Benji’s Reviews > What Is Life? Revisited > Status Update

Dyson (1985: 5) has perceptively noted that in his book, “Schrödinger’s
view of what constitutes a living organism resembles a bacteriophage more than it resembles a bacterium or a fruit-fly”, which in hindsight proved
perfectly appropriate.

It is interesting that many of these pioneers—most notably
Delbrück and his group—used bacteriophage viruses as their experimental system, as these are purely parasitic, crystallizable entities in which the
metabolic function has been lost and only the hereditary function survives.

Let us not forget that ‘Brownian motion’ is named after the botanist Robert Brown, who first reported it in 1827!

As Michel Morange (2020: 411) succinctly puts it, “Schrödinger’s position is a direct transposition of the mechanistic and deterministic views of Descartes, expressed in terms of genes and chromosomes”.

The oft-told story is that von Neumann told Shannon to call his uncertainty measure ‘entropy’ because “no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage” (quoted in Tribus and McIrvine 1971: 180).

It is, of course, delightfully ironic that the section of What Is Life? that advocates of nonequilibrium thermodynamics (and many others) have found most illuminating and inspiring is the very same section that Pauling—arguably the greatest chemist of the twentieth century—finds most wrongheaded and infuriating.