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Biomathematics

Merging lines and emerging levels

Nature volume 392, pages 439–441 (1998)Cite this article

Talk of the ‘higher principles of life’ has a ring of vitalism to it. So it must have taken Michael Polanyi considerable pluck to argue in 1968, at the onset of the spectacular advances of biochemistry and molecular genetics, that life has an ‘irreducible structure’.

He wrote: ‘We can recognize a strictly defined progression, rising from the inanimate level to ever higher additional principles of life. ⃛ Evolution may be seen, then, as a progressive intensification of the higher principles of life’1. This ‘progress’, nowadays described as a series of major transitions in evolution2, is often due to the emergence of new units. We are used to seeing individuals as the units of selection, but they are groups of cells, which include, in turn, groups of organelles descended from some proto-cells, and whose nuclei are groups of genes.

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Notes

  1. *Units of Selection and the Major Transitions of Life, Paris, 30-31 January 1998.

References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Mathematics, University of Vienna, Strudlhofgasse 4, A-1090, Vienna, Austria

    Karl Sigmund

  2. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, A-2361, Laxenburg, Austria

    Karl Sigmund

  3. Department of Plant Taxonomy and Ecology, Eötvos University, Budapest

    Eörs Szathmáry

  4. Collegium Budapest, Szentharomsag u. 2., H-1014, Budapest, Hungary

    Eörs Szathmáry

Authors
  1. Karl Sigmund
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  2. Eörs Szathmáry
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Sigmund, K., Szathmáry, E. Merging lines and emerging levels. Nature 392, 439–441 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/33020

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