Organic Life: The Biological Importance Of Behavior

Adaptive theories show that the nature provides a system everything required to sustain system’s existence.

Process of evolvement of the universe would have been purely physical in nature, but for the evolvement of organic life. Organic life manifests some properties like life, mind, consciousness, and hopefully free will that inorganic matter does not manifest.

Therefore, the key question as pointed out by Schrödinger is the biological importance of behavior. We would put it slightly differently to ask if the process of evolution at all about the evolution of physical structures. Do physical entities learn to use parts because parts emerged accidently as a consequence of exposure to certain physical conditions?

One would like to believe

There are two important aspects to the existence of the cell – the cell as a physical structure and a cell as a functional entity.

Each cell is designed to perform a function and it has a reasonably predictable expansion in time, but it would be wrong to term this extended existence in time as life-cycle.

A cell cannot survive even as a physical structure once it is removed from the body of a living organism. As we have mentioned, each cell has a distinctly identifiable physical structure, and each cell performs a specific function, but it does so only as a part of a larger system, not as an independently existing sub-system of a system. Survival of the cell depends exclusively on the survival of the system. On the other hand, a cell can be removed from the body without shortening the life of the body. In fact, removal of a diseased cell can extend the life of the body.

The process of degeneration is a consequence of the functional aspect of the cell. The cell eventually dies when it can no longer perform its functions. The life and death of the cell can only be explained in relation to the whole. The cell retains its physical identity while being part of the body, but it is not an independent unit-life centered on

A sub-atomic particle is a part of an atom, not a sub-system of an atom. Similarly, parts of our body have distinctly identifiable physical structure; therefore, we can even name these parts, as if they have an independent existence, but parts of our body are sub-systems of the body. Parts of the body do not enjoy any functional freedom even if they perform different and specific functions in a bigger range than does a cell in our body.

Of course, this raises another important question, ‘what is the fundamental difference between a simple part of a system and a sub-system of a system?’, but for now, we will focus on the issue of the structural and functional integrity of the system.

Gravity may bind a system structurally, but gravity cannot make a system function and communicate as a composite whole. In any case, existence of functional systems rules out the possibility of gravity being the force that ensures even structural integrity of systems. No such force exists in the universe.

Atoms of a radioactive element are not bound by gravitational force, but radioactive elements still function as a