 very much. This is the last session of the seminar of this year. It's actually, incidentally, the last session of my organizing this seminar, which comes to an end after three wonderful years, even though half of that has been spent watching talk from our couch. But it's been fine anyways. So I think it's a very proper conclusion of the series to have Dan here. I mean, with most of us in one of them, so it doesn't need another presentation. But my personal experience, I came to know Dan's work in 2013, when he was giving a very brilliant talk at the ICH conference in Mobile Age 2013. I think that talk many years later became your design really a machine paper. And so Dan has been working on many, many different topics in philosophy of biology. I think that the paper that needs to be mentioned the most is the concept of mechanism in biology, which is for philosophy paper is a ridiculous amount of citations. And his work was more historically oriented work on the organism tradition in England before the establishment of the modern synthesis. This is a more recent project. Is there a paper ready or is the paper for coming? For this? Yeah, we'll go through this. There's a book coming on this. So without further ado, you have this over. All right. Well, thank you, Andrea, for this kind introduction and also for kind of inviting me to speak to you today. I'm very excited and I hope you will have a very stimulating two hours. So as Andrea has mentioned, I'm an historian of philosophy of biology. What I'm going to be presenting you to you today is an exercise in interpreting HPS, like everything I do. It's an attempt to bring together philosophical innovations and analyses with some historical work, including some untitled research that I've done on this topic. And my focus is, you can surely probably guess by now, is this book, What Is Life, which is really, I think, one of the most well-known, most famous books science books of the 20th century. In fact, I would excuse you if you thought that what you suspected, I mean, surely there can't be anything new to say about such a famous book. And I'm hoping that if nothing else might convince you, there's still plenty to learn about, not just about the historical details that led to the production of these, of the biological lectures that they're going to convert into the book that everyone knows, but also about the relevance of these ideas for contemporary biological theories. I'm hoping that you'll get a sense of why, even if you're not interested in history, we should be interested in revisiting What Is Life. This project actually began as basically a short report that I was asked to write or commemorate in the 75th anniversary of the publication of this book. The book was published in 1944. So in 2018-2019, it occurred to me, it would be nice to basically write on this book, but as I learned more about the book's origins and its impact, I realized there was scope there from a nice juicy paper. I tend to write very juicy long papers. And then as I got more into it, I realized that even a paper would not be enough to do this, the research that I did for this justice. So I'm actually now on the contract to produce a little element in the Philosophy of Biology series, The Grand Tribes in My Life for CBP. I was surprised to find that the Google book already has a book, even though it doesn't exist yet. It's expected in August 2023. So think of today as a little taste of what is to come next year. Hopefully what I say to you today will sufficiently animate you to convince you to read the book when it's published in the year from now. As it's, you know, these are very short books. I think Little Charles has a very nice recently published. Also these are 30,000 words. They're short books. But even though it's a short book that I'm preparing, I will not be able to present everything today. I will be indicating when I'm moving on to the next topic. So if you're interested, just remember and in the Q&A you can ask me about the things that I missed. I'm not trying to adjust as to everything I want to say about this book. So without further ado, let me then just begin with the story. And of course, the story has to begin with lectures. I'm sorry if you can't see the writing here. This is the original poster that was printed in Dublin, where the Schrodinger was in 1943. Dublin Institute for Environmental Studies, only the second one in the world. It was modeled after the one in Princeton, where Einstein was, the Prime Minister of Ireland, set this one up specifically for Schrodinger. And as part of his responsibilities as the director of the School of theoretical physics, there were two schools in Sydney, they were almost charity studies. Even today, that's the way that the Institute is divided up in Dublin. As part of his responsibility, he was supposed to give annually a series of public lectures. So in 1943, he decided to basically choose this topic, what is life here. You probably can't read that. It says the physical aspect of the living self, that's the subtitle of his lectures and delivered, as you can see here, in August 3rd, 18th, 1943. It was in sensation. It was reported in the Irish Times. Politicians came. People from the literary circles came. It was so successful, so popular that he was asked to deliver the lectures a second time. So these were on a Friday and then Monday also, because there were so many people interested. Schrodinger's wife talks in correspondence to Max Bourne about how it was a bit like an opera premiere. Everyone came with their newspapers early on to wait for the big, great Schrodinger to appear and present on this wonderful, of course, wonderful question of what is life. And Schrodinger, from the very beginning, intended to publish these lectures and so he did. There's a very interesting story about the publication of the book. Initially there was an Irish publisher that was committed to printing the book, but then Schrodinger, for the last minute, added an epilogue to the book on intertermination on free will that hadn't been part of the lectures. And the Irish publisher, the Catholic publisher at the time, refused to basically accept the book because there were some sort of appeals to that philosophy and so on. And so he eventually got the book published in Cambridge University Press, December 1944. Here is the book. And here, I guess, I don't know if you can see, but it says, so the physicist's approach to the subject, this was the sub-platform that was eventually used. And then it says also with an epilogue on the termination of free will. This is a very, very short book. It's about 90 pages long. It's a small book. There's a copy of it there. You can read it in an afternoon. One of the famous reviews of this book, I think it's in the back of that version says, you read it in an afternoon, but it will change. It will take you a lifetime to forget it. It's like it will change your life while you read it. And it really was a sensation. It was very quickly translated into half a dozen languages. It went through several editions, the first one written in 1946. At this looking online, I was able to find all these different versions of the book in different languages. So it's become a really sort of cornerstone, really, of 20th century popular science. And who has heard of it? Now, what's interesting is that one of the motivations that I've had in developing this project is that I guess Darwin's Origin is another example. Maybe it's not as extreme as this, that these sorts of books are more often cited in their read. And it's actually quite unusual to find an engagement with the argument that was shown in the present, even though everyone talks about the book. You don't very, very seldom find an engagement with what is it that the children is saying. So let me say a little bit more about the influence of this book. So it's because it's quite a sort of a classic status in molecular biology, because basically most of the founders of the new field of molecular biology have credited ensuring what is life as the key influence that led them to enter molecular biology, many physicists, for example. So these are some examples of this. This is Maurice Wilkins, who shared the Nobel Prize with Francis Quick and James Watson when they discovered the double-picture DNA. So during the war, at the part in making it, this is actually taken from his Nobel acceptance speech, by the way, in 1963. During the war, I took part in making the atomic bomb. When the war was ending, I, like many others, and you have to be the physicist, cast around for any new field of research. Partly in account of the bomb, I had lots of interest in physics. I was therefore very interested when I read Schrodinger's book, What is Life, and was struck by the concept of a highly complex structure which controlled living processes. Research at touch wants to seem more ambitious than solid-state physics, so it encouraged me to move into biology. He was the first, but not by far, absolutely not the last. So basically that entire generation of the founders of molecular biology after Wilkins made pronouncements about what is life. This is James Watson in 1993, one of his many autobiographical accounts. He says, when I came back to the university, I was always talking about his time in the mid-1940s, I spotted a tiny book, What is Life. In that little gem, Schrodinger said that the essence of life was the gene. Up until then, I was interested in birds. But then I thought, well, if the gene is the essence of life, I don't want to know more about it. And that was painful because otherwise, I would have spent my entire life studying birds and nobody would have ever heard of it. You need to take these sorts of pronouncement by scientists with a big grade of rock of salt, maybe. But it would be interesting to see what's the wanting to associate himself with Schrodinger and the book. Francis Crick, writing more generally, not about himself, but about the entire generation of this first generation of literature. Those who came into the subject just after the war, Schrodinger, What is Life, seems to be particularly influential. The book was extremely well written and conveyed in an exciting way. The idea that biology and molecular explanations were not only extremely important, but that they're also just around the corner. This has been said before, but Schrodinger both very timely and attractive people who might otherwise not have entered biology at all. And one final one from one of the members of the Fage Group in the Delbrox Fage Group in Caltech Group, Stent, who played a big role actually in developing this first historiography of molecular biology. Before the historians got there, the very architects of the field were telling their own histories about molecular biology and writing here very so dramatically. Having one of the family fathers with capital F's of the new physics put the question, what is life provided for physicists and authoritative confrontation with a fundamental problem worthy of their metal? And thus stirring up the passions of this audience, Schrodinger's book became a kind of Uncle Tom's canon of the revolution in biology that when the dust had cleared, left molecular biology. So you have this, as I say, it's of course myth and all, the state of this book. And that's been the case really since the 1960s that the book is referred to in this way. This is a letter from the Dublin archives, a very cool letter written just after the publication of the double helix papers, the papers by Watson and Quirk in 1953 where the structure of the double helix was presented. And here you have Francis Crick writing to Schrodinger. Schrodinger, he says, Dear Professor Schrodinger, Watson and I were once discussing how we came to enter the field of molecular biology and we discovered that we had both been influenced by your little book. The thought you, we thought you might be interested in the enclosed reprints, presumably the reprints from, you know, with this double helix structure. You will see that it looks as though your term apricotic crystal, which is one of the big terms that Schrodinger introduces or uses, it looks like, is going to be very apt. It's going to be very apt. So already, you know, Quirk is confidently asserting that these ideas are going to become very, very important in fact they were. So that's, that is sort of the way we can think of the book in, you know, since its publication. Recently, writers have already mentioned in 2018-2019 we were sort of celebrating the 75th anniversary of the publication of Wallace Life. And we had, for example, Quirk and me writing a retrospect in Nature about Wallace Life and Karl Sigmund writing a retrospect in Science about what is life, right? And it's all fine, as far as it goes, till it basically covers much of the same ground I've just covered now. What's interesting though is that it's very little, or if anything, about what the book is saying, a path you're saying that it focused the attention on the materiality of genius, but much, but nothing else really other than that. It was also a huge conference that was organized in Dublin in 2018, Schrodinger 75, that of course makes no sense because Schrodinger was in 75 in 2018, it was the book. And it was self-spent, as you see here, as a conference on the future of biology. It's kind of odd, right? There are all these normal laureates coming to speak about the future of biology and you wonder what role is Schrodinger playing here, right? And there is really not much. I mean, many of these are available on YouTube, but if you watch the keynote lectures that were given, sometimes Schrodinger will be mentioned in the first slide as having been an important impetus for the development of molecular biology, but again, there's no engagement with the arguments presented in the book, which is kind of odd. So that really struck me and then I thought, well, maybe this is the situation with the 75th anniversary. Let's look at the 50th anniversary commemorations, celebrations of what is life back in 1994. Maybe those are a little better. And in fact, Cambridge University Press published a whole book on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, what it's like the next 50 years. Again, not about the book, but only about the future of biology, odd. But a conference that you can see here brought together a veritable who is who for biological theory. We have Stephen J. Gull, we have John Maynard Smith, we have who was what, but Kaufmann, and also important physicists like Roger Penrose, Walter Thierry would be a personal friend of Schrodinger. And apart from Kaufmann's chapter of all the other contributions to this volume, we don't really engage with Schrodinger's argument. So that's kind of odd. Okay, so then we might think, so we might approach this by first of all asking, what is it that people