BIO 358 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Thermodynamics, Dna Replication
28 Feb 2017
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Document Summary
Life emerges from chemistry simply: organisms are vehicles built by design information for the purpose of replicating that design information: vehicle = animal bodies including humans, wrong, encoded information at the level of the gene. The gene is the unit of interest: not the animal, not the species, organisms are complex vehicles built by design information for the purpose of replicating that information. Tools structural molecules, catalyst, behaviors, molecular machines. Today: subset of human features shared with all other animals. Organisms are just chemical systems that are encoded with genetic information, giving them a purpose. Even though the genetic information is passed down to you while you are in the womb, by the time you are born, parents" information are long gone. Second law of thermodynamics : total entropy of an isolated system always increases over time, or remains constant in ideal cases where the system in a steady state or undergoing a reversible process.
