Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
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Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
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Re: Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
#2Technology Review: What's the problem you have most wanted to solve and haven't been able to?
Whitesides: There's an intellectual problem, which is the origin of life. The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a chemist, which I just don't understand. I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactions that are getting more complicated spontaneously. I just don't understand how that works. So that's a scientific problem.
--This is a rare, intellectually honest view of Evolution. Notice, there is reasonable doubt. However so constrained.
Re: Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
#3I get page not found error for the op's submission. But I assume this is the page which was submitted, http://www.technologyreview.in/biomedicine/41024/
Re: Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
#4 it's very easy in academic science to end up working on projects that are just
little extensions of previously known stuff, and that's sort of a waste of time.Re: Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
#5I get page not found error for the op's submission. But I assume this is the page which was submitted, http://www.technologyreview.in/biomedicine/41024/
I believe your link is for the MIT Technology Review India version of the article.
Re: Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
#6Technology Review: What's the problem you have most wanted to solve and haven't been able to? Whitesides: There's an intellectual problem, which is the origin of life. The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a chemist, which I just don't understand. I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactio…
No, it's an intellectually honest view of abiogenesis, which is not the same thing as evolution at all.
Re: Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
#7Technology Review: What's the problem you have most wanted to solve and haven't been able to? Whitesides: There's an intellectual problem, which is the origin of life. The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a chemist, which I just don't understand. I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactio…
"... The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a chemist, I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactions that are getting more complicated spontaneously. ..."
Interesting. Turing had a go at this in his last paper, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," [0] ~ http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing..... attempted to answer the theoretical explanation of the biological process that defines the shape of an embryonic organism from creation. This process is called "Morphogenesis" This is an important problem because complex organisms appear to be created by some "random" process that organises what appear to be self similar cells. (previously written at ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077817
Re: Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
#8Technology Review: What's the problem you have most wanted to solve and haven't been able to? Whitesides: There's an intellectual problem, which is the origin of life. The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a chemist, which I just don't understand. I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactio…
Rare? I can't think of a single prominent speaker / writer about evolution that hasn't made this point. Of course, they also note that this is outside the scope of evolution - evolution talks about what happens once you have that first reproducing cell.
Of interest, there is on-going research into just how good reproduction has to be before evolution can bootstrap. If you have a process that successfully reproduces 50% of the characteristics of the original "cell", is that enough to allow evolution to work? 75%? 95%? We know that the number is less than 100%, indeed it needs to be to allow evolution to adapt, and obviously if the copy can be a very bad copy, that reduces the constraints on what the very first cell needs to do, increasing the solution space.
Re: Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
#9Technology Review: What's the problem you have most wanted to solve and haven't been able to? Whitesides: There's an intellectual problem, which is the origin of life. The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a chemist, which I just don't understand. I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactio…
It's a little more complected than that as there are a lot of known naturally occurring chemicals that will self replicate in the right environment.
Re: Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems
#10Q: "What problems are being neglected?"
Whitesides: "I don't have strong feelings about that. There are so many problems in the world"
I've was recently at a conference with a bunch of Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Chemistry. I was asking them a similar question, and some version of Whitesides reply was what I almost always got.