know about this book? So if you stop a molecular biologist or any biologist in the street and you grab on the table, what do you know about what it's like? Tell me, tell me what you know. You're likely to hear something along any combination of these three sort of soundbites. This is what everyone knows about what is life. Okay, these are, here they are. The first one is that the hereditary substance, because at the time it hadn't yet been identified as DNA, Schrodinger on advice of Dalit and how they, in the book, talks about protein. The amplification of DNA as they carry actually happened the very same year that the lectures happened. The hereditary substance is made from a crystal with a cold script for development. Lesson one. Lesson two, organisms feed on negative entropy to comply with the second law from the dynamics. And the third one is that the study of living matter is likely to prompt the discovery of Uloz physics. Okay, so for most people, if they are if, what they know about what it's like is probably some combination of these three ideas. Right, so you may think if you actually have a book in your hands that the book is discussing each of these three ideas in more or less relatively equal, in relatively equal amounts of attention as to what is which of these three ideas, but that is not the case. Okay, so you take a book. Here it is. It's one of these books that thankfully has an analytic table of contents. It tells you after each chapter what the chapter is about. I love books like that. Fortunately, we've lost that tradition. This would be kind of nice. So here it is, here's the book. As you can see, my investment on the page is long. And again, I don't know if you can read that, but the interesting thing is that if you're trying to find where in the book, surely no one's talking about thermodynamics and negative entropy. Actually, it's just a little bit of the penultimate chapter. That's it. Six, seven pages devoted to this idea that organisms feed on negative entropy, which everyone seems to remember. The more interesting thing is that if you actually look, when he begins to talk about thermodynamics, he says, well, okay, time up, time up, time up. Let's take a break here. Forget everything, as I say here. At the moment that I've been talking about chromosomes and heretics, and let's just talk about the energetics from the next six pages. That's what he does. He talks about how organisms maintain their stability by bringing importing matter, rich in energy into themselves. And so in therefore doing, they comply with the second law of thermodynamics. There's no real conflict, as it was happening widely in the 19th century between the second law of thermodynamics and life, because even though it looks like organisms are highly ordered and they continue to be reproduced, that order seems to be propagated. They don't only do that by increasing the disorder of the ceramics. They leave a great amount of entropy in their way. To be alive is to increase the disorder in the universe, because there's no problem there. But let's just say, the interesting thing to me is that there is no real, I mean, that this idea is not really related to the main argument at all. And it gets even worse and the more interesting when you consider the third claim about new laws, because that's just the beginning of the final chapter, where he talks about maybe the study of life of inheritance living. He says, while not eluding the laws of physics, as established up to date, is likely to involve other laws of physics, hitherto unknown, which, however, once they have been revealed, will form just the integral part of the science as a form. Now this has been understood in a wide range of ways. Some people have even accused the disorder of being a vitalist, because he seems to want to introduce other laws of physics. This is something that I'm not going to be talking about in my presentation, but I'm very happy to discuss in the Q&A if you want to hear about the different interpretations of what this idea of new laws of physics actually means, actually integrals. So what does this mean? It means that when we go back to this list, it is really that very first lesson that we need to focus on, because that is when it meets with the book. We need to work out what the hell Schrodinger means, who he talks about, and then if we look at the crystal, what does he mean by a code script for the document. So let's just go through that. Let's now examine the argument in what is life and do what everyone should have done, right, that the very few people actually do, to actually find out what it is that he's up to in the book. So here's the argument in what is life. The first thing to say is that the book is not about life. Schrodinger is not trying to answer the question what is life. He's actually trying to answer the question what is the nature of biological order, that this is question. Okay, that's what he's interested in. He begins by saying, well, as a physicist, what would you say about order? The first chapter of the book is called the classical physicist approach to this subject. If you were a physicist, what do you have to say about order? Schrodinger says that physics tells us that he says atoms are incapable of exhibiting orderly behavior because they're subject to the stochastic effects of thermal adaptation, right? Anything above absolute zero is going to exhibit this kinetic energy, which means that at the individual atomic level, there's no order. It's very stochastic. There's this jittery. This is often described as Brownian motion when it's observable through the microscope, right? So what that means is the order that emerges in physics only emerges when you consider large ensembles of particles together, right? So you have statistical regularities. Schrodinger said that the physical laws of statistical nature, orders, order and regularity can only emerge upon consideration of huge numbers of atoms, molecules, particles, which collectively display macroscopic patterns of order. So you find order at the macroscopic level as described by the law of large numbers, the larger the number of particles that you consider, the more robust the regularity. I mean, this is an idea that was actually already proposed by Plank and others that most physical laws were statistical, not all of them. So if Plank talks about dynamic laws, such as gravity, but most other laws of physics in chemistry, in fact, are statistical. So if you want to talk about order as a physicist, you're going to have to be talking about what Schrodinger calls order from disorder, okay? So order emerging at the macroscopic level from a consideration of huge numbers of molecules, atoms, particles that even though individually exhibit disorder, collectively behave in orderly way. Schrodinger illustrates this in the book. He has a bunch of diagrams in the book. So this is, of course, a reference on the way to Boltzmann, where we'll return to later main intellectual influence on Schrodinger. So he has a bunch of examples here. So if you have, he says, well, if you have fog right then, collectively the fog will, you can use physical principles to describe what's going to happen to it. But if you were to consider any individual particle in that fog, and you were to trace its movement, it's probably irregular. This is directly significant. So if you have no order considering each individual particle, again, this is fairly familiar stuff for the physicists among you. But Schrodinger begins by discussing this, okay? And he gives a bunch of other examples. He talks about diffusion, right? You may or may not know or be able to predict where each individual particle is going to do. But you can talk about the regularity of the entire ensemble and also the example of paramagneticism as well. These are just examples to illustrate this order from disorder principle. Okay, so far so good. Now, what about life? What about biology? Well, Schrodinger says, well, if you don't know anything about biology, you may be forgiven for thinking that because life is very ordered, that it's going to exhibit the same sort of order than any physical system, right? You may think it is truly, really true that the order of life is also similarly based on macroscopic law like patterns of behavior exhibited by larger ensembles or molecules. This may just be an obvious thing. And here's where the twist comes, because he says, not only is this not trivial, it's actually not true. Okay, so this is the twist in the second chapter of the book called The Reventory Mechanism, and here's the sub-title, The Classical Physicist Expectation of Far from the Intrivial Output. Okay, so the block-thinkings. So the order is not statistical. What kind of order are we talking about? And here's where Schrodinger draws on the contemporary findings of genetics. We're talking about working genetics in the 1930s, it's paramagnetic work. And he argues that it seems to be the case, he said genetics is the most exciting science of our days. He says in the briefcase, and genetics seems to be telling us that the order of life of an organism is essentially determined by its genes. It's a very different kind of order from the idea of order that is familiar to the physicists, he says. He says, drawing on work that had been done on x-ray mutagenesis of grosophila in the 1930s, experimental evidence, as Schrodinger shows that the gene molecule only has about a few thousand atoms. He says it seems to be the case we can actually calculate the size of genes. And it seems that the size is too small, he says, from the law of large numbers point of view, to entail and bodily and lawful behavior of religious statistical physics. What is he saying? He's saying, look, genes are too small to be able to appeal as a physicist to order from disorder to make sense of how order of life is. That's not going to work here. We need something else. I mean, and this is weird, right? It's strange, since genes are so small they should not be able to reliably code for heritable traits. Given that they are firmly in the ripple form of adaptation, if you're a physicist or you're a chemist, it would be very strange to think of a molecule which we know is going to be subject to this stochastic motion, to think that such a molecule would be able to co-reliably code for traits. So this seems really odd, and yet it must be true. It seems to be the case, right? A political evidence seems to suggest that genes are remarkably stable. Schrodinger says, with the durability and all permanence that borders upon the miraculous. This is directly taken from Schrodinger's words. So you should think of the book as an attempt to solve this paradox. That's what the book is about. The book is an attempt to answer this question. How do we reconcile the small size of genes with their extraordinary stability in the face of constant stochastic perturbations? It should not be possible for entities as small as the genes to be able to be botany, and yet it seems to be the case that they are. How do we solve this paradox? And here's where Schrodinger uses his extraordinary powers of reasoning to basically argue almost from the armchair for how to resolve this paradox. So he actually illustrates this as a good viennese that he is. He gives the example of the Habsburg family, to just illustrate the miraculous divinity of genes. So many members of the Habsburg family had this sort of protruded jaw. It came to me known as the Habsburg lip or the Habsburg jaw. Schrodinger says, if you walk around the galleries in Vienna and you look at these portraits, what you'll find is that this genetically determined trait is found in members of the Habsburg family from Charles V born in 1500 to Archduke, I don't remember his name right now, but he died at the late of the 19th century. We're talking about 400 years, right? Where you have something that's determined by a molecule that is sufficiently stable that you actually can see it. And these are things I'm wondering, this is the photograph, and these are the rest of them are paintings, and they're supposed to be painted in an attractive light so you don't get the head cut off. And yet you can see, right, that it is real veritable fleaks of nature. So this is just an illustration that it gives in the book for the remarkable miraculous stability of a molecule that is capable of being stable in the light of stochastic perturbations for four centuries. So how does he solve the paradox? Well, he reasons that the genetic material has to have this extremely rigid structure. He thinks it has to be a sort of a crystal. We know now, of course, that DNA is a polymer, but the idea of a crystal is intended to reflect this incredible rigidity and stability of the atoms that make it up. Okay, it has to be that way in order to withstand these eruptive effects of random motion. And moreover, quantum mechanics provides the foundation for that stability because it is the theory of the covalent of the covalent bond developed by Haigler, who was showing this, people who work with Schrodinger, that provided, explains how something can be so stable, right? But it's not just any crystal, of course, it has to contain information. Of course, Schrodinger doesn't use the word information that would only enter biology, well, about a decade after. But clearly that's what he means. He says, well, he needs to be able to display some sort of aperiodic configuration so that it can contain within it a specification of what's going to be the macroscopic system. So that's why he thinks the genetic material has to be an aperiodic crystal. That's why Crick said in his letter, your term aperiodic crystal is going to be a very apt one. Schrodinger's reasoning from first principles, that the hereditary material is going to have, he says, the properties of a solid. Now, of course, it makes no sense from a physical perspective to talk about a molecule as being a solid or a gas of these properties of microscopic properties. But he calls them aperiodic crystal, aperiodic solid to illustrate how important it is that we understand that they're able to withstand any sort of jittering from the environment. And he says, well, this is a new form of order. It's an order that we have got a way of obtaining order that we don't find in physics. But we do actually find in machines, he says. So there's something that connects the orderly structure and behavior of organisms with machines that we create but not with any other physical system. That's why he concludes what is life by drawing them to a millier analogy between life, the living and the mechanical, right? It goes all the way back to Descartes. But Schrodinger says, don't accuse me of being some simple-minded mechanism, okay? I'm talking about clockwork here. He says life is like clockwork because of the, you know, that's virginity that is guaranteed by