内容

目次

Part 1 "What was life?" - theme and variations: life is historicalreality; can the historical origin of life be reconstructed?;complexity as a physical problem; how does information arise?; life isa dynamic state of matter organized by information; is there aprinciple of order in biological systems?; evolution means theoptimization of functional efficiency; what are the naturalprerequisites for the origin of life?; the ladder of organizationallevels; unceasing creation. Part 2 Vignettes from molecular biology:sequence comparison - statistical geometry, examples; how old are thefirst life forms?; nucleic acids as information stores - the transitionfrom chemistry to biology; structural forms of the nucleic acids; theproteins - molecular purveyors of cellular function; instruction -copying, reading and translation; the genetic code; quasi-species - thecloning of mutant distributions, the structure of mutant distributions;experiments in evolution; sequence space; viral infection; hypercyclesand comparements; recombinant DBA. Part 3 Resume: Darwin is dead - longlive Darwin!