226
D. Lloyd
14.1 Introduction: Life as a Complex System
‘You can never know what to expect from the real nightingale, but everything is determined
in the artificial bird. It will be so-and so, and no different! You can explain it; you can open
it up and show the human thought - how the cylinders are placed, how they work, and how
one follows the other.’
Andersen [3] ‘The Nightingale’.
Physicists and engineers deal with universal uniformity of mechanisms, usually
reducible to relatively simple systems, whereas the evolution of organisms has used
an almost infinite range of quality controls on the test-beds of vitality and survival
over a period of >2 billions of years leading to colossal variety. Biology has come
to expect a great diversity of form, each example of which is invested with its own
individual functional efficiency. The coherent unit (cell and/or, for an unicellular
example, whole organism) has to self-organize (coherently control) its energetics,
informational signaling, and mass increase during its growth [22]. It then has to reproduce exact copies of each and every one of its almost infinite molecular components
and partition them to the progeny, often then to develop new structures during adaptation to environmental changes, signals and stresses, whilst still maintaining form
and function (perhaps over many years) until death. Functional order requires temporally ordered sequences of processes and events repeatedly performed in successive
discreet time intervals and on time scales from atto-seconds to years.
There is a simplistic current zeal for equating an organism to a machine that
can be understood, and with a life story that can be predicted if its DNA is
completely sequenced. Although analogies with robotic machines and their informational contents have become commonplace, these prove more useful to the man-made
constructs of engineers (‘biomimetics’) than to the attempts of biologists to fathom
the purposeful organized complexity of life [100]. Furthermore, the non-reducibility
of the living order to its constituent parts is one of its implicit properties: Hans
Christian Andersen got it right!
14.1.1 Thermodynamics of the Living State
The living state in exchanging matter and energy with its surroundings is an open
thermodynamic system, but close analogies cannot be made with far-from equilibrium physical (Bénard instabilities), or chemical (Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillator)
systems. Living organisms perform with their constituent enzyme reactions on a low
duty-cycle whereby G values are small (some exceptions occur where ionophores
are involved) [162]. Thus overall they are at not-so-far from equilibrium states.
Heimburg [60] asserts that ‘In isoentropic thermodynamic systems all extensive
and intensive variables including temperature can display oscillations reminiscent of
adiabatic waves’. This suggests [156] that the oscillatory propensity of the living state
is a consequence of the necessity for continued performance of metabolic activity
D. Lloyd
14.1 Introduction: Life as a Complex System
‘You can never know what to expect from the real nightingale, but everything is determined
in the artificial bird. It will be so-and so, and no different! You can explain it; you can open
it up and show the human thought - how the cylinders are placed, how they work, and how
one follows the other.’
Andersen [3] ‘The Nightingale’.
Physicists and engineers deal with universal uniformity of mechanisms, usually
reducible to relatively simple systems, whereas the evolution of organisms has used
an almost infinite range of quality controls on the test-beds of vitality and survival
over a period of >2 billions of years leading to colossal variety. Biology has come
to expect a great diversity of form, each example of which is invested with its own
individual functional efficiency. The coherent unit (cell and/or, for an unicellular
example, whole organism) has to self-organize (coherently control) its energetics,
informational signaling, and mass increase during its growth [22]. It then has to reproduce exact copies of each and every one of its almost infinite molecular components
and partition them to the progeny, often then to develop new structures during adaptation to environmental changes, signals and stresses, whilst still maintaining form
and function (perhaps over many years) until death. Functional order requires temporally ordered sequences of processes and events repeatedly performed in successive
discreet time intervals and on time scales from atto-seconds to years.
There is a simplistic current zeal for equating an organism to a machine that
can be understood, and with a life story that can be predicted if its DNA is
completely sequenced. Although analogies with robotic machines and their informational contents have become commonplace, these prove more useful to the man-made
constructs of engineers (‘biomimetics’) than to the attempts of biologists to fathom
the purposeful organized complexity of life [100]. Furthermore, the non-reducibility
of the living order to its constituent parts is one of its implicit properties: Hans
Christian Andersen got it right!
14.1.1 Thermodynamics of the Living State
The living state in exchanging matter and energy with its surroundings is an open
thermodynamic system, but close analogies cannot be made with far-from equilibrium physical (Bénard instabilities), or chemical (Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillator)
systems. Living organisms perform with their constituent enzyme reactions on a low
duty-cycle whereby G values are small (some exceptions occur where ionophores
are involved) [162]. Thus overall they are at not-so-far from equilibrium states.
Heimburg [60] asserts that ‘In isoentropic thermodynamic systems all extensive
and intensive variables including temperature can display oscillations reminiscent of
adiabatic waves’. This suggests [156] that the oscillatory propensity of the living state
is a consequence of the necessity for continued performance of metabolic activity