By Stephen Black
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Extra info for The Nature of Living Things. An Essay in Theoretical Biology
Sample text
The peripheral heat receptors in the skin in man, respond to heat transfer between different temperature ranges, be0 0 0 tween i o ° and 2 5 C . and 2 0 and 4 7 G. , which is itself maintained centrally by another neurological thermometer in the base of the brain. In touch, two sets of tactile corpuscles distinguish between light and hard physical contact, thereby providing the necessary information input to facilitate such a highly developed sense as stereognosis. One way and another, most of the physical and mechanical phenomena now employed by engineers seem to have been utilized by Nature before their discovery by man.
This includes, among other things, the activities of all the muscles which effect movement, the maintenance of osmotic pressures against the normal osmotic gradients, the work of secretion from glands, and in birds and mammals, the liberation of heat to maintain body temperature. Even the activities of the brain and nervous system depend in this way on enzymes. The nervous system is a network of elongated, tubular extensions of the nerve cells. For reasons not yet fully understood, but which almost certainly depend on enzyme action, the amount of sodium in these cells and their tubular extensions is maintained at a level which is far lower than would normally be the case according to the osmotic laws of physics, and the amount of potassium is by comparison much higher.
And when the polypeptides are further combined 42 to form proteins, they evoke of course the varied tastes of meat, eggs and cheese. Clearly the amount of energy involved in the transfer of information by molecular shape must always be low. It is this same low-energy-low-entropy quality of shape which suggests its role in the apparent thermodynamic anomaly of life. And if the energy in a cybernetic system is low, the noise level is low and the sensitivity of the system can be correspondingly high.