Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Robert Rosen devoted a large part of his career, from 1958 [18] onwards, to developing a comprehensive theory of life as a self-organizing complex system, "closed to efficient causation". He defined a system component as "a unit of organization; a part with a function, i.e., a definite relation between part and whole."
Biological processes are made of many chemical reactions or other events that are involved in the persistence and transformation of life forms. [1] Regulation of biological processes occurs when any process is modulated in its frequency, rate or extent.
However, Bedau stipulates that the properties can be determined only by observing or simulating the system, and not by any process of a reductionist analysis. As a consequence the emerging properties are scale dependent : they are only observable if the system is large enough to exhibit the phenomenon.
Also called an antibacterial. A type of antimicrobial drug used in the treatment and prevention of bacterial infections. Archaea One of the three recognized domains of organisms, the other two being Bacteria and Eukaryota. artificial selection Also called selective breeding. The process by which humans use animal breeding and plant breeding to selectively control the development of particular ...
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not. It is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction.
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
Holism is the interdisciplinary idea that systems possess properties as wholes apart from the properties of their component parts. [1] [2] [3] The aphorism "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts", typically attributed to Aristotle, is often given as a summary of this proposal. [4]
Metabolic processes force the sum of the remaining two terms to be less than zero through either a large rate of heat transfer or the export of high entropy waste products. [3] Both mechanisms prevent excess entropy from building up inside the growing cell; the latter is what Schrödinger described as feeding on negative entropy, or "negentropy ...