Biological Senomic Thermodynamics in the Evolution of Life on Earth
摘要
Autopoietic living systems have arisen from simple prokaryotic cells and are scaling up to complex eukaryotic cells that assemble multicellular organisms, with trillions of coordinating cellular participants. All cells act as Kantian wholes by achieving catalytic and constraint closures to physical laws and performing thermodynamic work to construct and maintain themselves. According to Stuart Kauffman, cells and multicellular organisms act beyond previously identified physical laws. Cells have closed loops of causation based on biological codes, among which the redox code is the most important. They assemble and maintain biological organization through biological thermodynamics, as proposed by Ervin Bauer almost a hundred years ago. This biological law of thermodynamics, or Kauffman’s Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, allows cells and cellular organisms to maintain their living state and to evolve uninterruptedly across billions of years. The electrically charged plasma membrane represents the border between the cellular inside and outside, generating the cellular senome. This senome includes a constituent cell-wide bioelectric field acting as a bioplasma-like medium for cellular sentience. Cellular senomes confer normativity to biochemistry and cell metabolism by integrating ionomes, proteomes, glycomes, lipidomes, redoxomes, and electromes into the coherent and agential units that permit living cells to act as the Kantian wholes in accordance with a prospective Fourth Law of Thermodynamics. Here, we propose that the bioplasma-based cellular senomes act as an anti-entropic force, enabling creative biological evolution driven by sentient cells.