Living Computers
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How animals, plants and microbes sense, represent, process and output information
How animals, plants and microbes sense, represent, process and output information.
For students of computer science, biology, medicine, and LIFF.
Ask most people what a "computer" is and they will usually think only of an electronic machine.
As one of the newest kids on the block of evolution, people have designed and manufactured some pretty amazing machines.
Only fairly recently - the last 100 years or so - has science been able to use some of these machines to look deep inside the tissues of living organisms and start to find out what they are made of and how they work.
And only very recently - the last 10 years or so - have those investigations revealed that all living creatures are related to one another much more closely than ever before imagined.
What all living creatures have in common is what they do and how they do it.
And what they do is pull things in, process them inside, and push other things out. These things - light waves, sound waves, molecules and forces - they are perturbations of the energy field of the Universe. They are information.
AIDS viruses, algae floating in a pond, cloned sheep, IVF babies and all the rest of us: we are information processors - we are living computers.
