What is Life?:How chemistry becomes biology Read Online Free

they will react and what materials are likely to form? You consider and apply the appropriate chemical rules, depending on the nature of the problem, and you come up with a prediction. No purpose, no agenda—just inviolate laws of nature. The notion of purpose within the inanimate world was laid to rest with the modern scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.
    The very existence of teleonomy however, leads us to a strange, even weird, reality: in some fundamental sense we are simultaneously living in
two
worlds each governed by its own set of rules—the laws of physics and chemistry within the inanimate world and the teleonomic principle that dominates the biological world. Indeed, given the existence of two distinct worlds we find ourselves interacting quite differently with each of those worlds. Consider our interactions within the inanimate world. We move from one place to another as required, we try to keep warm when it is cold, to keep dry when it rains, we build a physical enclosure to live in to protect ourselves and to facilitate life’s activities. We learn to climb up slopes despite the gravitational force, to generate fire for cooking, to manufacture tools for improved function, to plug a hole in a leaking roof, to avoid physical injury, and so on. All of our interactions with the inanimate world are based on the recognition that there are certain laws of nature, described primarily by the physical sciences, which govern the manner in which the universe functions.Understanding those laws helps us to keep out of trouble, and, even better, enables us to take advantage of nature’s
modus operandi,
thereby allowing us to further life’s goals more effectively. In fact that is the essence of technology—creating systems that exploit nature’s laws in a beneficial manner.
    Our interactions with the living world, however, are of a quite different kind and are much more complex. As we have already noted, the living world is teleonomic—all living creatures are busy furthering their agenda, and in doing so they must take into account the particular agenda of other living beings. Accordingly, living things create a web of interaction with other living things, making many of our actions mutually dependent. Consider us humans. We communicate and deal with members of our immediate family, with our work colleagues, with other members of our society in an endless series of interactions—by spoken and written word, more subtly without words, by gestures. Some of these interactions are cooperative in nature, some competitive. Ordering a cappuccino at the local café or going to the hairdresser exemplify cooperative interactions, while bargaining in the market over the price of some article or fending off an intruder are competitive interactions. Our lives involve endless interactions of both types as we individually pursue our ‘purpose’ and get on with life’s goals. We also continually interact with a wide range of non-human life forms. Our need for sustenance is satisfied by feeding on other living creatures, both animal and vegetable, and we protect ourselves against the life forms that threaten us, whether multicellular creatures—bears, sharks, snakes, mosquitoes, or spiders—or from single-celled creatures—bacteria of endless variety. Many non-human interactions are cooperative—the pet dog that we feed which providescompanionship and warns us of intruders, the billions of bacteria in our gut to which we happily provide room and board, and who return the favour by assisting us with our digestion and more.
    We are so used to this dual state of affairs—matter that exists in both living and non-living forms—that much of what has been said here is glaringly obvious and very much taken for granted. Familiarity breeds acceptance, if not contempt. But if I were to tell you that on Mars all material forms obeyed one set of principles, yet on Venus they followed another different set, we would all be