quantum mechanics that hinges, also hinges upon a solid, right? Machine is a solid. The aperiodic crystal is also a solid. And that's the only way which we can understand it being largely withdrawn from the disorder of So what picture do we get of nature? We get a picture where you have two ways of getting at order of producing order. The order from disorder principle and the order from order principle that is going to be fundamental for the new biology. Okay? Excellent. Okay, so that's what I want to say about the book. And now I want to begin the process of, well, first I'm going to begin by evaluating these two principles, right? With the benefit of hindsight, you know, 80 years later, what can we say about these two ideas, order from order and order from disorder? Okay, let's begin with the order from order idea. Well, the first thing to say is, of course, that, you know, in Schrodinger's, in the book, the principle is to say, accounts for the transmission of biological order. Okay? So it explains how order is transmitted in the hereditary code script. Okay? Now, because Schrodinger used the term code script, many people have assumed or have credited Schrodinger for the idea of a genetic code can extend the game very incredibly. Now, I think this is problematic and a lot of people have actually missed this, but it's problematic because the notion of code has one and one meaning, right? Code can mean, can refer to sort of a cipher where you have a translation of one language into another, and that's what a genetic code is by the way. But a code can only, can also be some sort of plan when you talk about the highway code, for example, sort of a set of instructions. And I would argue that this is exactly the way in which the notion of code is used by Schrodinger, okay? So that's the first thing to note, but it has often been missed, okay? That the code script in Schrodinger's work does not involve the translation of the message as you do in molecular biology where you have DNA to RNA to protein, but rather it's a plan. He's talking about a plan. Preformation, a preformation is planned, something that is set of rules right in the hereditary code script that governs and controls the production of macroscopic order, okay? So in that respect, what Schrodinger's anticipating is not the idea of the genetic code, but the idea of the genetic program, right? Which was coined, proposed by François Diacombe and Jaques Coulomb, and it's my in 1961, 15 years later. And it is that idea of the genetic program that it seems to be anticipated by Schrodinger's writings. Now, you are familiar with the literature today, this notion of a genetic program, the idea that development is basically is the result of an execution of a programmatic set of instructions. It's a very problematic one. In earlier work, in my own work, I've actually criticized this idea according, due to the fact that it sort of proposes three very problematic theses about development. Here they are. Neopropamination is a genetic analysis of developmental compatibility. What do I mean by that as well? The idea of neopropamination is quite familiar. It's the idea that developmental information, the information for development is fully included in the genes. All that with neopropamination is because it's a reference to the pre-formationist ideas of animal generation were popular in the 17th century. Genetic animism, what is happening? What it means that it seems to be the case, often the biologists ascribe agency to genes. Genes are not just storing information, they gain things done, right? They are the agents, right? They initiate, direct and control the developmental process. Again, very problematic, right? Very problematic to ascribe agency to a chemical molecule. Developmental computability, well, that's the idea that has been proposed by a number of development biologists. We're running all the ones, like yours, Walpert, that if you have all the knowledge of what's in the genome and you knew the initial condition to be able to compute development. So Walpert has a paper in Science of 1994 called Can We Compute Development? Rosenberg, following up saying absolutely yes, most of the principles of biologists thought that was a very problematic idea. Why am I mentioning this? Why am I mentioning this? Because if you look at the book and you look at when the term cold script is being used, what you're going to find is that Schrodinger is using the term to defend these three claims. Let me just illustrate that very quickly. So here it is, it's used seven times. So when he's talking about the cold script as containing the entire pattern of the individual's future development is clearly advocating or endorsing this new information's view, right? Talks up here in the corner, that's a highly comprehensive white plan. When he talks about, you know, what about genetic analysis? Well, he seems to be saying not only is that, not only is the genetic material a local, but also it's executive power, right? Also, here's another similar architects plan and build this craft in one. It's not just having the information, it's actually getting things done, it's making things happen. Again, very problematic, but for me what's interesting is that these ideas, you already find 15 years before you're going to consider the idea of a genetic problem. It's already in show. Okay, and the last one, this term in this day and year, I mean, I'm sure you can guess who is mentioned. Plan Classes team, of course, as always is the case and it's mentioned in showing this book. In calling the structure of the chromosome five is a code script, we mean that the all penetrating mind, one conceived by the class, so which every causal connection layer immediately open, could tell from the structure whether the egg would develop into a black got, a special hand, five mains, black, 400 people, mouse, white. Okay, very, very explicitly. Deterministic, pre-formationist, and ascribing genes to this sort of animism. Okay, so that's what we can say, retrospectively, about Schrodinger's engagement, right, that he's already anticipating not just the ideas, right, but also the pitfalls of these ideas that only now we're realizing are not appropriate for thinking about development. But to be fair to Schrodinger, of course, we have to recognize that he was right in recognizing that there is a stream of water, right, from DNA of the parent to DNA of the offspring. That seems to be right. There seems to be an order from all the principle of work and morphogenesis, and of course it's connected to the hereditary substance. But, as I've already argued, he was wrong to localize in this substance all the information required to specify the organism, of course, because the environment plays an important role, right, so neo-preformationism is wrong, and he was wrong to not realize that, and even also to invest in with a causal power to get stuff done to initiate control direct development. Okay, and why was he wrong? Well, because DNA does nothing alone. We know that now. DNA does nothing on its own. The only reason why it has its remarkable properties is because we've got all these other molecules, one sort of machinery, although I have a shiver every time I use that metaphor, that is helping the DNA, you know, faithfully transcribe and translate the message, right, is to sell as a whole and has that activity. Even the stability, the stability that fascinated Schrodinger is not an intrinsic property of the DNA. It's an accomplishment of the entire cell. So every time the DNA is replicated, they're replicated errors. You've got all this machinery to ensure that these enzymes that work very hard to ensure that those errors are eliminated. So it just shows that we actually need to think of the context of the cell as a whole to make sense of this paradox. But once we do, the paradox disappears. Just mentioned here, a nice quote by Lenny Moss, what genes can't do that develops these ideas very nicely. So to say, this modern cell biology we can say resolves Schrodinger's paradox of the gene. And of course, there's the other point, right, that when you have cell division, it's not just the DNA that is passed on, it's everything else that is passed on, and some of it can have an influence in the phenotype. So you need to account for extra genetic inheritance, septic genetic inheritance. It's a lonely book by someone else I've worked with, a longer lab, a very famous, well-known book in the philosophy of biology and all that mentioned develops these ideas. All right, so far so good. So let's talk now about the order from this sort of principle. You may think, well, what am I going to say here? Surely Schrodinger was right about that, because he's talking about the principle as a principle that's well-known in business. And of course, I can't say anything about that, surely. What we can say, of course, historically, is that the principle reflects the transformation of physical law, the statistical transformation of physical law that was brought about by Boston and others. It's the physical mechanics of what was developed by Boston and others. And of course, that's correct as far as it goes. What is more problematic is to suggest that it plays no role in life. In wanting to distinguish clearly order from order and order from disorder, I'm saying order from disorder, super important in physics, but plays no role in biology. I think Schrodinger is deliberately, as I would argue later, misconstruing how order arises in the living world. Why? Because you can find statistical regularities everywhere in nature. The work of Charles here illustrates that very clearly. I mean, the statistical revolution also impacted biology. You can think of the entire population genetics, the whole evolution, as being important in that idea, right? Even also Mendel's Principles of Inheritance, right? So in many areas of biology, knowledge of individuals is derived from the study of large populations. That is not a foreign unfamiliar idea to a biologist. So it seems really odd. And I will explain why he does this. It seems really odd that Schrodinger wants to say this notion of order doesn't play a role in life. So just a very quick quote from Ari Fischer, who had been influenced very much by Boltzmann, talking about his whole investigation as being comparable to the theory of gases, very directly saying that the same sort of principle, the same sort of statistical approach applies in his work as it does in physics. Again, really odd that Schrodinger would want to exclude this form of order in life. We don't even need to appeal to populations. Even in cell biology, in areas where it seems less likely that statistics are going to play a role, you find direct engagement. This is a very nice paper from 2012, which I like, which has actually the idea of developing statistical mechanics of cell fate decisions. And I have it because there's this wonderful sort of comparison of statistical mechanics with the process of cell differentiation and then maybe in biological. What we need to do is look at how physicists work with this notion of order from disorder and develop the corresponding equations that will enable us to determine what happens, how from a seemingly stochastic bundle of cells together organize differentiated embryo at the end of it. And the other thing, of course, is that statistical regularities are not the only way to get order from disorder. Now, we know that we have things like self-organization, far from experiment thermodynamics, iliaprivogene being the sort of the hero in this branch of physics, right? Where you have, where you recognize that in physics, it doesn't have to be only in life. You have dissipative structures that are able to maintain order in a static state, in a reversible static state. And actually that's exactly the same sort of principle that applies to biology. Now, biologists have been a little bit slower in the uptake, but increasingly you find more engagement with the notion of self-organization also in biology. This is a very nice paper in 2008 called Self-organization in Cell Biology. And you're interested, I've written about this, increasingly we're realizing that more and more organelles in the cell actually have dissipative structures and that we need to appeal to this kind of physics to make sense of that. Genetic order just won't do because there is no template. There's no genetic template for much of the architecture in this cell. Interesting. This is a sort of red version of what you discovered. And you know, some people have argued, and I want to discuss this in more detail, we can return to this in the Q&A that Schrodinger came close to this realization when he talks about negative entropy, right? In those six pages he talks about how the system is maintaining its order by maintaining energy. That's kind of close to the notion of a pre-genius in the structure. But Schrodinger never talks about pharma and everything. More importantly, never considers this as a source of order, right? So it is inappropriate to creditor him into this. And yet people have done this. If you are interested in this, I can return to that. Okay, so I want to move now on to the legacy, right? How we think about Schrodinger's what it's like today. Now, there seems to be an interesting situation here because historians seems to have agreed on something. Historians don't usually agree on anything. There seems to be a consensus which emerged in the 1990s that actually there's no reason to look at this book at all. There's no reason to engage in a book. Maybe this explains why it is that people don't talk about the argument. Why is there no reason to engage in the book? Well, because most of the accounts of the influence of the book were actually, you know, provided 20 years after the fact. And historians say you should not trust scientists when they're telling their own narrative autobiographies, right? So the book may be helpful to understand, you know, the process of discipline building, you know, how to legitimize the discipline, because that seems to be what has happened, that what seems to happen, at least what the quotation that I have for you in the beginning, Schrodinger seems to come up as a way to give legitimacy to the new biology by associating this new biology with one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, you know. So it seems like his name is being, you know, drawn on to give legitimacy to the molecular body. And there's nothing really about the argument that matters. So the consensus, historical references to date, you ask any historical biology to date, they will probably tell you, yeah, okay, what is life? It can make incitement, it do a focus, but really no scientific value on the subject. The reason why that is also the consensus is because on commemorating the centenary of the birth of Schrodinger in 1987, the