Before DNA

Name: Before DNA
Brand: Emile S. van der Merwe
Price: 15.99 AUD
Availability: OnlineOnly

How Life Learned to Regulate Itself Before It Learned to Store Information

By: Emile S. van der Merwe

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eBook | 30 December 2025

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Before DNA revisits one of biology's deepest assumptions: that life began with a code.

For decades, the origin of life has been framed as a problem of information—how molecules learned to replicate, store instructions, and evolve. But a code cannot function without stability, and chemistry cannot persist if energy overwhelms it.

For the first time, life is examined from a regulation-first perspective — showing how stability, buffering, reconstruction, and prediction arise as physical necessities rather than evolutionary accidents.

Drawing on thermodynamics, control theory, and modern physiology, Before DNA traces a continuous logic from prebiotic chemistry to living systems, biological diversity, and the emergence of mind. It reframes DNA not as a blueprint, but as a reconstruction constraint; explains why bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals represent distinct regulatory architectures; and shows how prediction, self-reference, and awareness arise when regulation turns inward.

This perspective reshapes long-standing questions across disciplines:

Origin of Life: from rare events to enduring architectures

Biology: from lineage and genes to feasibility and constraint

Medicine: disease as loss of regulatory coherence

Mind: awareness as regulation made internal

Astrobiology: life as sustained, buffered energy flow

Before DNA does not add mystery to life. It removes it—revealing a quiet, universal coherence beneath living systems.