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Code Biology – A New Science of Life

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Abstract

Systems Biology and the Modern Synthesis are recent versions of two classical biological paradigms that are known as structuralism and functionalism, or internalism and externalism. According to functionalism (or externalism), living matter is a fundamentally passive entity that owes its organization to external forces (functions that shape organs) or to an external organizing agent (natural selection). Structuralism (or internalism), is the view that living matter is an intrinsically active entity that is capable of organizing itself from within, with purely internal processes that are based on mathematical principles and physical laws. At the molecular level, the basic mechanism of the Modern Synthesis is molecular copying, the process that leads in the short run to heredity and in the long run to natural selection. The basic mechanism of Systems Biology, instead, is self-assembly, the process by which many supramolecular structures are formed by the spontaneous aggregation of their components. In addition to molecular copying and self-assembly, however, molecular biology has uncovered also a third great mechanism at the heart of life. The existence of the genetic code and of many other organic codes in Nature tells us that molecular coding is a biological reality and we need therefore a framework that accounts for it. This framework is Code biology, the study of the codes of life, a new field of research that brings to light an entirely new dimension of the living world and gives us a completely new understanding of the origin and the evolution of life.

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Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to all members of the Biosemiotics Board who have sent comments on this paper. I thank in particular Stanley Salthe, Anna Aragno and Joachim De Beule for their very useful suggestions.

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  1. Dipartimento di Morfologia ed Embriologia, Via Fossato di Mortara 64a, 44121, Ferrara, Italy

    Marcello Barbieri

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  1. Marcello Barbieri
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Correspondence to Marcello Barbieri.

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Barbieri, M. Code Biology – A New Science of Life. Biosemiotics 5, 411–437 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-012-9147-3

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