book came out, which brought together a number of authors to discuss the legacy of Schrodinger. And what was really interesting and surprising is that there were two chapters that discussed Schrodinger's contribution to biology, and the two authors, Max Perutz and Linus Pauling, huge names, both lambasted Schrodinger and said there's nothing more valuable. So here is Perutz being particularly mean about Schrodinger saying a close study of what his life has shown me that what was true in this book was not original, and most of what was original was not known to be true, even when the book was written. Pauling, when I first read one of his life over 40 years ago, I was disappointed. It was and still is my opinion that Schrodinger made no contribution to understanding that. Now of course Pauling goes on to say that in providing quantum mechanics and a theory of the covalent monk, he provided the foundation for chemistry, and in providing the foundation for chemistry, he also provided the foundation for biology, but as far as the book's argument and concern, we should not pay attention. And I think this is the reason why no one reads the book anymore. At least no one reads the book to work out what it said anymore. That's why I'm trying to sort of push against it, because I think this is wrong. I think that if you consider the argument presented to you, it's not a complicated argument about Schrodinger either, what you find is that his argument is that I'll just remind you that the source of Schrodinger's orders in this big solid-state crystal that provides the structure of the genetic material, and in doing so it renders the material impervious to stochastic forces. Now if you think about this more than one minute, you're going to realize that this order that is encoded in the in the genome is going to have to be transmitted to the proteins, the work forces of the cell. So the order encoded in the crystal has to be reliably transmitted to the cell's components, so at least an individually expressive through their actions, in a way also that similarly eludes the, you know, or overcomes the browning storm of the molecular ring. What does this mean? It means if you go to an empirical crystal that has to be a crystal, so that it can maintain its order, surely all the other molecules that are doing things in the cell to generate the phenotype of the cell are also going to have to be in some sense fixed and rigid. So what I'm going to suggest is that the true legacy of the book is in convincing biologists that most of these components of the cell have to be understood and have to be studied as rigid fixed macromolecules, okay, and that we don't have to worry about stochasticity, right, that they can elude or overcome stochastic forces. So here is my hypothesis, what I'm suggesting should be, we understand as the legacy, the influence of this idea, this idea here, granted molecular biologists the license to dismiss the effects of stochasticity on the cell in the process, and that's exactly what we find by the way at the recent, no one is talking about stochasticity, because these beautiful diagrammatic descriptions of molecular processes, it looks like it's completely removed from the milieu with these molecules exist, which is of course stochastic. Allow them to focus on the structure of the macromolecules, drawing attention to the crystal-like rigidity of course through methods like X-ray crystallography that actually work with crystals of these proteins, right, emphasizing their function specificity like you would with a machine and ignoring the deep stabilizing influences of the microscopic environment. I think this is what we should think about when we think about the influence of life, the fact that it was okay to think about the cell and its components in this way. So these are just some examples of how this has been, you know, come to life. This is an example from, you know, a very, very important lab in the counter-independence work on genome-regulatory networks. What you're seeing here is the pathways that lead to the differentiation of the seed urchin and embryo, and it's not a coincidence that this looks like a circuit, like an electronic circuit. It's deliberately represented in this way. You have seen, meaning, Boolean networks that enable you to say, well, what's going to happen on this gene, the reaction of this other gene? This is completely standard, by the way, when you look at developmental genetics today. A physicist who doesn't know anything about biology, the first thing they're going to say is, well, this is really weird because you're not considering here the scale at which these reactions are happening. There's no room for stochasticity here. It's giving you a view which everything seems to be determined. It's a deterministic view, and it's a pre-formationist view as well. And it's not just gene-regulatory networks, by the way. Any metabolic pathways, right, this is a classic way to think about certain pathways in the cell. They tend to be also represented in the technical literature, by the way, technical literature, as known in the circuit. Solid states, just like Schrodinger thought. If you go to the biology department here, I'm sure that you will find metabolic diagrams of this kind, you know, as posters in the wall, right? We teach this to students. We say, you know, one of the metabolic pathways in the cell and they show just, you know, things like this. Now, of course, this is a terrible, well, I mean, it's one way to represent what's going on, but it's very misleading because, of course, each of these nodes, which are the proteins, I mean, this is a free cell, they're not fixed through any circuit board, and they stochastically interact with many binding partners. This is only showing one possible way of potentially infinite number of ways in which the molecules are represented and can potentially interact. Specificity, it turns out, in molecular biology, is actually the exception, not the norm. And even when I was a student, it wasn't that long ago when I studied molecular biology, I was told, for example, that enzymes affect catalysis precisely because it's super specific. And yet, it turns out that most molecules can actually interact with many, many other molecules. This is a, this comes as a surprise in molecular biology. Why a surprise? Because we have this idea that molecules are supposed to be fixed rigid and specific. When you actually look at the literature, at the empirical literature, what you find are things like this. This is what we call a horror, a horror graph, because it shows, first of all, in black, the textbook representation, and green and red, the actual empirical observations of how these molecules interact with another. What you find is so much met, so much crosstalk here, which, of course, poses an interesting question, how do we represent this stuff? I mean, if this is really what's going on, then we shouldn't be looking, we shouldn't be teaching students this. I'm not engaged with this here. I've spoken about the problems with this and potential solutions or alternatives in other work. What I mean, I'm interested in here, what I want to get you to understand is that this, I think, is a consequence, and it's partly of the arguments we're sending. Despite the fact that no other historian seems to have suggested this. So you may be thinking, okay, okay, okay, but I mean, surely you can't let go of this to show it. I mean, why show it? This seems to be a bit of a stretch. Well, here's where, you know, I've got my historian's hat on, and I go around the archives, investigating, and look, seeing if I can find some evidence of surely this name being used in the work of these important molecular biologists, and to see whether it's really showing who's been in the influence here. And actually, with the help, I have to say, from Laurent Marzot in Paris, is able to find some direct evidence, at least in the case of Jack Monor in the archives in Paris, to suggest, well, to show, really, because it's quite clear the evidence is indisputable, really, that Monor changed his mind in the 1950s, having had originally a statistical view in order to a more mechanistic, deterministic clockwork view in order, as the constant words are really shown here, which is amazing, okay. Now, Monor is well known for this book, Chance and Necessity, published in 1970. The stuff that was in naturalist philosophy for molecular biology was like sort of a manifesto of the new view of the cell, and it's a very deterministic view that he proposed, right. It's a view that is really showing what is like, right. And of course, there, he doesn't mention it, but in the archives, I was able to find in some lecture notes of some talks he gave in 1956, discussing, so he says, this is 1956, okay. So the whole trend of more molecular biology makes it every day clear that structural stability and rigidity, rather than dynamicity, are the most essential and characteristic properties of the typical cellular macromolecules. Forget about metabolism, forget about energetics, forget about dynamic equilibrium, it's going to be stability and rigidity that we need to focus on, he says. Good, what about Schoeniger, what is he coming with? Well, here we have it. Schoeniger, with an insight of genius, he says in his lecture, had perceived this as a necessary attribute for the hereditary material, short or the short is the way. Now, it's not just DNA, he says, it's also not just limited to DNA. We know for recent work that RNA also has to be super stable, and also proteins, which is actually the goal of Mono's lecture. Okay, so this seems to be kind of nice, of course, it's just one example, but a very prominent one, because even though you may not think that many people read Schoeniger, surely lots of people also read Mono, so you can talk about the secondary influence. Interesting, okay, so let me give you one more quote, which is super nice, also on the archives, he says, he's talking about the ribosome, he says, even when you consider a ribosome, the protein synthesizing process, the process, right? He says it appears to be working with very high precision, and the concept of micro heterogeneity, you know, you have different, so it doesn't seem to be important, you know, fluctuations, we don't, it seems unwarranted, pretty otherwise, even in the formation of such large complex molecule, like a protein, the synthesizing system appears to work mechanically, like a clock, or a precision machine tool, rather than statistically, and you can't think of an example, but then he has Schoeniger here, in practice, to remind himself to say that in the lecture. Now, what's interesting is that if you open a scientific journal today, and you look at how today people think about the ribosome, you know what you get? The exact opposite view of this. We've had to unlearn the lessons, right? What we're learning is that the ribosome is behaving actually not mechanically, that most of the things it does actually do not contribute to the function. So this is a nice paper from Peter Moore, so this is 1958, right? And what about 2012? You got this paper from Peter Moore, Yale, how should we think about the ribosome, it's actually talking about these rich virtual animations, and he says it's very, very problematic to use snapshots of the ribosome to work out the function because that's not how it works. You know, the ribosome is a machine. It doesn't help to think about macromolecules and molecular machines. The use of the word machine in this context is pernicious. It's the implication that the functional properties of macromolecules can be explained mechanically. Everything that the ribosome does is a consequence of mechanical interaction, and that's simply not true. Why? Because it's just not possible to have those sorts of processes where stochasticity reigns to be. So I just want to have this contrasting on the slide to show you what a difference 50 years makes, and that we had to sort of come full circle as it were. We've had to sort of go back to the view we had before showing it, and I think this provides interesting evidence for the hypothesis I'm suggesting. All right, so now, another objection you may have. Well, I mean, is this really fair to Schrodinger? I mean, we're all after all, we're talking here 80 years after the fact, is it fair to retrospectively, you know, blame Schrodinger for having had these ideas? You know, maybe he didn't know enough, maybe after all he was a physicist. So what did he know about biology? Surely, I mean, maybe this is not right, I want to say that Schrodinger is responsible for anything. Well, let me just remind you of what I have presented to you today, so far, in terms of arguments, right? What have I said Schrodinger's responsible for? Three things. These are the three things, genocentrism, the idea that the genes, the herd has all the information. I've also suggested that Schrodinger is responsible for denying the fact that statistical regularities play any role in biology. And I've also suggested that Schrodinger's responsible for essentially giving biologists more learning about this than license to dismiss the influence of stochasticity in the process Now, you may be thinking, is this fair? Is this okay? Or am I going too far here? Is this blaming Schrodinger for not knowing the future, other than for criticism posed from the benefit of hindsight? What I want to show to you and what remains of my talk is that it's definitely not unfair. It's showing that you are exactly what he was doing, what he presented these three ideas, also moreover, that he didn't have to defend these three ideas. There were many options available to him. He chose to defend these views. This was not the consensus view in biology at the time. Okay, so I want to show this to you now. None of these things are inevitable. The genocentrism was like reveals that they reflect deliberate choices by Schrodinger. So what are we going to do now? Well, in this final part of the talk, we need to get into why Schrodinger wrote this book. Let's do a little bit more historical investigation and find out how he came to want to, if it is really true, that he had in mind the argument of these three ideas. And also, why? Why are Schrodinger interested in defending this? Let's see if we can answer this question. Okay, so you look at the literature and you look at the biography of Schrodinger and you ask the question, why a 56-year-old physicist? Why did he turn his attention to biology? What the hell is going on here? Why did he do that? He could have discussed any topic. Well, Walter Moyer's biography says, well, you know, his dad was an amateur botanist. Maybe, you know, he was interested in botany and so he had an interest in biology all his life, right? That could be one possible explanation. Emily Fox-Caller and Lily Kaye show that Schrodinger