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Carregando... A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Lifede Stuart A. Kauffman
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. The current state of theoretical biologist Kauffman's reductionism-averse view of science and the world. In a near-the-end (p 123) recap of this little book, he says, "Thanks to the three closures -- constraint, work cycle, and catalytic -- living systems literally construct themselves ... upward into the unending openness of complexity in the nonergodic universe above the level of atoms. No laws describe or entail this miracle." When briefly describing what he sees as analogous self-construction in global economics, he completely neglects to mention the devastating impact that recent technological developments have had on privacy rights. sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
How did life start? Is the evolution of life describable by any physics - like laws? Stuart Kauffman's latest book offers an explanation - beyond what the laws of physics can explain - of the progression from a complex chemical environment to molecular reproduction, metabolism and to earlyprotocells, and further evolution to what we recognize as life. Among the estimated one hundred billion solar systems in the known universe, evolving life is surely abundant. That evolution is a process of "becoming" in each case. Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality. Butphysics alone cannot tell us where we came from, how we arrived, and why our world has evolved past the point of unicellular organisms to an extremely complex biosphere.Building on concepts from his work as a complex systems researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, Kauffman focuses in particular on the idea of cells constructing themselves and introduces concepts such as "constraint closure." Living systems are defined by the concept of "organization" which has notbeen focused on in enough in previous works. Cells are autopoetic systems that build themselves: they literally construct their own constraints on the release of energy into a few degrees of freedom that constitutes the very thermodynamic work by which they build their own self creating constraints.Living cells are "machines" that construct and assemble their own working parts. The emergence of such systems - the origin of life problem - was probably a spontaneous phase transition to self-reproduction in complex enough prebiotic systems. The resulting protocells were capable of Darwin'sheritable variation, hence open-ended evolution by natural selection. Evolution propagates this burgeoning organization. Evolving living creatures, by existing, create new niches into which yet further new creatures can emerge. If life is abundant in the universe, this self-constructing,propagating, exploding diversity takes us beyond physics to biospheres everywhere. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)576.8Natural sciences and mathematics Life Sciences, Biology Genetics and evolution EvolutionClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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