connection, shedding light on how and why some prebiotic chemical systems are able to make the magical transformation from inanimate to animate. Through the application of these simple chemical concepts, this book reveals the essence of the animate-inanimate connection, explains the strange properties of living systems in chemical terms, and offers profound new insights into classical biological issues, such the mechanism and driving force for evolution and the origin of altruism.

Pross reveals that the emergence of life on earth and classical Darwinian theory are intimately related--that Darwinian theory is just the biological expression of a more general chemical principle, one that Darwin himself predicted would likely be uncovered in time.

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• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (November 1, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199641013
• ISBN-13: 978-0199641017
• Product Dimensions: 0.7 x 7.5 x 5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

What is Life?: How Chemistry becomes Biology PDF

In 1944 Erwin Schrodinger published a little book with the title, `What is Life?' Though, obviously not the first to pose this question, it is purported to have provided at least part of the inspiration to those, such as Watson and Crick, who would later go some way to answering it.

Addy Pross, though using the same title, adds the sub-title, `How Chemistry Becomes Biology' and this is quite odd as he spends most of this very slim book attempting to persuade the reader of exactly the opposite; i.e. that biology is simply a sub set of chemistry, or at least its natural extension. His justification for this curious and, I imagine irritating - at least to biologists, strangely naﶥ claim is his depiction of the transformation from non-living to living matter as a two stage process the first of which, the abiological phase, which is governed, principally, according to the established laws of chemistry, results from the autocatalytic replication of organic molecules such as RNA resulting in replicating networks or primitive forms of embryonic proto-life. The second, biological, phase is governed by the `rules' of evolution as elucidated by Darwin leading to an increase in organic complexity and the biodiversity we see today.