Living Computers : Replicators, Information Processing, and the Evolution of Life

✍ Scribed by Alvis Brazma

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 321
• Category: Library

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Living Computers
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
I How to Clone Oneself?
A mechanical replicator
Self-reproduction without hand-waving
Cellular automata and Life
Self-reproducing structures
The world of information bits and bytes
Church–Turing thesis
The complexity of reproduction
Autonomous replicators and ecosystems
Chance and making a reliable device from unreliable parts
Microbes—molecular replicators
II Self-organizing Molecules
Measuring order
From order to disorder
From disorder to order
Molecular order of crystal lattices
Energy and its equal partitioning
Free energy
Creating order via the Second Law
Molecular templates and copying of information
The liquid order in water
III Informed Self-organization
Life's building blocks
Self-organizing sequences
The empiric laws of biology
Self-assembling molecular complexes
Self-organizing molecular processes
Energy and information
Life's information molecule
The central dogma
Copying the cell's 'tape'
Assembling by the manual
Controlling the production
Epigenetic information and inherited structures
Genome sequencing and bioinformatics
Crick's central dogma and von Neumann's replicator
IV The Simplest Life
Model bacteria
Inside a bacterium
A bacterium replicating
Autonomy and ecosystems
How similar are the clones?
The simplest possible living cell
Biochemical communism
The RNA world
A living cell and the Universal Constructor
V Evolving Replicators
Changing genomes
A death for every birth
From genotype to phenotype
Microbes in the wild
Pangenomes and exchange of information
Complexity evolving
Fitness landscape and evolvability
How much change is too much?
Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution
VI Life on Earth
From pre-life to life
The chemistry of early life
From RNA to DNA and proteins
A complex cell
The key epimutation
From cells to organisms
Genomes vs individuals
Sex and information exchange
The elusive concept of a gene
Runaway genomes
New means of information processing
Is evolution learning?
Animal communications
VII Evolution as a Ratchet of Information
Information and prior knowledge
The analogue and the digital
Information in a genome and the prior knowledge of a cell
Epigenetic information
Niche construction
Animal cultures
Measuring biological complexity
Is there progress in evolution?
Genetic algorithms
The Brownian ratchet of information
All the information on Earth
VIII From DNA to Language
What is language?
Learning by example
From animal communications to language
When did our ancestors start to talk?
From genes to language
Genotypes and mnemotypes
From language to genes
From speaking to writing
From clay tablets to silicon chips
IX Epilogue: Beyond Language
Notes
Bibliography
Index