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Schrödinger's cat among biology's pigeons: 75 years of What Is Life?
Philip Ball revisits a book that crystallized key concepts in modern molecular biology.
Looking at an inherited characteristic (such as the protruding lower jaw common among members of Europe’s Habsburg dynasty), Schrödinger asks how the allele responsible remained “unperturbed by the disordering tendency of the heat motion for centuries?”. It’s a shame that Schrödinger didn’t touch on fellow physicist Leo Szilard’s work on Maxwell’s demon, a thought experiment that revealed how entropic disorder could be undone by making use of molecular-level information that looks like mere statistical noise at the macroscopic level. Schrödinger’s thoughts on the entropic balance of life can be regarded as precursors to studies of how biological prerogatives such as replication, memory, ageing, epigenetic modification and self-regulation must be understood as processes of non-equilibrium complexity that cannot ignore the environment.
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