NEW LAWS TO BE EXPECTED IN THE ORGANISM
What I wish to make clear in this last chapter is, in short, that from all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the ground that there is any 'new force' or what not, directing the behaviour of the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is different from a anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory. To put it crudely, an engineer, familiar with heat engines only, will, after inspecting the construction of an electric motor, be prepared to find it working along principles which he does not yet understand. He finds the copper familiar to him in kettles used here in the form of long, wires wound in coils; the iron familiar to him in levers and bars and steam cylinders here filling the interior of those coils of copper wire. He will be convinced that it is the same copper and the same iron, subject to the same laws of Nature, and he is right in that. The difference in construction is enough to prepare him for an entirely different way of functioning. He will not suspect that an electric motor is driven by a ghost because it is set spinning by the turn of a switch, without boiler and steam. If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.
REVIEWING THE BIOLOGICAL SITUATION
The unfolding of events in the life cycle of an organism exhibits an admirable regularity and orderliness, unrivalled by anything we meet with in inanimate matter. We find it controlled by a supremely well-ordered group of atoms, which represent only a very small fraction of the sum total in every cell. Moreover, from the view we have formed of the mechanism of mutation we conclude that the dislocation of just a few atoms within the group of 'governing atoms' of the germ cell suffices to bring about a well-defined change in the large-scale hereditary characteristics of the organism. These facts are easily the most interesting that science has revealed in our day. We may be inclined to find them, after all, not wholly unacceptable.
An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a 'stream of order' on itself and thus escaping that the decay into atomic chaos -of 'drinking orderliness' from a suitable environment –seems to be connected with the presence of the 'aperiodic solids', the chromosome molecules, which doubtless represent the highest degree of well-ordered atomic association we know of - much higher than the ordinary periodic crystal - in virtue of the individual role every atom and every radical is playing here. To put it briefly, we witness the event that existing order displays the power of maintaining itself and of producing orderly events. That sounds plausible enough, though in finding it plausible we, no doubt, draw on experience concerning social organization and other events which involve the activity of organisms. And so it might seem that something like a vicious circle is implied.
TWO WAYS OF PRODUCING ORDERLINESS
The orderliness encountered in the unfolding of life springs from a different source. It appears that there are two different 'mechanisms' by which orderly events can be produced: the 'statistical mechanism' which produces order from disorder and the new one, producing order from order. To the unprejudiced mind the second principle appears to be much simpler, much more plausible. No a doubt it is. That is why physicists were so proud to have fallen in with the other one, the 'order-from-disorder' principle, which is actually followed in Nature and which alone conveys an understanding of the great line of natural events, in the first place of their irreversibility. But we cannot expect that the 'laws of physics' derived from it suffice straightaway to explain the behaviour of living matter, whose most striking features are visibly based to a large extent on the 'order-fromorder'
principle. You would not expect two entirely different mechanisms to bring about the same type of law -you would not expect your latch-key, to open your neighbour's door as well.We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics. For that is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter. We must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it. Or are we to term it a non-physical, not to say a super-physical, law?
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Originally Posted by IronFist
