Life and evolution as physics

Diet-dependent entropic assessment of athletes' lifespan

Life expectancies of the athletes depend on the sports they are doing. The entropic age concept, which was found successful in the previous nutrition studies, will be employed to assess the relation between the athletes' longevity and nutrition. Depending on their caloric needs, diets are designed for each group of athletes based on the most recent guidelines while they are pursuing their careers and for the post-retirement period, and then the metabolic entropy generation was worked out for each group. Their expected lifespans, based on attaining the lifespan entropy limit, were calculated. Thermodynamic assessment appeared to be in agreement with the observations. There may be a significant improvement in the athletes' longevity if they shift to a retirement diet after the age of 50. The expected average longevity for male athletes was 56 years for cyclists, 66 years for weightlifters, 75 years for rugby players and 92 years for golfers. If they should start consuming the retirement diet after 50 years of age, the longevity of the cyclists may increase for 7 years, and those of weightlifters, rugby players and golfers may increase for 22, 30 and 8 years, respectively.

The N-space Episenome unifies cellular information space-time within cognition-based evolution

Self-referential cellular homeostasis is maintained by the measured assessment of both internal status and external conditions based within an integrated cellular information field. This cellular field attachment to biologic information space-time coordinates environmental inputs by connecting the cellular senome, as the sum of the sensory experiences of the cell, with its genome and epigenome. In multicellular organisms, individual cellular information fields aggregate into a collective information architectural matrix, termed a N-space Episenome, that enables mutualized organism-wide information management. It is hypothesized that biological organization represents a dual heritable system constituted by both its biological materiality and a conjoining N-space Episenome. It is further proposed that morphogenesis derives from reciprocations between these inter-related facets to yield coordinated multicellular growth and development. The N-space Episenome is conceived as a whole cell informational projection that is heritable, transferable via cell division and essential for the synchronous integration of the diverse self-referential cells that constitute holobionts.

Towards a General Definition of Life

A new definition of life is proposed and discussed in the present article. It is formulated by modifying and extending NASA's working definition of life, which postulates that life is a "self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution". The new definition includes a thermodynamical aspect of life as a far from equilibrium system and considers the flow of information from the environment to the living system. In our derivation of the definition of life we have assumed the hypothesis, that during the emergence of life evolution had to first involve autocatalytic systems that only subsequently acquired the capacity of genetic heredity. The new proposed definition of life is independent of the mode of evolution, regardless of whether Lamarckian or Darwinian evolution operated at the origins of life and throughout evolutionary history. The new definition of life presented herein is formulated in a minimal manner and it is general enough that it does not distinguish between individual (metabolic) network and the collective (ecological) one. The newly proposed definition of life may be of interest for astrobiology, research into the origins of life or for efforts to produce synthetic or artificial life, and it furthermore may also have implications in the cognitive and computer sciences.

Approaches for testing hypotheses for the hypometric scaling of aerobic metabolic rate in animals

Hypometric scaling of aerobic metabolism [larger organisms have lower mass-specific metabolic rates (MR/g)] is nearly universal for interspecific comparisons among animals, yet we lack an agreed upon explanation for this pattern. If physiological constraints on the function of larger animals occur and limit MR/g, these should be observable as direct constraints on animals of extant species and/or as evolved responses to compensate for the proposed constraint. There is evidence for direct constraints and compensatory responses to O2 supply constraint in skin-breathing animals, but not in vertebrates with gas-exchange organs. The duration of food retention in the gut is longer for larger birds and mammals, consistent with a direct constraint on nutrient uptake across the gut wall, but there is little evidence for evolving compensatory responses to gut transport constraints in larger animals. Larger placental mammals (but not marsupials or birds) show evidence of greater challenges with heat dissipation, but there is little evidence for compensatory adaptations to enhance heat loss in larger endotherms, suggesting that metabolic rate (MR) more generally balances heat loss for thermoregulation in endotherms. Size-dependent patterns in many molecular, physiological, and morphological properties are consistent with size-dependent natural selection, such as stronger selection for neurolocomotor performance and growth rate in smaller animals and stronger selection for safety and longevity in larger animals. Hypometric scaling of MR very likely arises from different mechanisms in different taxa and conditions, consistent with the diversity of scaling slopes for MR.

The Double-Aspect of Life

Life is based on two aspects: matter and a non-material, electrical component. In a dynamic system of reciprocal causality, matter and the so-called bioelectricity interact with one another, forming a functional unity. The aim of this essay is to summarize evidence for bioelectricity, for the sensitivity of biosystems to external physical factors and for the interactions of internal bioelectricity with internal biochemical structures. I propose non-material information of bioelectrical states to be just as inheritable from generation to generation as is the material genetic code.