Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
(Sect.
6.1.4
),
rule-governed creativity
, the
energy requirement
of information
transduction, storage, and transmission (Sect.
4.8
) (Ji 1997a, 2001). Both human
and cell languages can be treated as 6-tuples, {
L, W, S, G, P, M
}, where
L
is the
alphabet,
W
is the lexicon or the set of words,
S
is a set of sentences,
G
is a set of
rules governing the formation of sentences from words (called the
first articulation
)
and the formation of words from letters (the
second articulation
),
P
is a set of
physical mechanisms necessary and sufficient to implement a language, and finally
M
is a set of objects or processes, both symbolic and material, referred to by words,
sentences, and their higher-order structures (e.g., texts). In Table
6.3
, cell and
human languages are compared with respect to the components of the linguistic
6-tuple. Table
6.3
contains two important concepts,
conformons
and
IDSs
, which
play fundamental roles in the
Bhopalator model
of the living cell (Ji 1985a, b, 1991,
refer to cell language as
cellese
and human language as
humanese
(Ji 1999b)
,
and
the science of
cell biology
may be viewed as the translation of
cellese
to
humanese.
To the best of my knowledge, the first concrete application of the cellese concept
was made by Aykan (2007) in formulating his so-called message-adjusted network
(MAN) model of the gastro-enteropancreatic endocrine system.
Just as human language can be viewed as a
linear
network of letters forming
words (i.e.,
second articulation
), words forming sentences (i.e.,
first articulation
),
and sentences forming texts (i.e.,
third articulation
[Ji 2005a, pp. 17-18]), so
bionetworks (e.g., individual proteins or their networks known as metabolic
networks) can be viewed as
multidimensional
generalizations of linguistic
networks, where, for example, amino acids can be compared to letters, proteins to
words, complexes of proteins to sentences, and network of complexes as texts (see
Rows 7, 8, and 9 in Table
6.3
). In addition to these structural or morphological
similarities, there is a set of conventional/evolutionary rules and physical principles
that is common to both human and cell languages, including the following:
1. The principle of self-organization (PSO) (6.10)
The phenomenon of self-organization was first observed in physical (e.g.,
Bernard instability [Kondepudi and Prigogine 1998; Kondepudi 2008]) and chemi-
cal systems (e.g., Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction) as discussed in Sect.
3.1
. Since
the cell is an example of self-organized systems, it would follow that one of its
functions, namely, communication with its environment including other cells (and
hence cell language itself), must be self-organizing. Self-organization on the cellular
level entails generating molecular forces from exergonic chemical reactions occur-
ring internally. Also, since human communication is built upon (or presupposes) cell
communication, it too must be an example of self-organizing processes. Therefore, it
can be concluded that both cell and human languages are rooted in (or ultimately
driven by) self-organizing chemical reaction-diffusion systems.
2. The minimum energy requirement for information transmission
(6.11)
Both human and cell languages can be viewed asmeans of transmitting information
in space and/or time. All information transmission requires dissipating free energy as
