The Origin and Evolution of Complex Enough Systems in Biology

Abstract

Recent criticisms of Neo-Darwinism are considered and disputed within the setting of recent advances in chemical physics. A related query, viz., the ontological thesis, that everything is physical, confronts a crucial test on the validity of reductionism as a fundamental approach to science. While traditional 'physicalism' interprets evolution as a sequence of physical accidents governed by the second law of thermodynamics, the concepts of biology concern processes that owe their goal-directedness to the influence of an evolved program. This disagreement is met by unifying basic aspects of chemistry and physics, formulating the Correlated Dissipative Ensemble, CDE, as a characterization of a 'complex enough systems', CES, in biology. The latter entreats dissipative dynamics; non-Hermitian quantum mechanics together with modern quantum statistics thereby establish a precise spatio-temporal order of significance for living systems. The CDE grants a unitary transformation structure that comprises communication protocols of embedded Poisson statistics for molecular recognition and cellular differentiation, providing cell-hierarchies in the organism. The present conception of evolution, founded on communication with a built-in self-referential order, offers a valid argument in favour of Neo-Darwinism, providing an altogether solid response and answer to the criticisms voiced above. Introductory Remarks Reductionism in Natural ScienceA frequent understanding of natural sciences contends that biology reduces to chemistry and chemistry to physics. Even if the traditional analytic interpretation of mathematics as a language or tool to convert knowledge about nature, i.e. a formal science not being incorporated amongst the branches of physical or life sciences, some recent propositions impart that also physics can be reduced to mathematics [1]. Within such views, based on strict reductionnism, see more below, one argues that the present laws of physics are not only commensurate to biology, but also contain the necessary natural laws for expressing all the known biological facts.There are numerous differences of opinion regarding the scheme outlined above, e.g. the impossibility to derive the Coulomb Hamiltonian corresponding to a molecule from first principles and the general problem of quantum chemistry to treat nuclei and electrons on a more or less equivalent basis, see Löwdin [2]. Other arguments concern the concepts of biology as the laws of physics, at present, exclude a fundamental understanding of biological processes governed by an evolved program [3,4].Observation and deliberate experiments instigate rational, deductive theory, formulated in the language of mathematics, with the so accumulated knowledge discussed and contained by the methods of philosophy in general and the concepts of biology in particular. Recognizing the acquired demarcation between the philosophy of science, including biology, and the enactment of reductionism as embodied in the laws of physics, the endwise connections between them ...

Application of the Catecholaminergic Neuron Electron Transport (CNET) Physical Substrate for Consciousness and Action Selection to Integrated Information Theory

“…Electrons in a quantum dot (QD) structure that are engaged in strong electron–electron interactions can form persistent quasiparticles [ 29 ], which have previously been discussed with regard to biological systems in association with Correlated Dissipative Ensembles [ 30 ]. The study of quasiparticles is revealing that they can be “designed” [ 31 ], and a large number of different types of quasiparticles have been discovered to date, including excitons, phonons, magnons and polarons [ 32 ].…”