Name: What is life?
ISBN: 9780198784791

What is life?

Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrodinger 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.

What Hacker News says

_MicroftAug 2019

There's a very interesting book called "What is Life - How Chemistry becomes Biology" [1] by Addy Pross (homepage: [2]) in which he claims, among other things, that there is no clear boundary between chemistry and biology.

Here's a review if you don't want to go hunting for information on it [PDF]: https://www.pagepress.org/journals/index.php/eb/article/view...

[1] https://www.amazon.de/What-Life-Chemistry-Becomes-Landmark/d... [2] http://www.bgu.ac.il/~pross/

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pizzaMar 2017

Capitalist Realism

Flow

Neuromancer

Snow Crash

What is Life?

The Stranger

special mention: David Pearce's archipelago of paradise engineering manifesto-websitelets

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_MicroftAug 2019

There is an interesting theory that a gradual process of increasing complexity of autocatalytic processes might be more probable to lead to something like life than a sudden abiogenesis event and that there might have been no single event that could be called the beginning of life.

Here is an (accessible?) article on it:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843823/

One of the authors (Addy Pross) even wrote a book called What is Life - How Chemistry becomes Biology about this idea (https://www.amazon.de/What-Life-Chemistry-Becomes-Landmark/d... ). There's a review of the book at this link [PDF]: https://www.pagepress.org/journals/index.php/eb/article/view...

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keithpeterJan 2014

I am a physical object. I consist of a complex series of 3 dimensional structures, energy flows and chemistry. My source code is a very long one dimensional array of four repeated symbols.

I think it was Ed Wilson who pointed out the 1d DNA leading to 3d structures (perhaps Schroedinger in his book What is Life or Gould in one of the many essays). I can track the reference down if needed.

Meta: I think you are wrong, but I'm surprised at the degree of down-voting.

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