was obsessed as an undergraduate student of the University of Vienna with this book, Now Forgotten by Richard Simone, the Neymar's conservation principle that discussed the idea of setting the memory. And so maybe this explains his interest in biology from an early age, possible. Stephen J. Gull, in his contribution to this 50th anniversary publication that I showed you at the beginning, suggests that maybe it has to do with this intellectual milieu that Schrodinger was brought up in, you know, the Vienna, the beginning of the 20th century, where you had this sort of aspiration to sort of a unity of science, to seek sort of common principles. And finally, one of his students, John Simmons, basically says, well, look, this guy was a renaissance man. He was interested in many things. He just went from one topic to another to another to another. After all, he wrote top books about, you know, science and the Greeks. He wrote poetry, published poetry books and all kinds of things. So maybe that's it. There's no more to that. I'm not convinced. And I want to hopefully show to you why you shouldn't be convinced by any of these explanations, neither. I think that the real reason why Schrodinger's interest in biology has to do with what was going on in physics. And I think the reason why people haven't noticed this before is that there are only two kinds of people who talk about this life. You have historical biology and historical physics. Historical biology usually don't know much about what was going on in physics in the period that they look at. And the historical physics don't usually understand that. So there's been some mismatch, right? So we need to bring this together. So let's have a look a bit at the physical context to make sense of what's going on. Well, so here's my idea, right? Just my conviction that we can make sense, we cannot make sense of Schrodinger's engagement with that understanding, his position in the heated debates about theoretical physics that took place during the interval period. That Schrodinger was involved in, okay? So what do we know about that? Well, we know that Schrodinger, by that method, he was almost a marginal figure. He was a dog, he was basically the most of his business contemporaries, with the exception of other Einstein, who could really correspond on this. Why? Because he rejected the increasingly prevalent orthodox Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. He never accepted this view of quantum mechanics. He thought this was an aberration that this is, he had his deterministic wave equation and, you know, I'm born and Heisenberg and Jordan had taken it and statisticalized and basically destroyed the beauty of this equation. He talks about this as I was showing the moment, right? So, right, the equation, Schrodinger's wave equation is deterministic and yet the interpretation that was given to it by Bohr and Heisenberg is not. And Schrodinger never accepted this interpretation, it led him to become progressively more larger than the Heisenberg already said from the physical orthodoxy of his day. These are just some fun quotes from the archives, where you see Heisenberg being really mean to Schrodinger, the more I pondered the physical parts of Schrodinger's theory, abhorrent. Schrodinger writes about the visualizability of this theory. Schrodinger, for his part, talks about the damned gulping in people, referring to Heisenberg or Jordan, using my beautiful wave mechanics to compute the shitty little matrix around this. It's very, very heated, okay? And he's in in the margin also losing this debate, right? So, I mean, this is another quote where he actually won from the archives and we're going to have to stick to this damned quantum jumps and I regret that I've ever had anything to do with quantum theory, Schrodinger says. And it is only by understanding this that you can understand why in 1935 he wrote this very famous paper, the present state of quantum mechanics, where he proposed this famous cat fort experiment, which is tragically, people think of the cat fort experiment as a way of, you know, as a way to show that Schrodinger was defending this bizarreness of quantum mechanics, when in fact he intended it as a reduction of absurdity. He suggested, well, it makes no sense, right? We only need to think of what would happen if you could amplify a quantum effect at the microscopic level to realize that it's absolutely crazy to say that the cat is the state of superposition being alive and dead until you observe it. It makes no sense to say that. So he writes to Heisenberg saying, I've got it, you know? I've got this this is going to show how absurd it is and the exact opposite happened because, you know, it became a poster channel for the cognitive interpretations, the tragedy, right? If you ask those people on the street, what they know about Schrodinger, they won't even mention his way of mechanics. They will mention the cat, which Schrodinger hoped would eliminate, sort of, remove this cognitive interpretation, which of course he didn't do. Okay, so this is, I argue, important background to understand what is up to him. Let's now get into that, okay? So what's really interesting about Schrodinger is that he really can be thought of as the last classical physicist in the sense that he never lost that sort of unwavering commitment to determinism, even if it was a statistical kind of determinism, but it's still a deterministic picture that he had all his life. And this is partly a consequence if you, if anything, if you take the effort to look at his autobiography, his obsession with Boltzmann and the sort of Vienna school, right, that he then was so influential on him. This is a quote, I think, from his autobiography that I think makes it very clear. Just the old Vienna Institute, we've had just, so I didn't mention this, but Schrodinger hoped to study with Boltzmann. And the same year that he entered university, the summer before the start of term, but with Boltzmann, he was madly depressed and had just committed suicide in Priester. So he was taught by Boltzmann students. The old Vienna Institute, which had just born the tragic loss of Ludwig Boltzmann, the bloody work Fritz Hasen, Earl and Franz Exor carried out the work, these are the two, so the most important influences on, you know, people actually to influence, physicists and influence Schrodinger's view, gave me a direct insight into the idea of to be formulated by that great mind. His line of thought made me call, he says, my first love in science, no other has ever thus enraged me or will ever do so again. And so he got this collective break to Boltzmann. So it seems to be the case that what Schrodinger is basically up to, right, that his allegiance is really not with quantum mechanics, right, but with actually this Austrian sort of school of statistical mechanics, which was represented by Boltzmann and Exor and Hasen, which was the view, which recognized the importance of statistical regulators, even recognized that they may, we may need to be skeptical about whether indeterminism is ontological or not, but that guaranteed a deterministic picture at the end of the day, microscopic speaking, because the regulators of physics allowed us to have that picture, right. So what I want to suggest actually is that the reason why Schrodinger turned to biology, the reason why he got interested in biology is because he hoped that he would find there a way to salvage this mechanism, the terminus worldview that he had, you know, been brought up with classical physics that he had become progressively undermined by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. I think this is what's going on. He's trying to protect or, you know, salvage this view that seems to be eroded completely by physics, by suggesting that maybe in biology you have a reason to defend this deterministic view. Okay, so again, this is the hypothesis that I have. So let me just give you a couple of reasons why I think this is a companion hypothesis. First of all, it's kind of interesting to note that Schrodinger decided his answer to Walter's life, his argument, a decade before the publication of the book. It's simply not true that on 1942 he said, okay, well, I'm going to do the next six of lectures on biology. He had been brewing and thinking, just like Darwin had been thinking about his theory for many, many years before he wrote Walter's life. And in Schrodinger's case, a decade. Why do we know that? I will show you, I will give you the evidence in a moment. I think the critics are right, you know, those who say that Walter's life is not representative of biology at the time are right, I think, but for the wrong reasons, they're right, but they're right because Schrodinger actually wasn't trying to advance biology with Walter's life. That was not his goal. He was not intending to advance debates in biology. In fact, he was intending to advance a particular debate in physics that I will get to in a moment. Schrodinger's biological argument, which is strongly deterministic, I suggest was simply a tool, a means to an end, namely the defense of a general deterministic goal here. This has one particular important implication which has to do with free will. So at the time you have physicists already arguing that maybe there's a connection with something in the determinism of quantum mechanics and free will. And that's the way we should make that connection. Schrodinger, absolutely despised as he tried to suggest that this was not quite right and actually suggests that quantum determinism actually cannot be used to provide the foundation for free will. I think this is actually what's going on. And the moment you realize that you had us in your head, you will never read that book in the same way. You will see it everywhere and I will get to it in a moment. So let's go back to the book. Remember what was the subtitle? What did it say here? The physicist approached the subject with an epilogue on determinism of free will. That's what he added at the end of the book after the elections. The thing that really annoyed the Irish publisher, which is why he had to go to Cambridge University Press for the publication of this book. Now the interesting thing is, so this is what he says actually in the epilogue. It's a four-page epilogue. To the physicist I wish to emphasize that in my opinion, and contrary to the opinion of Helden's own quarters, he's referring specifically to the work of people like Pascal Giorna who was suggesting this idea, quantum deterministic plays no biological relevant role in the activity of physics. He says this. If you want to argue for free will, don't use science. This is the wrong way of arguing and don't use physics and definitely don't use a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics that's already wrong. In his correspondence he talks about the Copenhagen twirl, the Copenhagen fluff. He's very, very critical of Bohr and this interpretation. Now the irony of course is that the reviewers of the book, people like Helden thought it was a ridiculous epilogue because he talks about how he, you know, he says Helden with his own sort of rhyme remarks is a mechanism must either give a mechanism account of life or turn a stone saw. In his epilogue, Schrodinger does the latter with a very great evidence. He's not the only one to say things like this. He completely misinterprets it. This has just been lost. This is what he goes out to. So let's now go back. So what I want to do now quickly is just suggest to you and show to you that with that in mind, with that hypothesis that I've offered you, you can understand why Schrodinger offended. You know, you can understand why he thought that we should not consider order from the sort of important value and you can understand why he dismissed or asked this to you. Okay, so let's just take the first one. Right, now you may think that at the time this was the common view in genetics. It wasn't. Okay, this wasn't the common, this it was not at all the case that most geneticists in the 1930s had this view of the genome, the genome, the hereditary material being, you know, responsible for everything that happens in the organism, right? So we know from the archives, I've noticed that he actually asks for help. He asks that C. Brown Brothers, these physicists, Carl and Hans, who's a biologist in Vienna, for literature, he asks about Brownian motion. So he's already thinking about the structure of the genome in 1932. And then what happens is this Basquad Jordan publishes this paper, the National Research Outlook, Quantum Mechanics and the Foundational Propaganda and Psychology, where he for the first time suggests that maybe Quantum Mechanics provides a foundation for biology and psychology. Now, when this happens, the brothers write to Schrodinger again and say, have you seen the last paper by Jordan? It's absolutely crazy. I think we need to stop him. He has to be stopped. He says, my brother and I are very pleased to have you as a confederate in the struggle against all occult forces, which he's referring, of course, to Joe Downey. And they say, listen, Eric, you need to publish. You need to write something to respond to Joe Downey. You need to do this. And also, you may be interested, perhaps in reading, and they suggest maybe read Muller. This is Muller in the American United States. Read this paper, The Gene as the Base of Life from 1929, which will give you the sort of ammunition that you need to defend this static fixed deterministic view. They say, why don't you come look at this and so Schrodinger goes on and he writes, he presents in front of the before the National Academy of Sciences in 1933, this talk, this is an abstract, it's published, why are the arts so small, which basically provides the argument that I presented you at the beginning of what it's like. It's already there in 1933. What's interesting is in the archives, there's an actual book called Balon, which is in reference to the preparation. And possibly you can't see it, but I promise you that the last one is Muller. He wrote down, okay, make sure you read Muller in preparation for this presentation. So what does Muller say that is so incendiary? So, well, he said it's actually you read Muller's paper. It's like an arch reductionist manifesto. He talks about the gene already as a material thing, as being the foundation of life. The entire protoplasm, he says everything in the cell is a product of the action of the gene. And it's basically arguing for this extreme genocentric view, which was not the consensus view at all. The other thing that's interesting is that these three chapters of the book, much of the meat of the book is actually drawing on a paper. And this is a paper that's come to be known as the Three Man Paper. Here it is. There goes these are the three people that are at the office. Timur