Basic Biological Anticipation

Abstract

Living organisms persist as functional wholes far beyond the individual lifetimes of their functional components. They achieve this by taking antecedent action, continuously fabricating themselves in anticipation of a future nonfunctional and deleterious internal state. This property of self-fabrication is the most basic expression of biological anticipation and of life itself. Self-fabricating systems must be closed to efficient causation, and in this chapter, I identify the classes of efficient biochemical causes in the cell and show how they are organized in a hierarchical cycle, the hallmark of a system closed to efficient causation. Broadly speaking, the three classes of efficient causes are the enzyme catalysts of covalent metabolic chemistry, the intracellular milieu that drives the supramolecular processes of chaperone-assisted folding and self-assembly of polypeptides and nucleic acids into functional catalysts and transporters, and the membrane transporters that maintain the intracellular milieu, in particular its electrolyte composition.