All creatures alive today, plus the remains of all living things that have gone before, all the organic compounds, all fossils, all fossil fuels, all the biomass accumulated by this planet over billions of years, exists because, information coded into DNA was accessed, read and acted upon by a cell. Before any one of those cells could grow, before any living tissue could be manufactured, before any polypeptide chains could be assembled, before anything could happen in ANY cell, DNA information had to be processed. Information processing is the very first act of Life.
Why is this an important distinction? Because information processing involves a set of concepts that are independent of the processing method being used. For one, there must exist a consistent set of rules or protocols that govern information processing within the system. This is called an operating system, or OS.
All living organisms follow the same rules for accessing and reading DNA code. These universal rules infer the existence of a biological operating system. I call it LifeOS.
Hi Jim,
Enjoying the read thus far. Your entry on DNA triggered a memory of this article I recently discovered .. and haven’t gotten around yet to discussing.
peace bro
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2007/09/24/dna_unraveled/
Comment by Mondo — September 26, 2007 @ 10:06 am
Buckminster Fuller said something along these lines in his 1970 book ‘I Seem To Be a Verb’.
He wrote: “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”
Comment by Lynne Fischer — July 7, 2010 @ 1:44 pm
Yeah, Bucky was an action verb, a doer for sure.
Comment by insomniac — July 7, 2010 @ 3:12 pm
Reblogged this on syndax vuzz.
Comment by syndaxvuzz — February 7, 2013 @ 4:45 am