Fedrosovsky, Drosophila Genesis, Russian based in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Carl Simer, and Max Delbert, of course, who then would go on to win the Nobel Prize. It was very important in developing molecular biology. Notice here, the fifth chapter is Delbert's model discussed. So, Delbert actually, this paper is important. Why is it important? Well, because it's the first attempt to actually bring together physics and biology, quantum mechanics actually, how that can be brought to bear to explain the mob, the destruction of the gene. That's actually what the paper does, right? And so it's interesting that the paper book, right, is discussing Delbert, right? So it might be worth finding out what the paper is saying, especially because my experience is lambasting destruction of the board of Schrodinger. He says, the chief merit of what is life is, because it's so proud of, basically, the only good saving grace that we can mention, is that at least it popularized this paper by Timur Fedrosovsky and Delbert, because otherwise we remain unknown outside of the geneticists. So what is important about this paper? Well, what's important about the paper, okay, is that at the end of the paper, in the conclusions, they present this view, which is very deterministic, okay? They talk about how, according to the conception of many biologists, right, genes, we can project back from the genes back to the organism, right? So the entire property of the organism in some way are already located in the genes, he says. We can think of them as the immediate starting points of analysis. And we should not even think about the cell as they get into life, because the cell ultimately is dissolved into genes. It's a very, very relevant, just the kind of stuff that Schrodinger needed, right? So that's really cool. So first of all, the cool thing is, of course, that this is what the view that ends up in was, life that everyone knows, right? And it's also the view that seems to be reflecting more of its position. Now, you may think, okay, that's interesting, but what's even more interesting is that this is not the actual view of the authors. This is the penultimate paragraph in the paper. And the last paragraph in the paper is saying this view is not one that we endorse. So this is the last paragraph in our ideas. This is the last paragraph of the paper. Challenge in this picture. Do you think this is going to convince me? Yes. But they're likely incapable of directly forming the morphogenic substances. They're incapable of being responsible for development. They're saying this already. They can also be hardly thought of, the starting point of developmental sequences. Therefore, we need not to dissolve the cell into genes, right? So they're basically saying, no, we're not going to follow mudah here. And yet, that's not what you find in the book. And you see, because most people didn't read this, because Pub was published in an obscure journal that disappeared after two issues, no one knows about this. And it was only thanks to the work of Phil Sloan, actually, in Notre Dame, who basically has a graduate seminar project translated this into English. That we now know this, right? So Sloan produced this really nice book for creating a physical biology in a three-man paper and molecular biology. And what he's doing there is basically saying, look, guys, we've been wrong about this for 70 years. And he's surely did deliberately misconstrued the conclusions of this to serve his agenda. He didn't have to do that, but he served the agenda because he was trying to follow mudah here. All right, I'll be much shorter because I want to come to an end now about these last two, the other two. What about order from the soul, all right? Now, it seems really bizarre that Schrodinger said this. So again, I want to say, it's not with the benefit of hindsight that we say he's wrong. No, no, no. He knew what he was doing. Why do I say that he knew what he was doing? Because in the same year that what his life came out, Schrodinger published a little paper in Nature called the Statistical Law in Nature, commemorating Wolfsman. The same year. It was the same year. 1944. And in that paper, to illustrate this statistical law, he uses biological examples. So it makes this really, really strange. Schrodinger's appealed to Darwin and Mandel as examples of statistical regularities. And in the book, we all remember, he said the exact opposite. So the only way I have to explain this is that he had an agenda. He knew what he wanted to say. It's not like he looked at biology to find out what biology was saying and then presented it. It's like, he has a view and he reads the papers that are going to give him the evidence that he needs to defend his position against people like Jonathan, by reading people like Wanda. That's what I think was going on. Again, this is not part of the story. No, historians look at this. This is why I'm so totally bad, dazzled, and confused that this isn't really, that we don't know this. Finally, finally, finally, stochasticity. Again, is this something that we've learned recently? No. We've known about stochastic effects for more than a century. I mean, Brownian motion was actually, Robert Brown was a Scottish botanist working in the 1830s, we've known since the 1830s. Let's look at that and we'll have this jittering motion. And even biologists, you know, Darcy Thompson, for example, an important biologist in the beginning of the 20th century, wrote, I want to read this, basically saying, look, if you're going to think about bacteria, instead of macroscopic organisms, forget everything you think you know about the media. Because the media is not going to be one where gravitation is important or Ignatian. It's going to be a strange world. It's going to be a world where, you know, electric charges play a role, Brownian motion plays a role. These are just different. So this was something that people knew. More importantly, perhaps more compellingly, Max Delbrock himself, in his review of what is life that came out in the quarterly review of biology in 1945, writes this about the book. He says, it's kind of odd that Schrodinger does not return in his later discussion to the problem of how the cell gets around statistical fluctuations. The careful reader will be disappointed by this notion. There were not many, not many careful readers, but not many people were disappointed. At the beginning of the book, he says, the statistical fluctuation when it's talking about what are from disorder and physics. I've represented as an unsurmountable obstacle for the physical understanding of the cell, but later on this difficulty seems forgotten. Without a final discussion on this aspect, particularly in the end of the process, blah, blah, blah, the argument of the book loses its strength. He says, where is this discussion of stochasticity? Where is it? It is really the case, right? That at the molecular level of stochasticity, why does it disappear when Schrodinger starts talking about the cell? So again, I don't think it's unfair to talk in 2022 about Schrodinger having made this mistake because people at the time, even the person that Schrodinger mentions Delbrock, is, hang on a minute, what's going on here? Why is this not mentioned? All right, well, you've been very, very patient. I now swiftly come to a close, we have some time for discussion. These are my conclusions. Okay, so, yes, yes, yes, the historians are right that what it's like did intensify the focus on molecular basis of biology. However, let's remember, I mean, let's try to change the chip here. The book is not about genes, it's about order. It's about the nature of order. That is the question that is driving the book, okay? The belief Schrodinger had, that biological macromolecules must be extremely rigid and stable in order to withstand the drop to the effects of global limitation. This is the argument. But you prompted researchers to develop highly idealized models of cellular processes, like the ones I showed you, you know, the gene breakthrough networks, the circuit diagrams. All of this, I think, can be sort of traced to this influence, making them less disposed to explore how the cell actually harnesses noise to generate it, which is exactly what's happening now, by the way. If you look at molecular biology today, that's what people are really excited about. It's not about saying that Schrodinger is not there, how it's in use, but actually how this process is used by the cell to generate water. It's kind of exciting, but I can discuss that with you, mate, if you're interested. I want to share with you what it's like. It's not really about advancing biology at all. It should rather be seen as showing this last whistle attempt to salvage this mechanism, deterministic worldview for Baltimore being undermined by the advent of quantum mechanics, particularly in the Copenhagen. And maybe we want to engage in some counterfactual history here. What would have happened if Schrodinger had given a different kind of answer to what it's like? Molecular biology had developed differently. You know, maybe if he had been interested in defending this deterministic view, maybe more like a much greater way. This is something just to ponder. And finally I want to end with this sort of paradox, right? That it may just turn out that one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century is responsible for convincing biologists that they do not need to worry about physical forces in the world that they do. And it's taken us 80 years to unlearn those lessons. All right, you've been very patient. Thanks very much. Thank you for your talk. I think I will never speak again about Schrodinger's cat. No, because I wasn't referring to this wrong representation. So now I know it was a redacted absolute. So that's a very good reason to read your book, maybe. I have a question to be naive. I don't know biology a lot. It's about Schrodinger's paradox. I just wonder if it's really a paradox. Paradox? Why did he describe the very beginning of what is life? Paradox of the book. Yeah, I just wonder if it's really solved nowadays. I will give you some of how you know. The first point, just to finish my question, it's about the law of a stochastic process. I mean, when you have a serious variable, like Shannon's theory with several variables mathematically, I said this because it's not like this, it's in applied mathematics, we don't have complete laws. So that makes a problem when you go to information theory because you cannot solve the problem when there are a huge amount of variables. And so I just wonder when you are in biology with all these graphs, it looks like information theory. You show us there were many connections. And so if we try to explain it in terms of Shannon's theory or many stochastic processes, maybe there is a mathematical gap. So maybe the paradox driven by Schrodinger still remains in some way different, different way. But yeah, I just wonder and the other reason is that sometimes in phallus theory, in phallus theory, in condition of it, we tend to forget the specific role of genes. And it looked like very structural. And we speak about autopoiesis. And so maybe it's still interesting to wonder what is the interest of gene in transmission, in information transmission. So I just wonder if these two problems make possible to think there is still a paradox in the world. Well, okay. So the paradox itself, so people like Perot, for example, said, look, the paradox is a constant Schrodinger not knowing his chemistry. Francis Krueger also says this. He just didn't know chemistry, otherwise he would use the term polymer or even micro molecule which was coined in 1952, rather than crystal, which seems like an odd term to use. Once you realize that, right, so they actually suggest that, you know, there is no real paradox because the stability, you don't need to posit this extreme rigidity for, for example, polymers to exist in the way they do. And maybe that's just, they say a consequence of Schrodinger not knowing his chemistry. I think a more full, fulfilling answer is the one that I gave you in the talk about what happens in this product, which is that Schrodinger is attributing order to one molecule. What we need to do is to attribute order to, you know, it's not an intrinsic property of the DNA, but it's actually a dynamic accomplishment of the cell. The reason why that order is reliably transmitted is not because the molecule itself is super stable and it's not because it's not being affected by stochastic forces. That's the wrong way to think about it. It's a very good reductionist way. It's actually affected like everything else at the microscopic scale by stochasticity. What is going on is that you have, as I say, this entire apparatus in the cell that is ensuring that that order is maintained despite fluctuations and reliably transmitted. Okay, so, and with that, so your discussion about what you were mentioning, the information, I mean, it's something I'm discussing in the book that I didn't have a chance to talk to you now is what happens to this notion of order from order in molecular biology and guess what happens? The notion of order is replaced by the notion of information. So we've got from order from order to order from information. Information that comes to the password that replaces the notion of order. People don't really talk about order more than money. They talk about information. Information also replaces the concept of specificity that have been the reigning dominant notion in biochemistry and also in the knowledge until that time. You read people like Linus Pauli, they talk about specificity. That sort of language is lost of what we have in its place as the notion of information. People like Robert Wiener, for example, in sci-metrics in 1948, mentioned Schumacher, and he says with Schumacher we have, and he actually also already made the transition from order. He was already thinking about order as information. He's already talking about information as something real, something that is there, even though it's an import from communication theory on the part of Shannon, a consequence of the war effort by 1948 already by 1948. Wiener is talking about information as a fundamental property of nature and also energy and matter. He says, if you understand life, you've got energy, matter, and you have information. So very, very quickly in molecular biology you have the reification of this notion of information, which ultimately remains a vague metaphor. It means different things to different people. If you talk about information to developmental biologists, they will have something very different in mind than if you talk about information to someone working in molecular biology. You've got information in terms of the information coding, the coding for amino acids from your DNA