Did you know...
There is no entry for "Life" in the Oxford Dictionary of Biology?
This is a profound omission. Life is the foundation of the living world. Without it, contemporary biology is essentially studying a ghost -- it tries to analyse cells and organisms without ever defining the core quantity that makes them exist in the first place. As a result, biology is a seriously incomplete science - think physics without quantum mechanics. Biology can describe organisms in remarkable detail, but it does not know why they are alive, or why they even exist in the first place.
The Decades-Long Quest
Founded by Philip Rushton (PhD, Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics), Rushton Research has spent two decades investigating the definitive question: What is life?
Operating completely independent of rigid academic constraints, Rushton Research was established to seek a fundamental answer to the question: What is life?
The result of this twenty-year inquiry is the formulation of a new paradigm: the Canonical Communication Architecture (CCA). It sounds technical, but it is beautiful.
The Evolution of Biology
Contemporary biology is centred on evolution. However, evolution does not answer some of biology's deepest questions.
Why does biochemistry have the structure it does? What was the origin of the genetic code, and why does it have its particular structure? Why is biology split into three distinct domains of life? Why did life begin at all? And, of course, what is life? These unresolved questions point towards something that evolutionary history presupposes rather than explains, namely, the existence of life itself.
We envisage that the biology of the future will place life - rather than evolution - at its foundation.
While evolution accounts for how living systems change over time, life explains the existence of living systems in the first place. Therefore, life precedes evolution. Schrödinger famously proposed that life may require "other physics". Rushton Research extends Schrödinger's brilliant insight: that living matter is governed not only by the laws of physics, but also by communication logic.
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Life is other physics
— Erwin Schrödinger (What is Life?, 1943)
The Logic of Life
Do organisms obey the laws of physics? Yes, of course. Can physics explain the organisation of organisms? That's a different question altogether.
Consider the genetic code: a physical system can implement a code, but the existence and architecture of the coding relationship itself call for an explanation beyond simply describing the motion of underlying molecules.
Information has been widely recognised as fundamental to biology. However, the architecture that makes biological information transmission possible has not been (adequately) explained.
Rushton Research has gone one step further: we propose a universal communication architecture that can be derived from pure logic and maps directly onto the cell.
We call this the Canonical Communication Architecture or CCA. This framework suggests a universal communication architecture - protocol that is not itself evolved, but arises from the logical requirements of communication and which maps directly onto the cell.
Figure: Schematic representation of the proposed correspondence between the Canonical Communication Architecture (CCA) and the DNA-RNA-Protein system.
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Of all the unsolved mysteries remaining in science, the most consequential may be the origin of life.
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— Franklin Harold, Professor of Molecular Biology (The Way of the Cell, 2001)