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6 pages, 1995, Computers Chem. Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 95--100, (1996)

Abstract:

Author's Abstract: "Present-day molecular biology, despite its name, is almost entirely committed to a macroscopic, classical picture of the organism; one in which quantum aspects play no role, except as a source of noise. Particularly is this true when dealing with informational aspects; especially "genetic information". The pervading metaphor here is an identification of "genetic information" with DNA sequence, and thence with program or software. We take a quite different view herein. If we presume, to the contrary, that microphysical processes play a role in primary genetic processes, then the "information" they can convey consists of observables evaluated on states. It is then natural to analogize a complex, consisting of (observed system + observer) with the biological partition between genome (observed system) and phenotype (observer). Such a picture immediately raises the deep issues surrounding "the measurement problem" in quantum mechanics. In our brief consideration of such matters, we suggest that standard quantum mechanics is too narrow to deal with the biological pictures, because it is inexorably tied to quantifications of classical, conservative systems; there is no such for an organism. Rather, we are led to consider subsystems we call "sites", for which there is in principle no Hamiltonian. We then query the extent to which such "genetic information" is already subsumed in traditional observables a physicist would measure in vitro in a laboratory. We suggest there is no reason to believe that "genetic information", manifested in bioactivities, is reducible to these. Finally, we contrast this view of "genetic information" with more traditional ideas of program and computability. We argue that computability (algorithms) are entirely classical concepts, in a physical sense, and quite inadequate for a biology (or even a physics) in which quantum measurement processes are important. I. INTRODUCTION The explosive developments of the "New Quantum Theory" in the 1920s were, according to many participants and witnesses, accompanied by a renewed interest in biology on the part of the physics community. Put bluntly, it was widely believed that the new insights into nature, occasioned by these developments, would also serve to illuminate "the nature of life". Bohr himself was always much concerned with such possibilities. So too, to mention only the most eminent, was Erwin Schr6dinger, who in his famous essay "What is Life?" repeatedly spoke of a "new physics", required to build the bridges between quantum-theoretic insights and the world of organism. At the very least, no one then doubted that life was heavily intertwined with microphysics."...

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