The Great Reaching Out: How Living Beings Communicate, Robert Froman, 1968

Description: Thank you for looking at our listing. A purchase is supporting Friends of Spanish Peaks Library District! These books are all donated from different sources. This book is in very good condition, and an ex-library book with library stamps and markings, see photos for details. I will combine shipping for each additional item purchased. Please do not pay for books until you are done bidding/shopping, and I will create a new Invoice with the reduced shipping charges. Please, please, I cannot issue refunds due to penalties that EBay assesses. Feel free to submit any questions you have. Thanks! From intro: Tom Lehrer, the part-time mathematician and part-time nightclub entertainer, likes when in the latter role to jab deflating needles into the devotees of certain catchwords. But one current cliché so enrages him that what he uses on those who favor it is more like a meat ax. This is the complaint about being unable to communicate with one's fellow human beings. "If they can't communicate," says Lehrer, "the least they can do is SHUT UP." Those who make the complaint might profit by following this suggestion. We members of the species Homo sapiens are the beneficiaries of several billion years evolution of methods of communication. Most of us usually take it for granted that we depend almost entirely on the verbal methods developed in the last several thousand years. Actually, we also use a great many other forms of communication, sometimes without being aware of using them. There are even forms of communication that no one-indeed, no thing-can refrain from no matter how much effort may be invested in the attempt to abstain. This little paradox is what the Second Law of Thermody- manies is all about. According to that law, which seems to hold go id in every part of the universe and in all conditions that scientists have so far been able to observe, warmer objects always communicate heat to cooler ones. Do not dismiss this as a mere play on words. Communication is defined as the process by which some quality or information is made common to two or more objects or individuals. And the process by which heat is communicated from one object to another has been found to be quite similar to the process by which information is communicated from one person or place to another. Indeed, the mathematical theory of information is based on the mathematical theory of thermo-dynamics. This book is not a mathematical treatise, however, so it will stick to the story of the communication of information, which is story enough. Here on Earth the beginning of such communicating seems also to have been the beginning of life. Although it is easy to see that a mouse is a living creature and a mouse-sized stone is not, it can be quite difficult to distinguish life from not-life at the simplest known level, the level that now interests the specialists who call themselves molecular biologists. To help them decide whether a complex protein molecule is or is not a genuine "living system," they have produced a minimum definition of such a system: (1) It must be able to transfer energy in a directed way. (2) Once having done this, it must be able to remember how and be able to communicate this information to another system like itself which it can construct. Biochemists have been able to identify a number of the steps by which comparatively simple nonliving molecules, present in the earth's atmosphere and seas three billion or more years ago, could have gotten together to form more and more complex molecules. It now seems highly probable that life on earth got its start when one of those molecules learn to communicate its own structure and habits to other molecules in the neighborhood. It has been demonstrated in any case that this is how life is carried on today and its fundamental level.

Price: 11.25 USD

Location: Walsenburg, Colorado

End Time: 2024-09-14T17:12:06.000Z

Shipping Cost: 4.63 USD