The Ancient Patterns of Work in Living Systems
The Ancient Patterns of Work in Living Systems
This chapter investigates the most fundamental work process in living systems by which cells perform work, whether in microbes or in humans, and illustrates how the characteristics of these processes offer a foundation from which work at all other levels of organization proceeds. It discusses the natural history of these work processes at a molecular level. This chapter shows that the understanding of how work gets done in living systems depended on the discovery that this is also how an organism does the most fundamental work that occurs inside the cell. It also demonstrates the clear complexity of human work as one more flowering of the diversity of working processes among living systems.
Keywords: living systems, working processes, work, humans, microbes, cell, organism
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