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Biological Operating System
All creatures alive today, plus the remains of all living things that have gone before, all the organic compounds, all fossils, all fossil fuels, all the biomass accumulated by this planet over billions of years, exists because, information coded into DNA was accessed, read and acted upon by a cell. Before any one of those cells could grow, before any living tissue could be manufactured, before any polypeptide chains could be assembled, before anything could happen in ANY cell, DNA information had to be processed.
Information processing is the very first act of Life.
Why is this an important distinction? Because information processing involves a set of concepts that are independent of the processing method being used. For one, there must exist a consistent set of rules or protocols that govern information processing within the system. This is called an operating system, or OS.
All living organisms follow the same rules for accessing and reading DNA code. These universal rules infer the existence of a biological operating system. I call it LifeOS.
Once you start to look at biological systems as being information processing systems first, with protein production being secondary output, a very different picture emerges of their structure and organization.
It is our mission to explore that structure and discover its rules of organization.
LifeOS: Manuscript in Progress In blog format. Let me know what you think.
Cheers,
jim
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