Living organisms, debate

The second issue, which is more relevant to the focus of this chapter, concerns the evolutionary basis of the profound influences living organisms have on Earth s atmosphere. In part this debate continues because of a widespread failure to appreciate limitations on the mechanisms of evolutionary change. For adaptive evolutionary change to happen, an allele must confer benefits to its possessors when the allele is present in only a tiny fraction of members of a population. In other words, an allele must be able to increase in frequency when it is rare. 

Although no one realized it at the time, Fulhame s ideas on catalysts were directly relevant to the debate on vital force. There is no mysterious vital force in living organisms. Instead, organic reactions in living organisms depend on organic catalysts called enzymes. 

What determines the physical forms of animals and plants is a subject of much debate within the biological sciences. We know that the basic unit of living bodies is not crystalline however, should we entirely disregard the units that comprise living organisms as having no link to crystals Does DNA alone uniquely control all living phenomena ... 

A characteristic of this nonequilibrium or irreversible thermodynamics is that time is explicitly introduced. Furthermore, open systems, in which materials and energy flow into and out of the system, are considered. Clearly, a living organism is an open system not a closed one of classical thermodynamics. Because of the flow of materials concentration gradients are set up and transport phenomena often become of primary importance. Articles and books that provide an introduction to nonequilibrium thermodynamics and to the literature in the field include the following.10 26 28 34 Whether these methods can be applied in a practical way to metabolic systems has been debated.35 36... 

Equally a biochemist was Friedrich Wohler, who, in 1828, synthesized the biological material urea from the non-biological cyanic acid and ammonia, thereby settling a debate as old as alchemy itself, by providing the first unassailable evidence that the substances present in living organisms are chemical entities which differ from those in the chemist s reagent bottles only in their complexity, and not by the introduction of any mysterious hypothesis of the nature of life . 

We will leave it to others to debate whether such an organism can ever either learn to control itself or be brought under effective external control. Instead, we will confine our attention here to discussing how having to live with such a state of affairs is likely to influence the strategic environment within which the firm must operate certainly at present and perhaps indefinitely into the future. 

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