BI 224 Dan Nicholson: Schrödinger’s What is Life? Revisited

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Nov 5, 2025

Dan Nicholson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, delves into the nuances of Erwin Schrödinger's influential work, What Is Life? Revisited. They explore Schrödinger's motivations and how his physics background shaped his perspective on biology. Nicholson critiques the mechanistic view of cells, arguing genetic determinism misinterprets Schrödinger's ideas. He emphasizes the importance of a pluralistic approach to understanding biology, warning against overreliance on metaphors. Archival discoveries unveil Schrödinger's intent to clarify misconceptions about indeterminacy in biology.

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INSIGHT

Proteins Are Dynamic And Contextual

Proteins behave stochastically and context-dependently, switching conformations dynamically.
Modern methods reveal a fluid, probabilistic molecular biology that challenges rigid structure→function models.

INSIGHT

'Negative Entropy' Was Overstated By Followers

Schrödinger's 'negative entropy' passage is short and not an original foundation for non-equilibrium thermodynamics in biology.
Many later thinkers misused or overstated his thermodynamics comments for self-organization agendas.

INSIGHT

Order From Order Framed Informational Biology

The contrast Schrödinger set between 'order from order' and 'order from disorder' framed the shift to informational explanations in molecular biology.
That contrast legitimized treating organization as encoded rather than emergent from statistics.

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My guest today is Dan Nicholson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, here to talk about his little book, What Is Life? Revisited. Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life is a famous book that people point to as having predicted DNA and influenced and inspired many well-known biologists ushering in the molecular biology revolution. But Schrödinger was a physicist, not a biologist, and he spent very little time and effort toward understanding biology.

What was he up to, why did he write this "famous little book"? Schrödinger had an agenda, a physics agenda. He wanted to save the older deterministic version of quantum physics from the new indeterministic version. When Dan was on the podcast a few years ago, we talked about the machine view of biological systems, how everything has become a "mechanism", and how that view fails to capture what modern science is actually telling us, that organisms are unlike machines in important ways. That work of Dan's led him down this path to Schrödinger's What Is Life, which he argues was a major contributor to that machine metaphor so ubiquitous today in biology. One of the reasons I'm interested in this kind of work is because the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience and artificial intelligence, inherited this mechanistic perspective, and swallowed it so hard that if you don't include the word "mechanism" in your research paper, you're vastly decreasing your chances of getting your work published, when in fact the mechanistic perspective is one super useful perspective among many.

Dan’s website. Google Scholar.
Social: @NicholsonHPBio; @djnicholson.bsky.social
What Is Life? Revisited
Previous episode:
- BI 150 Dan Nicholson: Machines, Organisms, Processes

Read the transcript.

0:00 - Intro 7:27 - Why Schrodinger wrote What is Life 15:13 - Aperiodic crystal and the meaning of code 21:39 - Order-from-order, order-from-disorder 28:32 - Appeal to authority 37:48 - Cell as machine 39:33 - Relation between DNA and organism (development) 44:44 - Negentropy 53:54 - Original contributions 58:54 - Mechanistic metaphor in neuroscience 1:16:05 - What's the lesson? 1:28:06 - Historical sleuthing 1:39:49 - Modern philosophy of biology