Biology is the science of life.
WHAT IS LIFE?
Life is an
emergent property of matter.
Currently the most uncontroversial and most widely accepted definition of life comes from the discipline of systems biology.
Systems biology is
the science of study of biological systems. In the 20th century the discovery
of DNA and the beginning of the era of molecular biology made 'zooming in' to a
cell the paradigm of biological sciences. Any and every research in branch of
biology now mandated an explanation at the molecular level. In the midst of the
volumes of data thus generated, some new disciplines arose. The discipline of
bioinformatics involved the usage of computer algorithms for storing,
processing and interpreting all the data thus generated. At the same time the
discipline of systems biology followed a direction of inquiry exactly opposite
to that of molecular biology, i.e. rather than zooming into the single
biological system of the cell, systems biologists 'zoomed out' and took a look
at how biological systems performed in their totality and how they interacted
with other biological systems and used mathematical modeling to scientifically
study such patterns.
Systems biology is an approach that attempts to model the dynamic behavior of whole biological systems based on a study of the interactions among the system’s parts. Successful models enable biologists to predict how a change in one or more variables will affect other components and the whole system.
The "grades
of organization" is an age old concept in biology but systems
biology gave it an impetus and elaboration that it truly deserves. The combinations
of laws of physics and mathematics with the biological phenomena made systems
biologists see life from a very different perspective. In mathematics "the
chaos theory" deals studies the behavior of dynamic systems that are very
sensitive to initial conditions (a response popularly referred to as "the
butterfly effect”; you can watch the Hollywood movie with the same name; good movie!)
In layman's terms, the theory states inter
se that beginning with existence of a single entity, qualitative or
quantitative multiplicity follows it. This multiplicity eventually leads to a
chaotic situation in which, with passage of time, self organization emerges.
This self organization thus creates a new system that becomes a singularity for
the next level of self organization and the process keeps repeating.
Perhaps one of the
best examples of this can be found in the originally biological idea of the
grades of organization. As a student of biology you must be aware that cell is
the basic structural and functional unit of life. Many cells of the same type
become a tissue, many tissues form an organ, different organs together form an
organ system and various organ systems work together to form an organism or a
living individual. One can go further ahead "up" this ladder and say,
many individuals of the same species in a given geographical area form a
population, many different populations of the area together constitute a biotic
community, Biotic communities coupled with environmental conditions become an
ecosystem, many ecosystems become a biome and many biomes become the biosphere.
 |
NEW PROPERTIES EMERGE AT EACH LEVEL OF BIOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION
|
However, it should be noted here that every entity, each rung of
this ladder, is an independent self sustaining system in itself; cells,
tissues, organs, organ systems, individuals, populations, communities, etc.
another noticeable point here is that at every level, there are new properties
acquired that emerge only when the components of the systems come together.
Systems biology mandates that whenever a system is born its properties would be
more than the arithmetic sum of the properties of its individual components, i.e. NEW properties would EMERGE that only the system would be having as a whole while any of its individual
Life is today considered to be one such emergent property that arises when matter, as macromolecules, organizes itself as a system, a living system, a cell.
