Pragmatic turn in biology: From biological molecules to genetic content operators
摘要
Erwin Schrdinger‘s question 'What is life?' received the answer for decades of 'physics + chemistry'. The concepts of Alain Turing and John von Neumann introduced a third term: 'information'. This led to the understanding of nucleic acid sequences as a natural code. Manfred Eigen adapted the concept of Hammings 'sequence space'. Similar to Hilbert space, in which every ontological entity could be defined by an unequivocal point in a mathematical axiomatic system, in the abstract 'sequence space' concept each point represents a unique syntactic structure and the value of their separation represents their dissimilarity. In this concept molecular features of the genetic code evolve by means of self-organisation of matter. Biological selection determines the fittest types among varieties of replication errors of quasi-species. The quasi-species concept dominated evolution theory for many decades. In contrast to this, recent empirical data on the evolution of DNA and its forerunners, the RNA-world and viruses indicate cooperative agent-based interactions. Group behaviour of quasi-species consortia constitute de novo and arrange available genetic content for adaptational purposes within real-life contexts that determine epigenetic markings. This review focuses on some fundamental changes in biology, discarding its traditional status as a subdiscipline of physics and chemistry.