When we look into the inner workings of biology, we see that the central code that runs life, the genome of an organism, is the sole carrier of interpretable information. Its DNA (or RNA in some cases). This then begs the question: where from does the organism get its instructions on how and when this information needs to be used? It is partially written into the code itself, but if you isolated one copy of a genome onto a Petri dish, it would do nothing outside of a living system. So besides a self-reading code, is there another — more vital — force, which dictates which chapter of which volume of the Larousse needs to be read on a Tuesday morning? Is there room for a vital substance still, or a watchmaker, if you will?
The most astounding part of biology for me, is the answer to this question. And the answer is an anticlimax. There is no watchmaker. There is no vital substance meta. What supplies these instructions on a day to day, or a second to second basis, is the web of interactions between molecules within the cell, between cells, between the organism and its environment, and between organisms (the last interaction not solely driven by molecules). This web of interactions is held by the scaffolding of time.
Carbon and such begat organic molecules; those molecules interacted with one another over time (lots of it), and begat patterns of interactions that repeated ad nauseum, ad vivum. Repeating, reproducing patterns begat living systems (aka LUCA, the last universal common ancestor). Organisms reproduced, passing along recurring patterns of molecular interaction which later got codified into genomes, but all along, sustained by the same unbroken sequence of chemical reactions. This unbroken sequence of reactions, beginning with the first carbon chains and phosphate bonds in the primordial soup, is tethered through time, through surrogates carried in eggs and sperm and glucose molecules and phosphodiester bonds, to the web of reactions that holds me together. The cells of my body know that insulin turns the knob of a tyrosine kinase because that’s what it has done for as long as insulin (or its relatives) existed, and further second messengers will go on to flip the pages of the Larousse to a very specific page to activate a very specific code to bring a very specific protein to the cell membrane.
What sustains life, what dictates the reading of the code, is also what ties me to LUCA: a continuous, unbroken chain of chemical reactions.
kilroykishore 