24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Microbes Rule the World
Microbes make up 80 percent of all biomass, says microbiologist Carl Woese. In one-fifth of a teaspoon of seawater, there are a million bacteria (and 10 million viruses), Craig Venter says, adding, “If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet. This is the planet of the bacteria.” That means that most of the planet’s living metabolism is microbial. When James Lovelock was trying to figure out where the gases come from that make the Earth’s atmosphere such an artifact of ...
1 Stewart Brand describes the state of our world, engineered by microbes and ourselves as the vehicles for their propagation in many cases.
30 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Homeostasis
The constant conditions which are maintained in the body might be termed equilibria. That word, however, has come to have fairly exact meaning as applied to relatively simple physico-chemical states, in closed systems, where known forces are balanced. The coordinated physiological processes which maintain most of the steady states in the organism are so complex and so peculiar to living beings- involving, as they may, the brain and nerves, the heart, lungs, kidneys and spleen, all working coo... 1 
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notesOrigin of the word, meaning the tendency of animal life to maintain an internal equilibrium.
11 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Microscopic and Macroscopic Perspectives in Science
In science, simultaneous macroscopic and microscopic exploration is quite customary, especially in biology. Molecular biology, for example, which derived from the application of chemical analysis to biological problems and led to the discovery of DNA and its function as the carrier of information for every form of life, has developed independently from physiology, which concerns the whole animal and the way it functions as an integrated living system. In like manner, the difference between th...Folksonomies: science perspectives
Folksonomies: science perspectives
1 notes
notesSeeing the trees for the forest and forest for the trees.
11 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Cybernetics as a Trait of Living Organisms
One of the most characteristic properties of all living organisims, from the smallest to the largest, is their capacity to develop, operate, and maintain systems which set a goal and then strive to achieve it through the cybernetic process of trial and error. The discovery of such a system, operating on a global scale and having as its goal the establishment and maintenance of optimum physical and chemical conditions of life, would surely provide us with convincing evidence of Gaia's existenc... 1 notes
notesThe feedback look, sensation and response to it, are a crucial characteristic of living beings. We feel that cold is a punishment, prompting us to find warmth, while learning skills involve feedback loops of rewarding.
11 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Life as "Improbable Distribution of Molecules"
At the end of the last century Boltzman made an elegant redefinition of entropy as a measure of the probability of a molecular distribution. It may seem at first obscure, but it leads directly to what we seek. It implies that the probably life or one of its products, and if we find such a distribution to be global in extent then perhaps we are seeing something of Gaia, the largest living creature on Earth.
But what, you may ask, is an improbable distribution of molecules? There are many poss... 1 notes
notesOur search for life means looking for distributions of molecules that are unlikely, be they atmospheric proportions or solid constructions.
