BIOLOGICAL ORDER 



What is the information, that is, the negentropy, of an organism? 

 This is, as pointed out by Brillouin in his classical book, an un- 

 explored field of research. 



The Negentropy of 

 Biological Organization 



Physicists know that in a machine the structural negentropy 

 represents the information or organization of the machine. How 

 can we visualize the structural negentropy of an organism or of a 

 cell? Each species of macromolecule, whether it is a polysaccharide, 

 a protein, or a nucleic acid, is part of the organization of the living 

 machine. One could consider that the negentropy of an organism 

 is the sum of the negentropy of its specific macromolecules. But 

 the problem can be simplified. 



The organization of all the macromolecules of an organism has its 

 origin in the organization of the hereditary material, which is 

 nucleic acid. In the bacterium Escherichia coli, the hereditary ma- 

 terial is composed of 10" nucleic bases belonging to 4 categories 

 organized in a given sequence. Since this is so, we can calculate the 

 number of possible arrangements of the 10" units. It is 4^^'. 



For the calculation of the information of our bacterium, we have 

 assumed that at the origin there were 4^0" possible outcomes, and 

 that today there is only one, selected from among a large number 

 of probabilities. 



If we apply the formula 



/= 1.38 X 10-16 InPo 

 it follows that 



/= 1.38 X 10-16 In 410' 



The structural negentropy of the bacterium Escherichia coli is 

 around 2 X 10 -^ entropy units, that is, ergs/°C. 



This figure was obtained by considering only the genetic material. 

 But an organism is much more than its genetic material. It contains 

 a few thousand enzymes and a large number of other specific macro- 

 molecules. This organization should perhaps be considered also in 

 the calculation of the amount of information. But the problem of 



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