Overview

Life is a diverse and ubiquitous phenomenon on Earth, characterized by fundamental features distinguishing living bodies from nonliving material. Yet it is also so complex that it has long defied precise definition. This book from a seasoned biologist offers new insights into the nature of life by illuminating a fascinating architecture of dualities inherent in its existence and propagation. Life is connected with individual living beings, yet it is also a collective and inherently global phenomenon of the material world. It embodies a dual existence of cycles of phenotypic life, and their unseen driver — an uninterrupted march of genetic information whose collective immortality is guaranteed by individual mortality. Although evolution propagates and tunes species of organisms, the beings produced can be regarded merely as tools for the survival and cloning of genomes written in an unchanging code. What are the physical versus informational bases and driving forces of life, and how do they unite as an integrated system? What does time mean for individuals, life on the global scale, and the underlying information? This accessible examination of principles and evidence shows that a network of dualities lies at the heart of biological puzzles that have engaged the human mind for millennia.

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9783642431333

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Reviews

From the reviews: Dualities have been the subject of numerous books and countless published reports. ... Zhegunov (Kharkov State Veterinary Academy, Ukraine) adds to this rich literature with his exploration of the duality that exists between phenomes and genomes. The author begins his discussion with a short review of the impressive genetic and phenotypic diversity that exists on Earth and then argues that this diversity is fully integrated in a global system. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Only general readers. (J. A. Hewlett, Choice, Vol. 50 (10), June, 2013)

From the reviews: Dualities have been the subject of numerous books and countless published reports. ... Zhegunov (Kharkov State Veterinary Academy, Ukraine) adds to this rich literature with his exploration of the duality that exists between phenomes and genomes. The author begins his discussion with a short review of the impressive genetic and phenotypic diversity that exists on Earth and then argues that this diversity is fully integrated in a global system. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Only general readers. (J. A. Hewlett, Choice, Vol. 50 (10), June, 2013)

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