PHYSICS 20E Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Anaximander, Erasmus Darwin, Polyphenism
Document Summary
Viruses - considered by many to sit at the barrier between living and nonliving: cannot replicate on their own but can do so after entering a living cell. Aristotle made an early attempt at defining life, something that. In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of disorder. Technically = # number of ways in which a system may be arranged. Ice cube - minimum entropy, maximum order. Puddle of water - maximum entropy, minimum order. Life is something that decreases or maintains its entropy, evades decay to equilibrium, out of equilibrium . Based on this starting point, schrodinger argued the genetic material had to have a non-repetitive molecular structure (correct! It"s also complex in ways that non-life isn"t. Non-life chemical phase simple life biological phase/ darwinian theory complex life. A movement towards disorder is a drive towards stability. Unchanging things don"t change, and changing things do change - until they change into things that don"t.
