Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

Anything with a simple biochemical switch would almost certainly have been “solved” by selection by now, if it were possible without triggering unacceptable trade-offs, and if the “problem” being solved were really a problem.

To stay far from equilibrium, in other words, to continue to exist, a system must be able to extract free energy (what Schrödinger called negative entropy) from a noisy, fluctuating, ever-changing environment. This is no trivial task. In fact, it absolutely requires that life acquire information about the world it inhabits.

Metabolisms are made up of hundreds of chemical reactions. Each reaction may be relatively simple: an enzyme may do nothing more than pull a hydrogen atom off a molecule, for instance. But that molecule is then ready to be grabbed by another enzyme that will rework it in another way, and so on through a chain of reactions that can become hideously

To perform its thermodynamic function, life must acquire