basis. That's one way of thinking about information. You've got positional information in development theory. So the notion really it's true that many people have tried to provide mathematical accounts of information that would do justice to the way it's used, but these have all failed because biologists themselves are not very careful the way they use the term information. Perhaps it is precisely the fact that the notion of information is semantically ambivalent that gives us its remaining power. We should not try to provide some operation, some definition that applies to all cases. But what's really interesting in any event is that in the second half of the twentieth century what we had says we didn't get order from information. And I've actually even found correspondence with I forget my terrible French pronunciation. Not prismian, why prima? It was interesting if I was saying this idea of neg entry. So we're going to write it and show you the same. Maybe we can use a notion of negative eventually be here to talk about information, Schrodinger is actually very, very skeptical. So Schrodinger, coming from a different generation, doesn't, he's not prepared to even think about information in the way that people can be suggest. So, I mean, you know, in philosophy about this long, it's a well-known problem, right? The notion of information. Biologists seem to be very happy with this use of the type of information. Philosophy of biology, I think, have been trained to be much more skeptical also because when you realize the history of the importation of this notion of duality, you realize there's nothing really inevitable about it. There's nothing really inevitable about talking about information as something real. But you know, many biologists think that that's the notion of all that we need, but it's definitely not something you see in Schrodinger. Sorry, that may not be the complete response of what you were saying about that. Yeah, no, I think it gives a lot of context very, very. I want to sum up points that we tend to forget sometime in auto-project history, maybe the interest of the gene. James, yeah, absolutely. I think that's quite right. I mean, that doesn't directly relate to my talk, but absolutely. I mean, in the auto-poetic tradition, right, it's coming from a conservative organization. And interestingly is one that does not consider the genome as being the source of that water, right? It actually has more in common perhaps with people like Prima gene and others in physics who are more interested in providing a systemic account of water rather than one that traces the order to a particular molecule, which is what it's all about very, basically. Oh, we're talking about order in life as a consequence, you know, the property of one molecule that is amplified or is order an emergent systemic property of the cell as a whole, right? And that debate is very much in line with a number of different cases. Can we say there is still a paradox to solve? What is the purpose of this paradox B? Yeah, these two paradoxes will be first to understand what the formation is. I mean, I think that is not a paradox when you remember, right, that the notion was introduced in a particular context to solve a particular problem regarding engineering and communication and was brought in after the war, right? To provide a common language to talk about more likely interactions. It really is now, I mean, there's only a paradox if you think already that information is something real. It's a paradox if you take the term seriously. Exactly. If you don't, and you are sensitive to the history, then you're not saying that it's not useful. I would not say that we should be locked this motion, but I don't think there's a real paradox there. There are a few, but maybe after that I believe. But the first one is that at the end of the book, you argue for new laws that will find you physical. Yeah, good. And it's very confusing for me because if I end up here reading, where could they come from? That's the question, that's the question. All right, well, I was hoping that someone would ask this. I was going to because I knew he would, so it's fine. So what people have read into Schoeniger is that he had something in mind similar to one Bohr and Delberg had in mind. So Delberg was a theoretical physicist who got interested in biology because he attended a lecture given by Bohr in 1932 called On Lighting Life. In Copenhagen, where he suggested the complementarity principle applies not just to physical systems, but to biological systems. Then you also, in biology, have a complementarity between a mechanistic description and a more technological one. It's coming from the cantive influence of his father, Christian Bohr, who was a physiologist, by the way. But that's a long story. The point is that some people think that Schoeniger should be understood along the same lines as someone like Delberg who actually got into biology because he was looking for the paradox. He thought, I'm going to find a paradox that's going to sort of lead to a new kind of biology. And maybe in that sense, it makes sense to talk about new laws. I think that's the wrong way to think about it. Why is it the wrong way to think about it? Because you can't think of anyone more further away from the Bohr view or the Delberg view than Schoeniger. What Schoeniger has in mind, I think, by this idea of new laws of physics is actually new deterministic mechanistic laws, not statistical laws. Right, so I think what he had in mind was that if we really, really take this seriously, this programming of molecular biology, we're going to end up having, coming up with discovering principles that suggest that the order is deterministic and that it's not statistical. And in fact, we could even argue that that happened. You know, that the rarefication of the genetic program in the 1960s counts. So I think Schoeniger would have been happy to count that as a new law of physics of the kind that he had in mind. New law, because he was contrasting it with the... So he's arguing that physics is going to statistical mechanics and quantum physics and biology will save the good, classical... Yeah, exactly. Biology will bring physics back. The good, classical, processional... And I'll give you one more piece of evidence for this, which is that in the book, Schoeniger provides an analogy. He thinks imagine a guy, he thinks he says, imagine that an ancient person sees a steam engine and looks at the operation of the steam engine. They would be like completely overwhelmed. They would not know what's going on because these would be basically counts as new laws for him. And he seems to make that sort of connection that it's just a matter of time before we realize Schoeniger thinks that the living state, which is he thinks a solid state is giving us, you know, sorts of regularities that physicists at the time were not considering. So they made deterministic laws that are not statistical. So I think that's where it is, okay. Yeah, can you tell us a little more about the tension? Because you started with the idea that biologists didn't read or have no ideas, didn't read, didn't understand, maybe, the book. And then there is intention with the fact that you argue that no one had a big impact on biology. Some of you use this tension. It's basically you have two projects you have. That's what the book is really about and that's what the impact of the book on science. Absolutely. So I mean, I think that the way to resolve that tension is to realize that it's a bit like a tree. I don't have a pen, but it's like, you know, Schoeniger influenced someone like Mono and Mono influenced many others. So I don't need to show necessarily the influence of Schoeniger because if I can show the Mono's influence then it's a secondary influence, right? So if you think we're basically allowed to show right as if Schoeniger is here, Mono is here and you have, you know, this is the 1940s. This is the 1970 publication of Chancellor's Assessment. Just to take Mono's example, and this is now the 2000s, you know, that if I can show this, then I don't need to suggest that the scientists that they understand the arguments of Schoeniger's worth life, or it's enough for me to show that the view that we have today, or what I can order, can be traced back to the view of people like Mono, Cric and others, which themselves can then in turn be traced back to Schoeniger. So you mean Mono understood that? Well, it is clear that in the case of Mono that he not only did he change his mind, but then he created Schoeniger, which is why it's so cool. Like it's very clear, I mean, you don't usually find such clear evidence in a kind of Mono. Didn't you say that it's Mono that made the big impact of Schoeniger? Yeah, I mean, Mono had a big impact, but Mono got that from Schoeniger. They haven't been, I mean, Schoeniger, so we all know what's on his head beautifully about this, so Mono, when he spent his first work on bacterial growth, is a play, I mean, to statistical regularities. So then, so Mono, on his own, would have never made that transition. Actually, if he hadn't made Schoeniger, things might have been, might have looked differently. And how do you explain the fact that there's the myth around the book? Because it sounds great to have great physicists talking about life. Pilots just have an inferiority complex, okay? They're always looking up to the physicists how wonderful it is to have someone like Schoeniger, right? Big man himself, devoting this time to thinking about life. And so it sort of made sense from a sociopathical political perspective back in the 1960s, when you go to accept a Nobel Prize to get a little nudge to Schoeniger. That's what was working still. And then very quickly, many of the others followed. James Watson, Francis Crick. Many others, you know, Sidney Brenner, how much time do you have? Sino-Benz, Joshua Ledberg, all these people, I found evidence that this is all going to be in the book. It's difficult, it's hard to find some of the possible influence. You could do a cytometric, maybe it's not you that will write, but a cytometric to check between these two traditions, the more statistical one and the new mechanism. In fact, it seems that that's what you're claiming, is that it's the mechanism. And look to how it diffuses in the literature by a automatic study. And digital humanities, and maybe there you could prove empirically the scale of the inference. Yeah, absolutely. But it's probably huge, it's probably huge, because as you said, in the 40s, that was not... No, it wasn't the authors, you asked what was that? And the number of people who just throw perfunctory citation of what is life into the first paragraph of their article in Science or Nature, because it sounds cool, to be able to put Shrodinger in the first paragraph of your paper in Science or Nature. It's like, I bet it's a big one. I bet there's a lot of them. Yeah. No, but it's definitely, it's a good thing to try to look at, right? So, one thing you can do, for example, is how was this book received? So, I found a really interesting review of the book by Ludwig Bomberg-Lamping, right? Father of Genesis III, also an important theoretical biologist, based in Vienna, so he writes about the book and he says, wow, I mean, this is so... He first says, you know, we should be proud of Austria's, the past of Austria's people. Shrodinger's here, you know. Very interesting. And very quickly, things go, you know, turn goes south, because he starts talking about how it's, you know, the heart of life cannot possibly be something static, he says. We need a dynamic view, because of course Bertrand Lamping's coming from that earlier tradition that understood that biological systems are open systems, that the exchange of, you know, the energetic exchanges are going to be the heart of the matter, where actually Bertrand Lamping developed this idea of a steady state in his work. So, it's very good to see him reacting to Shrodinger saying, this can't possibly be right. This view which is so fixed and rigid and static can't possibly be right, and yet that's the view that at the end won the day, right? And again, I don't know if you've noticed in the quotes I had, but he was directly attacking this sort of steady state dynamic view. The lecture that I'm quoting from, from 56 is all about you have this traditional orthodox view, which is dynamic. And that's the old view. The new exciting view is one that is fixed mechanical Cartesian. And now we're going back, now, 2022, we're actually going back to pre-molecular biology days in some sense, and I'm not trying to deny, of course, the incredible accomplishments of molecular biology, but what is really interesting is that we are now in a situation where we're beginning to take seriously again the importance of a dynamic picture, but sort of unlearning the lessons of Shrodinger. That's why I got interested in this project. I mean, my earlier work was working out what was the problem with the contemporary view. And so what I'm doing in this project is giving an explanation where this view comes from, not by tracing it all the way back to Descartes on the 17th century bedding machine, but more proximal explanation that we have. Surely we are in 1944 talking about this now. Anyone? I have a follow-up. Yeah. I realize it's a history of science point of view. Yeah. And when you do this, it's kind of bad, right? Good thing. Monolithially, we see things. Surely I'm probably going to get one. Do you have other candidates? Like, why? Because it could be a little limited if you want to argue that there's such an impact on this room and all. Do you have other candidates? Great question. Not now as clear-cut as it might be. And in fact, I spent two weeks at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in archives last summer going through the correspondence in Francis Crippins and we couldn't decide if I could find anything. So I don't seem to have any direct connection linking, surely they're by name in a way, because you know, Monolith is so obvious, right? And in fact, for example, frontside.cobe says, even though it's only logical life, for example, he talks about the book, about the world's life, but he then, the statue within this autobiography says, he personally wasn't influenced by it. Because in the case of every single individual. So yeah, I mean, this is a hypothesis. I'm not giving you the full story. It's a working hypothesis. And I'm suggesting that thinking about things in this way makes sense. And of course, we don't want to say that Georgia was the only influence in us having inherited this view of order in itself, this molecular biology agenda. But I think a very important one, which by the way has not been mentioned in what, 50, 60 years of history biography. This is new, okay? This is like, people know there's a lot of