How these proteins are organized to orchestrate living processes is a central question in biology.
It is also consistent with the finding that living processes and structures as well as non-living processes are indeed fractal, as mathematician Ian Stewart has shown.
As he repeatedly emphasised in later editions of The Origin, he was a pluralist, and I suspect would have been delighted at the rich new insights into the dynamics of living processes that genomics is revealing.
The Canadian ecologist John Livingston once lamented that "our sundry aesthetic models" have no place for living processes and that "our culture is essentially abiotic" – ie lifeless.
Functional ecosystems in which dynamic living processes prevail are likely to be more resistant to climate change than stagnant collections in virtual glass cases.
On the other hand, to some chemists it is the distinction be tween a substance made by bac teria and one produced by non living processes that is more subtle.
Roux was more a laboratory man than a philosopher, so the main defence of the principles of mechanism, that all living processes "can be unequivocally explained in physicochemical terms" [quoted in [ 41], p.430] fell to Jacques Loeb [ 42].
The colloids prepared in living organisms by biological processes are vital to the existence of the organism.
In living organisms, many biological processes are inextricably linked with light, such as the photosynthesis systems and rhodopsin.
Although fluorescence microscopy provides a crucial window into the physiology of living specimens, many biological processes are too fragile, are too small, or occur too rapidly to see clearly with existing tools.
