Theory in Biosciences ( IF 1.1 ) Pub Date : 2021-05-06 , DOI: 10.1007/s12064-021-00342-w Athel Cornish-Bowden 1 , María Luz Cárdenas 1
Disagreement over whether life is inevitable when the conditions can support life remains unresolved, but calculations show that self-organization can arise naturally from purely random effects. Closure to efficient causation, or the need for all specific catalysts used by an organism to be produced internally, implies that a true model of an organism cannot exist, though this does not exclude the possibility that some characteristics can be simulated. Such simulations indicate that there is a limit to how small a self-organizing system can be: much smaller than a bacterial cell, but around the size of a typical virus particle. All current theories of life incorporate, at least implicitly, the idea of catalysis, but they largely ignore the need for metabolic regulation.
中文翻译:
重新审视生命的本质:理论如何阐明它
关于当条件可以支持生命时生命是否不可避免的分歧仍未解决,但计算表明,自组织可以从纯粹的随机效应自然产生。接近有效的因果关系,或者有机体使用的所有特定催化剂都需要在内部生产,这意味着不可能存在有机体的真实模型,但这并不排除可以模拟某些特征的可能性。这样的模拟表明,自组织系统的大小是有限度的:比细菌细胞小得多,但大约是典型病毒颗粒的大小。当前所有的生命理论至少都隐含地包含了催化的概念,但它们在很大程度上忽略了代谢调节的必要性。