Life seems to require at least some instability. This fact should be considered a biological universality, suggests John Tower, a molecular biologist at the University of Southern California.
Biological laws are thought to be rare and describe patterns or organizing principles that generally seem ubiquitous. Although they may be more fragile than the absolutes of mathematics or physics, these rules in biology nevertheless help us to better understand the complex processes that govern life.
Most of the examples we’ve found so far seem to concern the conservation of materials or energy, and therefore the tendency of life toward stability.
For example, Allen’s rule, formulated in 1877, indicates that warm-blooded animals living in colder regions need sturdier limbs with less surface area to conserve body heat, whereas in warmer regions the opposite is true. But as with anything organic, there are some exceptions: including short-legged animals. bush dogs found in Central and South America, as well as the common frog.
Another example of biological “rules” is the repetition of structures that obey mathematical power laws as they increase in size, such as the ever-expanding spiral of a nautilus shell. These are spread across many biological systems and again, strategies are expected to conserve energy and material usage. How bees make hexagonal honeycombs is another clever example.
“Self-similar structures, including logarithmic spirals, are considered the most economical way to increase the size of a structure, without changing shape or destroying the existing structure,” explains Tower.
His concept, called “selectively advantageous instability,” however, calls into question this tendency toward resource conservation in biological systems.
He asserts that at least some volatility is a fundamental biological necessity, despite such instability leading to resource loss. This is because there are other things to gain.
“Selectively advantageous instability increases the complexity of the system, and this increased complexity has potential benefits,” Tower writes. These benefits include the power to change and therefore adapt, which occurs at all biological levels, from the molecular level to the population level.
“Even the simplest cells contain proteases and nucleases and regularly degrade and replace their proteins and RNA, indicating that selectively advantageous instability is essential for life,” Tower said. said.
The requirement for instability inevitably leads to a loss of energy and resources, and the accumulation of genetic mutations that can be either harmful or benign. This is how we end up with biological aging, Tower speculates.
Yet without instability and its drawbacks, life would not be able to adapt and thrive in changing space and time.
So we are all caught in a contradictory tug-of-war between the need for stability and instability, making compromises in both cases.
“Science has been fascinated in recent times by concepts such as Chaos theory, criticality, Turing models And ‘cellular consciousness,” said Tower.
“Research in this area suggests that selectively advantageous instability plays an important role in producing each of these phenomena.”
This research was published in Frontiers of aging.
News Source : www.sciencealert.com
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