in more detail in the following chapter, but for the moment we’ll simply assume a definition of the term to be a constrained environment of living and non-living elements that facilitates interactions among its various components. So, as a start, let’s delve just a bit into the processes of living things.

Organic Design and Development

We make a seminal assumption that the repetitive production of some entity, be it organic or mechanical, requires a design and a subsequent means to apply policy through which the operational existence of the entities proceed. The words we’ve selected might be viewed as slightly provocative, but we will try very hard to use them carefully. To suggest or even to consider a design does not require consideration of a designer, either for organic systems or for electrical and mechanical systems. We suggest that a design is required because it is difficult, if not impossible, to explain systematic replication without one. Bear in mind of course, we view it as completely consistent with this assumption that a design can encompass randomly derived components. A snowflake is the result of a very well defined design. However, the design includes a random component inherent in the crystallization of water that renders every snowflake unique. Taken en masse, they readily form a blizzard or an avalanche. In a similar vein, as we suggested in our Prologue, policy is the way we explain or define how things work. A rock, sitting on a hillside, effects policy. At the very least, it is subject to the policy established by the basic physical forces. In some cases, the rock is stationary for a geological age. Then, an earthquake impacts the rock’s policy infrastructure and it rolls down the hill. So, based on these assumptions, let us first examine the landscape for living organisms.

Based on deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA, life has evolved on the earth through a process that an electronic circuit designer might recognize as a general feedback loop. In the April, 1953 edition of the journal Nature, James Watson and Francis Crick published a paper entitled A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid that provided the first definitive description of DNA’s form. Their model development was apparently enhanced by the x-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin, although she did not participate in authoring the seminal paper. Crick and Watson found that the molecular structure of DNA is that of a polymer whose resultant shape resembles a spiraling railroad track; the famous shape termed a double helix. The rails of a strand of DNA are comprised of alternating sugar (deoxyribose) and phosphate molecular components. Much like the cross-ties of a railroad track, attached to these rails in a perpendicular fashion and at periodic connection points are pairs from a set of four nucleotide bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. Adenine can only be paired with thymine, and cytosine can only be paired with guanine. Each such cross-tie is termed a base pair. One can readily see from this basic architecture that there is a high degree of systematic chemical as well as mechanical structure in the DNA molecule.

Drawing for example from Understanding DNA by Chris Calladine, Horace Drew, Ben Luisi and Andrew Travers, we learn that the total DNA complement within a single human cell, typically referred to as the genome, amounts to approximately three billion base pairs distributed among 46 chromosomes. A single base, when combined with the sugar and the phosphate radicals, forms a structure termed a nucleotide. Hence, one can view a DNA molecule as a long sequence of paired nucleotides. At this point, it might be interesting to draw attention to the metaphor that we have selected to represent the DNA molecule; that of a railroad track. Most texts use a ladder metaphor. Our selected theme has some relevance if we consider the following.

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