"What is life?" and "What is sex?" are really interesting books; they made me realize how barren my high school biology classes were. She was a great thinker.

I was blown away by Erwin Schrödinger's "What is Life?".

Just using pure reason and inference he not only made accurate predictions about DNA he also inspired a whole generation of physicists to switch to molecular biology and discover the fundamental building blocks of Life.

Tell me I'm not the only one who read "What is Life?" and, despite it not being the correct lyric, immediately heard "baby don't hurt me / don't hurt me / no more" in their head.

It's true. Have you read the book "What is Life?" By Schrodinger? He discusses the very concept you're talking about as he speculates on the physical substrate of genetic information (which was discovered to be DNA not long after the book was published).

Which evolved first cellular metabolism or replication ? Without replication you can't have evolution. Without metabolism you don't have a system to support replication.
(What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger 1944)

This is pretty good as far as grand theories of the universe go, which in fine because we're talking philosophy, not science. However, I don't agree with life being an oppositional force to normal increasing entropy. It's probably more like eddies in a current, where life can only exist where free energy / negative entropy / information already exists and can be used.

You might be interested in a book I just added to my reading list: "What is life?" (Schrödinger, 1944) The wikipedia articles on it sound fascinating.

The book is a very interesting read. It's easy to take our modern understanding of genetics for granted. "What is Life?" contains Schrödinger's musings on what kind of matter could be responsible for heredity; an "aperiodic crystal," as he refers to it. I found fascinating both the things that he got right and the places where he was way off base.

A few offshoots from this line of thinking…

Where do viruses sit on this scale of grayness?

Yes, viruses have organic molecules, information storage systems, and compartmentalization. No, viruses do not have metal catalysis (correct me if I’m wrong) nor do they have energy currencies (they rely on hosts for energy). Viruses appear rather gray indeed.

Can the grayness framework be modified/extended to describe superorganisms?

Superorganisms like bee colonies are only mentioned in passing and the authors do not try to apply their grayness framework. Organic molecules and metal catalysis aren’t as relevant beyond the molecular scale, but information storage systems, energy currencies, and compartmentalization apply just as well to superorganisms. Perhaps those are the more generalizable attributes of life.

I’m reminded of concepts from Schrödinger’s What Is Life?. Schrödinger describes local reduction of entropy to be a key feature — combining energy currencies with compartmentalization is one way to achieve that. Separately, he discusses the hereditary mechanism and suggests an “aperiodic crystal” could encode heritable information.

What would be the contents of a sister article titled “The Grayness of the Origin of Consciousness”?

I would love to see an outline.

The problem with popular science books is that they are written by journalists untrained in science. It should be scientists who write popular works. There are several scientists who have written great works which are neither difficult, nor dumbed down - for example, Steinhaus' "Mathematical Snapshots", Einstein and Infeld's "The Evolution of Physics", Schrodinger's "What is life?" and even delightful works such as Faraday's "Chemical history of a candle".

With the hypercompetitiveness of modern scientific careers, scientists who take time off to write popular expositions are looked down upon. The problem is not Malcolm Gladwell, the problem is the insularity of modern scientists.

Freeman Dyson reviews and extends "What is Life?" in his "Origins of Life," both a lecture[1] and a book.

[1] http://inspirehep.net/record/1268726/files/978-4-431-77056-5...

For statistics I can really recommend 'All of Statistics' by Larry Wasserman (http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~larry/all-of-statistics/)

It runs through a lot of important topics, particularly in inference, without being either as turgid as most stats texts for people without a maths background or as dry as more 'pure' books (no measure theory required).

For biology I'd recommend 'Physical Biology of the Cell' (http://microsite.garlandscience.com/pboc2/) if you like to think quantitatively. About evolution specifically I find Schrodinger's 'What is Life?' thought-provoking if you already know the basics.

This is not a new idea - it's been around for decades now[1] - and the suggestion that it's related to individuality is a distraction that carries a lot of political, psychological, and emotional baggage that is irrelevant to the topic.

There is no individuality in information theory. There are only systems.

It's been debated whether or not there's individuality in evolutionary theory. You don't lose anything - and you may gain a lot - if you stop thinking of evolution as the survival of "fit individuals", and think of it more as the survival of complex ecosystems shaped by a blend of cooperative and competitive strategies with environmental feedback and randomness.

[1] The first example I can find is Schrodinger's book "What is Life?" published in 1944.

"What is life?" - Erwin Schõdinger

Most of this book should be read from a historical point of view. It is also great to read thoughts written by the scientific minds of the 20th century, whose thought processes often went much deeper than today's scientists, trapped in a miscalibrated incentive system can go.

However, if you read just a little of "What is Life?", read chapter VI on Schrödingers idea how living matter is related to negative entropy / information. This is said to contain remarkable thoughts until today, and I met two professors in computational biology by now who told me how this chapter inspired them at the beginning of their career.

To those who enjoyed this one I strongly recommend Heisenbergs "Der Teil und das Ganze".

What about Eric Chaisson's Cosmic Evolution, Goodwin's Signs of Life, Shrodinger's What is Life?, Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe? All of these books I've read which argue the same damn thing as this guy, so what's new? That last book by Kauffman is probably the most simialr, and I highly recommend it to those interested.

As someone who's passed as a native in physics, biology, compsci, and math, this is peculiar to biology, or rather to the culture of academic biology today, where the laurels go to those who can make the biggest mountain out of their molehill of data. Thus you have grand assertions, followed by a slide with a dozen gels, half of which are blurred, which show that under some very strenuous assumptions and some very particular conditions, something might be a certain way if you squint hard enough.

Journal length limits are partially responsible for the culture of bad writing in academic biology, but it cannot explain why most of my colleagues in biology could not express technical ideas clearly in writing even without length limits.

If you go to the older literature you will find papers much clearer than any biology talk I've heard. Arthur Koch's papers on cell shape are good examples. There was also a culture of monographs that is missing today. The best examples I can think of off the top of my head are one by Henrici (http://www.archive.org/details/morphologicvaria00henr) and Schrodinger's 'What is life?'(whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf ) are the two examples that occur to me off the top of my head, or Chargaff's scientific essays in 'Heraclitean Fire'.

Disclaimer: I loathe the culture of academic biology and believe that most of its practitioners should be defunded in favor of serious biological research.

>Of course you could understand the dynamics of a hurricane by analyzing each individual particle

that's actually an article of faith because scientifically speaking we can't. And that's important because it's where reductionism subtly goes from being treated as a scientific method to a sort of belief system.

It's not actually obvious at all that say, complex mind states or intentionality can be reduced to physics. It even seems extremely unlikely, because there's no conceivable way to me how the 'aboutness' of intentional mind states are supposed to be reduced to particles.

Another good example is maybe life itself. Schrödinger in his book What is Life? categorised life as local 'negative entropy', ordering matter at a local level and exporting excess entropy to the outside, in a sense locally 'breaking' the second law of thermodynamics. When our civilisation warms the planet up and produces heat what it really does is exporting disorder, I think it's quite a good description actually.

Aside from the fact that we scientifically haven't proven it, it's hard to imagine how this sort of top-down causal behaviour and complexity is supposed to be reduced to mostly linear particle interactions.

I have glanced over Shrodinger's "What Is Life?" previously. Life is thermodynamics, information/entropy/computational like you said. Clearly the lines are blurred and the definition of life in biology textbooks is quite poor.

Still, this all begs the question of whether the particles that dominate our universe are species or are inherent from the physical laws. Then when you consider that the laws themselves may be species ..well..shoot me already. My head has begun to hurt.