However, this is not the only possible and scientifically acceptable view of life. There is a challenging alternative, namely its organistic (structuralistic) concept. It may be understood as a theoretical framework that treats processes and structural elements in living organisms as an emergent entity with new qualities that are irreducible to its structural elements - a whole. This whole is seen as possessing properties and laws, which are impossible to derive or foretell just from knowing the properties and laws of its partial or elementary processes and structural elements. The organismic whole is thus autonomous. See Goodwin , About genes .
At our Institute we try to
see life from the latter point of view, yet we do not neglect the importance
and insights of modern reductionistic, mainly molecular, biology. What
intrigues us most is how to understand the self organizing, essentially
dynamic whole manifesting through the process of life in living beings,
and how to relate it to the material and informational matter of organisms
(proteins, nucleic acids, membranes etc.). We regard the basis for the
organismic wholeness in a dynamic and partially coherent, long-range ordered,
field. It comprises organisms as wholes and their minuscule molecular parts
as well. The field must be in close communication with molecules, thus
forming their functional and coordinated assembly that effectively builds
the whole organism. It seems that the field exists on many levels or in
other words, that it is a multilevel field. At least two levels of the
field have been identified. First, there is the level of a long-range ordered
electromagnetic field involving the so called coherent oscillations of
dipolar molecules, as proposed by Fröhlich, Vitiello, del. Giudice, Preparata
and empirically found by Kaiser, Grundler, Pollock, Pohl and others. Another
aspect of this same level is the photon field that is behind the phenomenon
of the ultraweak bioluminescence (see
ultraweak).
There are other research fields that prove a long range order in organisms,
as for instance discovery of bands of colors when the living organism is
exposed to polarized light in an unconventionally used polarization microscope,
discovered by Mae Wan Ho.
The
second level of the dynamic, long-range ordered field is called morphogenetic
field. The field is researched primarily by embryologists, though it has
broader implications and is attracting mathematicians, philosophers and
other scientists as well (see morphogenetic
fields )
At present we are trying to review the concept of genetic information. In contemporary biology the latter is almost exclusively reduced to genes, i.e. to messages encoded into specially organized segments of DNA. There is another, more complex meaning of genetic information, viewing it also as non-linear interactions among countless products of genes. Still further comprehension includes maternal cytoplasm, since at least some of its elements could pass from generation to generation. However, our point is that there are at least two aspects of genetic information:
References:
Jerman I., Stern A. (1996): Gene in Waves (a book in Slovene language). Long summary in English.
Jerman I. (1998): Electromagnetic Origin of
Life, Electro- Magnetobiol. 17(3): 401-413. Abstract.
Some links:
Theoretical Biology of Adaptation