# The College of All Minds — The Truly Hardest Exam in the World
## Paper V — Biology

1. Is the genome a program, a blueprint, or neither? Defend your choice mechanistically.
2. What does it mean for a trait to be heritable, and why is heritability so often misunderstood?
3. Explain the thermodynamics of the living cell as an open system far from equilibrium.
4. Is natural selection a law, a tautology, or a mechanism?
5. What is a gene? Give a definition that survives contemporary molecular biology.
6. Account for the maintenance of sexual reproduction despite its twofold cost.
7. Why is the protein-folding problem hard even given the sequence?
8. What does information theory legitimately contribute to molecular biology?
9. Is there a unit of selection? Defend a level.
10. Explain the error threshold and its relevance to the origin of replication.
11. What distinguishes a signalling network from a mere chemical reaction network?
12. Why is convergent evolution evidence about constraint rather than chance?
13. What is the physical basis of the fidelity of DNA replication?
14. Explain how a developmental program can be robust to noise yet evolvable.
15. Is ageing selected for, tolerated, or a physical inevitability?
16. What does "junk DNA" mean now, and was the concept a mistake?
17. Account for allometric scaling laws in metabolism.
18. Explain why the neutral theory of molecular evolution was necessary.
19. Is the species concept salvageable, and does biology need it?
20. What is the thermodynamic cost of biological information processing?
21. How does a ribosome achieve both speed and accuracy?
22. Explain epistasis and why it complicates the genotype–phenotype map.
23. What would count as a second, independent origin of life, and how would we recognise it?
24. Why is cancer better understood as an evolutionary process than as a single disease?
25. Explain how phenotypic plasticity relates to, and differs from, evolution.
26. What sets the fundamental limits on the resolution of biological imaging?
27. Is the brain a computer? Answer with reference to what computation requires.
28. Account for the origin of the genetic code's near-universality and its departures.
29. What is the role of stochasticity in gene expression, and is it a bug or a feature?
30. Which single measurement would most constrain theories of the origin of life?

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