The biotic world is doubtlessly the best known example of what Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann has termed ‘‘complex adaptive systems’’—a name given to those systems possessing the innate capacity to learn and evolve by utilizing acquired information. Those familiar with living systems cannot but marvel at each cell’s ability to grow, to sense, to communicate, to cooperate, to move, to proliferate, to die and, even then, to yield opportunity to succeeding cells. If we dare speak of vitalism, especially as the new millennium is eager to dawn, we only do so to recognize that homeostatic mechanisms endow cells with such remarkable resilience that early investigators mistook homeostasis as a persuasive indication that life is.
