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Schrodinger, Erwin - What is Life - Mutation rate and temperature
Identifier
018552
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Erwin Schrödinger – What is Life?
The time of expectation is diminished by raising the temperature, the mutability is increased, and this has been tested with the fly Drosophila in the range of temperatures which the insects will stand …. The low mutability of wild genes was distinctly increased.
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We have already inferred from the breeding experiments, first …. that some single event produces the mutation; secondly …. that this single event must be an ‘ionisation’ or similar process, which has to take place inside a certain volume of only about 10 atomic distances cubed, in order to produce a specified mutation.
According to our picture, the energy for overcoming the threshold must obviously be furnished by that explosion like process, ionisation or excitation.
I call it explosion like because the energy spent … is well known and has the comparatively enormous amount of 30 electron volts. It is bound to be turned into enormously increased (heat) motion around the point where it is discharged and to spread from there in the form of …. a wave of intense oscillations of the atoms