work on the world's life. The only person that's written along, no, actually nobody. I mean, Phil Slavitt's work has been to show the motivations for sharing them. But the idea of connecting surely with the agenda of molecular biology is just something that's a working hypothesis. And you are right, of course, and I'm sure this will probably come, the referee reports in the manuscript. You can't, you can't. Well, no, it's fine, but you should give me more. So I'm gonna have to do something like this to make my case. Do I say anything else? I don't know. Yes, sorry. Yeah, please. Go ahead. Well, I would like to come back on the terminus. Yeah. We know that Schrodinger wasn't happy with quantum weirdness. Yes, exactly. Because he told, sometimes he said, if one were in a position to manipulate a single atom, a single photon, it would be blatant that we would arrive at absurd situations. And sometimes for us physicists, we think that the Schrodinger cat is an example of this, of the absurd situations when you go down. But the problem now for us physicists is that single atoms, single molecules and single photons are manipulative. And we arrive at the weird situations that Schrodinger would not have liked. So for us, the problem as physicists, we should try to understand where the weirdness, at what point the weirdness disappears. Because when you manipulate single or two or three molecules, the orthodox weird interpretation of physics, quantum physics exists. But certainly we have the impression that the weirdness doing those with the scale of the molecules. And so we are unhappy about that. And the coherence is only a partial explanation of it. Yeah, so actually you find that, I mean for most of the second half of the 20th century, what you find is that there's no engagement on the part of molecular biology with quantum mechanics. Nothing. And the reason is what you said, that it's just a different level. And even though molecular biology is still molecular, it seems to be all dampened because the quantum effects, the weirdness and the intertumbency plays no role. Now that's basically the sort of canonical orthodox view. And actually I try to find references to quantum mechanics during the regular metric searches in the molecular body, which is hardly any, you can count them with the figures of one hand. And if there are, it's to say, it's not relevant, right? Now that's, it was, now what's interesting about that is that it's that's different before Schrodinger and it's different now. So I'll talk about each of those. It's different before Schrodinger because Pasquale Jordan comes up with this research program that he calls Quantum Biology. Already in the 1930s, there's a consequence also of discussions with Bohr who also increasingly showed interest in the application of his ideas to biology. And in the 1930s, actually he writes a whole book. It hasn't been translated into English or Physics and the Mystery of Life. It goes into six editions. And this is a book which basically proposes what he calls the Amplifier Theory. And the Amplifier Theory is that organism serves amplifiers of quantum effects. And that quantum mechanics does, in fact, play a massive role in observation of the teleological, creative, spontaneous behavioral organisms. And by the way, because of that, we can also make a case of free will. So for Jordan it goes, it goes from physics, right? To biology ultimately to psychology. This is already in the early 1930s, okay, he suggests this. Okay, and so you know, quantum mechanics, yeah. Plays a role in how we should think about organisms and ultimately he wants to make the case for free will. Of course, we are organisms. So it's important to secure the biological foundations for any psychological argument. And in turn, it's important to secure the biological and metaphysical argument. Right, now what's interesting is that this is, of course, a bit speculative and very few people take it seriously. But Squadron Jordan is, unfortunately, an ardent Nazi. So it does work well for his reputation after the war. Right, he actually ends up becoming a politician. And, but you know, this is really picked up. Okay, quantum mechanics disappears. Until recently, and then now it seems to be a rebirth of interest in quantum biology. Why, because it seems to be the case that it thought to synthesis on another example is the orientation of Bert and Charles and I were talking about this earlier today. There seems to be the case that quantum effects may be playing an ideologically relevant role. So what was like really sort of something no one did for 50, 60 years, which is to appeal to quantum mechanics more likely while you suddenly get something that is not only acceptable, but it's hip and cool. And you have new graduate programs being developed right now on quantum biology. There's one big one in Sussex, for example, in the UK. So that's kind of interesting. But the reason also why I wanted to have this on the floor is that I really think that this, which is what Squadron Jordan is trying to do, is explains why Schrodinger gets interested in life. Because what Schrodinger wants to do is to be completely clear on this is to sever this link. Because if you stop this, then you can't end up arguing for free will on the basis of quantum mechanics. So the entire program, as I see it, of what's in that book and what is life is an attempt to show that we do, there's no reason, it's completely illegitimate, inappropriate to infer from the indeterminacy that you have in quantum effects to the microscopic, to the biological level. Okay, that's, this submarine is really, if I were to, you know, basically illustrate the whole, summarizing the entire talk of the time observation of Schrodinger in one, in two lines, it would be those two lines. Because in cutting that connection, Schrodinger is saying, you know, there's no, there's not a thing. But it's a bit more complicated because of course, Schrodinger is appealing to quantum mechanics in the book, right? But for him, quantum mechanics is deterministic, right? So for him, quantum mechanics is providing the stability that he needs to argue for the rigidity of the imperial crystal, I'd say. Quantum chemistry. Quantum chemistry, exactly. So Schrodinger is saying, we need quantum mechanics, but not in the crazy accommodated view, but actually the good stuff, right? The stuff that enables us to explain the chemical bonds. So in that sense, it is applying quantum mechanics to biology, but not in the way that 9% of people think of quantum mechanics today, which is a deterministic view. So that's why it's so odd to see people today talk about quantum biology and they say, hey, well, Schrodinger is the founder of this view because they're completely misunderstanding, Schrodinger, of course, is interested in securing biology and quantum foundations, but the foundations are deterministic, not deterministic. In that sense, he's completely sets himself apart from all the other quantum theorists of the time. Yes? Yeah, because I would like to comment on the question that in the second edition of his book, he put an author in the negative entry regarding free energy. Yeah. Can he argue that it's not necessarily keeps free energy in the sense of only change of modern energy that could simplify as the free energy. It's something else. And that, to my extent, this free energy that he was talking about is related again to the paper of war and life and life of the teleological issues. Great question. I don't know. So the Moore's paper, I mean, this is another paper I want to write about the influence of Moore's address on molecular biology. I want to basically suggest that the new biology, it's a dual biology. The biology of the interwar period was fascinated by Moore and promised a new revolution that would be based on the new physics, and yet the revolution of biology when it finally came was not based on a ball, but actually on the 19th century internalistic view of physics, which, of course, subside and edit some information through it from me. But the new biology you drew on the old physics rather than the new physics, and so it's nice for him to be told there about the role of the ball. But going to your question about entropy, so something that people picked up on when the book came up was that he surely had talked about negative entry, and so many physicists thought this was something that could make no sense. And so in the second edition, he added another saying, you know, I've been told by some of my physicists colleagues that it would have been more helpful to talk about free energy as a thing that has been used by the system to maintain the ball. As far as that goes, I mean, I find it very positive that there's been so much emphasis on this because, again, when you do a little bit of historical work, you realize surely there wasn't a person to note that there's no problem between the Second Law and by life. That had been a problem in the 19th century, but you have a whole range of authors, Fechma, Lopka, Raszewski, Hill, Hopkins, a bunch of biochemists who were already talking about dynamic equilibrium in the 1920s, and are already suggesting, okay, that we don't have a problem here with the Second Law because, you know, biological systems are not closed systems. And so the entropy is actually being increased when we consider the activities of organisms. So it's definitely not appropriate to suggest that Schrodinger, in some ways, the one figures this out. And yet, you know, something interesting happens here too. So in the discussions of thermodynamics and biology, often the first chapter begins with what is life and you're like, okay, what's going on here? And they often say, well, Schrodinger, you know, proposed this, resolved the products. It's interesting that even there, you have the appeal to Schrodinger's name to legitimize a feat. They're saying, well, you know, they're wanting to associate this pre-Ginian non-agribbable thermodynamics research program in biology with Schrodinger. Why? Because it's cool. Because it's a respect to you. Well, I mean, it's basically that, right? And again, this is something I want to also mention in my look. I didn't mention it in my talk. If you look at the history, you realize there's no reason I'm actually making the opposite claim. So whereas in the molecular biology case, I'm saying that Schrodinger did have an important legacy. I'm also at the same time saying that Schrodinger did not play a prominent role in suggesting that, you know, that that order that goes through, in developing this problem of self-organization. And the reason why he didn't do that is because what, when he talks, so you know, you've got this distinction between order from disorder, right? And order from order, okay? The whole book is talking about this distinction. Now, people have said, well, you know, Schrodinger was talking about an order from disorder, so surely we can go from here to self-organization. Schrodinger never says that, okay? Precogean is writing in, around the same time, 1947. That's the beginning of sort of the Brussels school, actually, with that movement on it. So it's a shame. I mean, it could have, Schrodinger maybe, you know, it could have happened with Schrodinger because he came close. He wanted to talk about it in a jetties, but he couldn't have thought, okay, maybe this provides a new form of order. And then maybe, you know, we need to enhance the conflict of order from disorder to not only include statistical regularities of physics, but also this sort of self-organizing capacities, right? In fact, people like Precogean, I don't know if anyone knows this, but actually the very concept of dissipative structure was proposed to distinguish this form of order from Schrodinger's one. He talks about order from fluctuations. And he says, let's, he says to the reader, hey, don't confuse this with what Schrodinger means by order from disorder, because I don't mean to talk about statistical regularities. I'm talking about a completely different kind of order than it has to do with self-organization. Interesting, huh? And yet now you have people saying, well, you know, actually look at the Wikipedia page of what is life. It's kind of fun. There's something that they call the Schrodinger Paradox. And guess what? The Schrodinger Paradox in the Wikipedia article is about, it's the paradox of the second law in life. It's not the paradox of the book. It's actually the paradox of this reconstruction, right? It's the idea that was already solved by people in the 1930s. So what I'm going to do in my book is actually provide evidence for this, right? Give you a couple of examples of people in the 1930s saying there is no problem, right? But I mean, this idea of the source of water coming from self-organization is developing around the same time, right, in the 1970s. 1994 is still very, very, very, very primitive. But by the 1960s, 70s, of course, sure, Primogean wins the Nobel Prize in 1977. And by that time, you know, he's writing with his fingers, you know, these wonderful books, Popular Science, talking about how order comes from nature, you know. People like Stuart Kaufman, then biology developed that, order for free, right? Fundamental, interesting idea, right? You can get order for free, because that's, it reflects a real, this, you know, property of sort of tenancy in nature. But all of that is, of course, unknown to Schrodinger, right? So it seems really odd, right? There's a lot to credit Schrodinger for this. It's just, it's known because it's cool, yeah. Yes, and no, because, for instance, the guy of offices was this, directly to free energy, to negative energy, the translation that changed over the main, by reading Schrodinger, making basis on experiments to analyze the atmosphere of Mars, the spectrum of the atmosphere of Mars compared to the spectrum based on what he was reading on Schrodinger. So, in somehow you have a kind of a empirical translation from the theory of Schrodinger to the formulation of the guy of offices, or at least to the results that, we don't need to send anything to Mars to know whether there is life or not, because, gentlemen, you can already was based on Schrodinger's opinion, there is no way that we can get life on Mars because of the concept of the theory of free energy only. Okay, I'm not familiar with any of that. That's completely new to me. All of this, as you just said, so I'm going to ask you to please send me. You have a new influence to have, too. Yeah, I've never heard of this. Never heard of Schrodinger's influence on Gaia, all of, like, oh, any of this. So that's interesting, that's right. It's nice what you do to include that in my story. Yes, awesome. So it's four o'clock. I will have a little question of myself, but I can talk about it over beer. So thank you very much. Thanks to all of you for your time.