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Preface and Acknowledgments

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What was the greatest discovery in biology of the 20th century?Our understanding of biology rests first and foremost on evolutionary theory, the merger of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection with Gregor Mendel’s Laws ...

Our understanding of biology rests first and foremost on evolutionary theory, the merger of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection with Gregor Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance in the second half of the 19th century. Together Darwin and Mendel taught us that living things carry genetic information and that this information determines biological traits. But what is the material that carries this genetic information? As we will come to, the great Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his highly influential lectures (1943) and book (1944), What is Life?, drew the attention of physicists and…

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