Dear colleagues,
Continuing with bookkeeping and cycles, some further speculations could
be made. Keeping in mind some of Terry Deacon's ideas -in order to make
easy the initial considerations- we could say that the basic bookkeeping
of an individual (enzymic) work cycle is an instance of "homeodynamics",
where a orthograde process and a countergrade process are tied (eg, the
favorable ATP hydrolysis propels most enzyme counter-current works). In
the case of a whole cycle of reactions that involves numerous compounds
(& their specific enzymes), this more complex instance probably
represents a "morphodynamic" exemplar. In both cases the thermodynamic
and physico-chemical bookkeepings provide good sense on the system's
evolution. Arguably, there are "proto-signals" such as enzyme effectors
(activators & inhibitors) that impinge in the dynamics without
apportioning any substantial energy; and in the reactions cycles there
emerge complex systemic relationships with the overall system that may
remarkably amplify or dampen the individual changes occurring within the
cycle (via alterations in effectors, substrates or products). At the
time being, not much informational saying; with considerable likelihood
the max. entropy production is a good principle making sense of the
overall bookkeeping results.
Then we go to the "autogenic" stage, where something else dominates the
bookkeeping. We assume that the bacterial life cycle (and even more in
the multicellular organism) implicitly takes along its selection process
a new reference--the "fitness" referent as the gauging instrument to
ascertain what is the impact of the individual change (or received
communication) along the self-production process. Signals from the
environment (communication) encounter a life cycle in progress. And
each signal "means" molecularly what it produces in metabolic and gene
expression changes. We hide from view (and the cell itself, at least
behaviorally) the enormous complexity inside. Glucose "means" good for
the cycle, while strong pH "means" bad; there is evolutionary blueprint
& connectivity imprinted that applies instantly throughout the signaling
system that controls the movement of E. coli: it automatically
orientates towards high fitness places. This fitness bookkeeping is
verosimil and quite useful, even more in the case of complex
multicellular organisms. See a recent comment in Nature (pp. 138-9, 512,
August 2014) "What females really want" referred to fruit flies' complex
courtship, on how male signals become indicators of "fitness" but they
are meant within each particular life-cycle state and past history of
the female.
To summarize this new autogenic stage, both the organismic
self-production process and the communication (signaling system) that we
find in action appear as bona fide "informational". And this term looks
more congenial and simplifying than the rather cumbersome nomenclature
that Deacon continues to develop. So we may depart from his terms as we
are finally in the province of information science, and subsequently a
perspective similar to the previous one might have currency in more and
more informational self-constructions around. Thus, in the human life
cycle we find quite many new bookkeeping terms, such as "profit",
"utility", "value", etc. which may be interpreted as new instances to
hide inner complexity and facilitate behavior in progress by the
individual within highly sophisticate cultural constraints...
The bookkeeping and the cycle, as Koichiro emphasized, become quite
fertile a place to reflect. But please take all the above speculations
"cum grano salis", with the customary grain of salt --or spoonful!
best --Pedro
Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
Dear Koichiro,
Nice that you have left your hibernation for a while!
I quite agree with your excellent comment. On the one side the
bookkeeping of molecules has plenty of tools to ascertain what is
happening with each other in an uncorrelated way (state variables,
force/mass/ energy, entropy, enthalpy, Helmholtz free energy, Gibbs
free energy, etc.). But trying to synchronize their happenstances
becomes daunting: tough external constraints have to be entered in
order to keep a decent bookkeeping and make useful workings. And this
is where the bookkeeping of life starts: building upon cycles as basic
functional constraints: the work cycle of the individual enzyme, the
multiple reaction cycles, the life cycle of the whole bacterium or the
unicellular. In aggregate, the life cycle is the great referent of
biological information, and the source of its "meaning". It is this
different inner reference what makes invalid the maximum entropy
principle for life--sometimes it is followed, sometimes it is just the
opposite. It depends on the intertwining of external "signals" and on
the advancement of the self-production process.
And with this I have already spent my "two cents" for the week...
best
--Pedro
PS. After the crash the list has more complex management (that I
cannot handle very well) and message processing. People willing to
check whether their messages have passed or not may directly check
at: http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/
Koichiro Matsuno wrote:
At 9:14 PM 09/05/2014, Pedro wrote:
Who knows, focusing on varieties of bookkeeping might be quite
productive!
[KM] Pedro, your kick was loud enough to waken me up from my long
hibernation. Suppose there are many things popping up here and there
concurrently with no synchronization among them on the spot. Then, we
would
be totally at a loss what to do when asked to tell what is going on
there.
One plan as a last resort would be to make an appeal to a scheme of
synchronization even if conceivable out of the blue. One candidate
would be
Bob U's energy, in reference to which we can safely say which are
synchronized and which are sequential. One more candidate of this
sort might
be a reaction cycle of a natural origin, since any component reaction
going
round the cycle is ipso facto made synchronous with the occurrence of
the
cycle itself.
Koichiro
--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
[email protected]
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
[email protected]
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
