Module 3 Flashcards
What is life
2 parts:
What makes things life is the way that energy matter and info is exchanged between individuals and their environment
Individuals are a very special level of biological organisation - where we see goal directed behaviour in the aspect of life - in the form of metabolism, reproduction, responding to stimuli
What is a life meter?
Life meter - a device that can tell u how far things are on the path to the evolution of life
Takes in data about the physical and chemical conditions of some locations and return a percentage regarding how close life is to evolving there
What did Erwin Shrodinger discover?
Discussed the concept of the entropy - the tendency of things to become disordered
Random moving of atoms cause things to become disorder
There r two different aspects of organisms that keep them in such a order despite the smashing abt of all the atoms - 2nd law of thermodynamics
(The Second Law also states that there is a natural tendency of any isolated system to degenerate into a more disordered state)
What did schrodinger claim about the significance of eating food?
Living things take in food from the environment - food is negative entropy
These things that are consumed have a high level of order that is being used to maintain order within the organism
With out keeping the disorder in check - it will cause the organism to fall apart
What form did schrodinger predict genes to take on? Was he correct?
Living things build their bodies from info and that info is stored in genes - genes hadn’t been discovered yet but he predicted that it would be some form of aperiodic crystal - a crystal is a stable structure and has regularity which allows it to store info but if it is aperiodic then it can store more info
Dna is aperiodic crystal - a structure that can remain ordered despite being bombarded by atoms
Explain the concept of Maxwell’s demon in relation to entropy
Demon is sitting in chamber of gas - the container as dividing wall and a little gate that allows atoms through - devil is controlling the gate - some molecules move faster than others - demon allows fast go through one direction and small one goes through the other direction - result ism that on chamber has more faster atoms than the other - so devil has create a temperature gradient which can be used to do work
Demon has created order without expending any energy which violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics
What are some examples of biological demons?
Channel protein and Kinesin Walker
Full of these at the cellular level - little devices that use info about the identity of molecules and control their movement to allow work to happen - there r reasons why these don’t actually violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics - they’re not 100% efficient in converting info into work - they do need a bit of energy to do this - but they r working at extremely efficient levels
one example is a proton pump of the mitochondria - detects protons on one side of the membrane and transfer them to the other side to produce proton gradient - and then this gradient is used to build up store of energy
Another example is the kinesin walker - walks along microtubules delivering cargo - mechanism allows it to go forward only and involves the use of info
Explain heat in respect to the concepts of order and disorder
Temp is a measure of heat and heat is a measure of energy - represents the energy of molecules in motion
Individual molecules in motion have no goal for where they’re travelling they just fly around - want some sort of coordinated force from outside - they’ll just move randomly - if a group of molecules r heated then they will travel faster than the other molecules and bump into the slower ones and transfer some of their energy and eventually the little intense hot spot is transferred to the surroundings
Explain the concept of entropy
Entropy - the tendency for the random movement of molecules to spread any local concentrations of energy out - energy that is spread out in this way is not any good for doing work - it is lost - energy in the universe gets spread out evenly - never gets back to an ordered state when we consider the universe
Why don’t animals fall apart?
Doesnt fall part because there is work going on in the lizard - work is a kind of energy - work is the energy of a group of molecules all going i the same direction - there is an order to their movement - this ordered movement can push molecules around into very specific configurations - the energy that the lizard needs to do this is coming from the chemical bonds in the food it eats - the process of metabolism is releasing that energy and some of the energy is being used to do the work on the molecules that its body is made up of - to force them to move in particular directions that help a lizard stay in an ordered state - one of the major features of living things - they steal order from the environment in the form of food and they use that to defend or even increase their level of order and their level of complexity - life feeds on negative entropy or drinks orderliness - doesn’t mean the animals r violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics because not all the energy from the food is going into doing the work - a proportion of those molecules receiving that energy don’t cooperate and shoot of in random directions - that means the body of the animals heats up a bit and that heat spreads from the animal into it environment - decreasing the order of the environment - overall environment plus the organism gets a bit more disordered and that is why it is not violating the second law
What is the metabolic rate?
heat production can be measured and that is what is referred to as the metabolic rate
What is the name for the purposeful behaviour of organisms?
The word for the purposeful behaviour of organisms - is homeostasis
The process of being the same has to be an active purposeful process because the 2nd law of thermodynamics
Why is homeostasis necessary and what is it’s relevance to information?
Homeostasis is the way that organisms keep themselves ordered despite the tendency of everything towards disorder - to do this organism need to recieve info and they need to store that info and respond to that info so they can maintain homeostasis
