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To: bela_ghoulashi who wrote (14469)	11/11/2000 11:07:11 AM
From: Jill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

Bland, thank you so much! I get New Sci abstracts emailed to me but sometimes I don't have time to read them. This is fascinating and I must get the book. Per Bak is a cool guy (the reviewer) and much admired by some of my favorite scientists. He fails to mention the law of Jill's disorganized bookshelf however. Freeman Dyson's little book is supposed to be next to Schrodinger's "What is Life", since the former is a tribute to the latter anyway, so it took me awhile to find it: "The prevalence of junk DNA is a striking example of the sloppines that life has always embodied in one form or another. It is easy to find n human culture the analogue of junk DNA> Junk culture is replicated together with memes, just as junk DNA is replicated together with genes. Junk culture is the rubbish of civilization: television commercials, Internet spam, astrology, and political propaganda. Tolerance of junk is one of life's most essential characteristics. Ine very sphere of life, whether cultural, economic, ecological or cellular, the systems that survive best are those that are not too fine-tuned to carry a large load of junk... This is teh end of my story, and it brings me back to the beginning. I have been trying to imagine a framework for the origin of life, guided by a personal philosophy tha considers the primal characteristics of life to be homeostasis rather than replication, divesity rather than uniformity, the flexibility of the genome rather than the tyrrnay of the gene, the error tolerance of the whole rather than the precision of the parts." Etc etc...if you've never read it order it from Amazon--its very digestible but equally profound