Bank Windhoek Socratic Forum

The next meeting of the Bank Windhoek Socratic Forum takes place on 19 April 2016 at 18:00 at Nice Restaurant. The topic of the meeting is What is Life? and will be introduced by Prof. Jannie Hofmeyr from Stellenbosch.Herewith a photograph and CV of Prof. Hofmeyr, as well as an abstract of his presentation and recommended reading on the topic.CV – Prof. Jannie HofmeyrJannie Hofmeyr is Distinguished Professor of Biocomplexity and Biochemistry and co-directs the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition at the University of Stellenbosch, where he has been since 1975. His main research interest has been the control and regulation of metabolism, but recently he has become interested in seeking ways of expressing formally the functional organisation of the cell in terms of a theory of molecular self-fabrication. This interest has led him to a broader study of complex systems, not only of biological systems, but also of ecological and sociological systems. He has received a number of awards, among which the prestigious Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award, the Beckman Gold Medal of the South African Biochemical Society, the Havenga Prize for Biological Sciences from Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns, and recently, a Fellowship of the Wissenschafskolleg zu Berlin. He is National Chair of the Arthritis Foundation of South Africa and frequently answers listener’s questions on science on the radio programme Hoe verklaar jy dit? Abstract – What is Life?What distinguishes the quick from the dead? This is most fundamental question of biology. Consider that during its lifetime any organism persists as a functional entity, despite the fact that all of its constituents have individual lifetimes that are very short relative to the lifetime of the organism itself; all organisms are fragile, yet persistent. Contrast yourself with your car. Your car is a machine built from persistent parts, but when a part fails you or a mechanic has to replace it before the car can regain its function. In contrast, when a component in one of your cells fails it is replaced by the cell itself. In fact, whether we are bacterial, plant or animal, every single part in each of our cells is replaced or repaired, not from without but from within: cells are biochemical factories that uninterruptedly and autonomously fabricate and maintain themselves. No machine can do this.However, contemporary biology still clings to a reductionist, Newtonian view of life, namely that a living organism is essentially a machine. We inherited this view from René Descartes and it has dominated Western thought. Descartes was enamoured of the hydraulic automata that were popular in his time, and from their life-like behaviour he made the fateful deduction that life is machine-like, and so the machine metaphor for life was born. Had he come to the much more sensible conclusion that these automata were life-like, instead of organisms being automaton-like, we would have approached biology quite differently and may have avoided many of the environmental catastrophes of the modern age. Nevertheless, a few philosophers—Aristotle, Kant, Jonas—have provided, each in their own way, a different but converging answer to the What is Life question and I shall use this to introduce my own ideas.Recommended reading (See following links)

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