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The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

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Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#181

Post by basil-rash »

carapace wrote: post #177
basil-rash wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please understand the discussion at hand before commenting. Nobody is denying the existence of small-scale "micro-evolution" that subtly guides species into local optima. The question is of abiogenesis and mass-speciation, topics evolutionism has been thoroughly unable to explain, despite many attempts.

I do understand the discussion. You don't seem to understand what explanation is. Saying "God did it" doesn't explain the origin of life. We may never have a scientific explanation for how life arose. It may be that it was an act of God (which, for what it's worth, I personally believe) but that doesn't explain it. There are limits to human knowledge, and faith transcends those limits. You seem to confuse faith and s…

You are using the evolutionist's definition of "explain", which is not applicable to the creationist's interpretation of reality. Under the evolutionists view, there is no actor with the ability to alter universal state besides those physical laws which we currently observe. Thus, any change in universal state that has ever occurred would naturally be able to be "explained" by providing a detailed step-by-step rundown of how those laws interacted with universal state S until it reached universal state S'. Under creationism, this definition is nonsense: any change in state can occur at any time based on the whims of the unknown actor, no further rationale is necessary or indeed possible.

Accordingly, if we take a definition of "explain" which does not assume a particular interpretation of the fundamental axiom (as we should, when that axiom is the very thing under debate), my statement is perfectly valid: That actor which we cannot fathom made it so. Thus, it is.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#182

Post by verisimi »

burnished wrote: post #115
verisimi wrote: post #14

> How did we figure all this stuff out? > We don’t yet have the technology to just observe all of the activity inside a living cell . That Goodsell painting above that shows the crowded cytoplasm packed with proteins is an artistic composite—backed by rigorous research to be sure—because there’s no way to capture all the different players in situ at once. > A group at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne uses a…

Yeah I always appreciate that, I hate it when people shy away from honesty because they think some heckler won't understand the subtlety of the observations at play.

You realise of course that models can be wrong. The map is not the terrain. Models are not reality. The observations here are on models.

If I knock up something in excel, and other people use that thinking it is how things are, but do not refer to the reality the model represents because there is no way to do that, how useful is the model?

Have you ever looked at old medieval beastiaries? Information is being relayed, but how useful is it?

https://alexanderadamsart.wordpress.com/2019/07/30/the-besti...

Without a means to view the underlying thing the model is meant to represent, to check and correct one's misunderstandings, how useful can the model be?

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#183

Post by ssener2001 »

beders wrote: post #8
swader999 wrote: post #4

Incredible to think how something this intricate with so many interdependent parts and integrated systems could have evolved.

I know. But this is very well understood and researched. All it requires is mutations, time and selection pressure. The Blind Watchmaker is still a good read.

It is a well-known fact that that well-proportioned, regular, perfect, and beautiful arts are based on a very beautiful program. A perfect and beautiful program, in turn, indicates a perfect and beautiful knowledge, a beautiful mind, and a beautiful spiritual faculty.That is to say, it is the spirit’s immaterial beauty which is manifested in art by means of knowledge. Thus, the universe, with its innumerable material fine qualities, is formed of the distillations of immaterial fine qualities pertaining to knowledge.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#184

Post by namaria »

londons_explore wrote: post #38

> We don’t yet have the technology to just observe all of the activity inside a living cell. How close are we to being able to make a map of all atoms within a cell? There are 1E23 atoms in 1 ml of water, and an ecoli is about 500nmx500nmx1um. That means there are only about 2E10 atoms in the whole cell! Would it be possible to somehow freeze a whole cell, then use an electron beam to knock off and identify (via mass…

Key word here is activity. Even if you froze a cell and mapped it down to an atom, you'd need to do it again for a cell you somehow managed to freeze in the state immediately after the first one, and so on. What granularity would be significant? What branching of what process would you like to follow?

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#185

Post by arkey »

jjk166 wrote: post #92
arkey wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doesn't that reduce to a point where something useful becomes from separate useless components? In your case, why would a flagella be useful if it's not propelling something? A flagella is only useful as a component of something, but not by itself.

Flagella only exist as components of something, they do not need to and shouldn't exist by themselves. If flagella spontaneously popped into existence and cells picked them up, that would be quite difficult to explain without design, but cells producing flagella because they are useful components makes perfect sense on its own.

> cells producing flagella because they are useful components makes perfect sense on its own.

But that's the thing, this sort of implies that a complete flagellum can be spontaneously produced because it's useful, which sort of collides with the parent comment on systems evolving by combining previously useful components.

Flagella aren't useful until they are complete. So intermediate forms should be lost, right?

Would this leave us in a scenario where a single combination of several mutations at the same time suddenly gives you a complete, functional flagellum?

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#186

Post by arkey »

jjk166 wrote: post #138
lebek wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that, but it seems like even the MVP "shitty" flagellum would require many mutations that individually have no benefit. But I suppose with enough generations/parallelism you get enough stacking of useless mutations to reach the useful ones.

That's the thing most people have difficulty wrapping their head around. What you need to remember is it's not the structures evolving, it's the instructions evolving. If for example you have a small molecular pump that the cell uses to suck up sodium ions, and a mutation causes the part of the rotor sticking out of the cell to just be longer, which might be due to a single change to the gene controlling the length o…

But again you're starting with a fairly complex system already, the molecular pump.

And my (limited) understanding is that changes that are not useful or helpful would get lost.

And additional to that, if an organism has a pump (which it needs to function properly) and that pump suddenly is no pump, it's a very bad flagellum, that organism has a very big problem. It's like if we swapped our arms for wings. Wings are cool, but we wouldn't be able to fly anyway, and we'd have serious problems as humans with no arms and hands.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#187

Post by arkey »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #78
prmph wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if a monkeys bangs on keys forever it will eventually produce Shakespeare? I'm quite skeptical

There's no selection pressure when a monkey bangs their hands on a keyboard. It's just randomness without any consequence. The letters are not interacting with each other or their environment in any significant way.

What about offering the monkey some peanuts if he bangs correct words, the more correct words the more peanuts he gets?

I understand there would be limitations in the lifespan of the monkey and such, but in a hypothetical case, would that work?

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#188

Post by actionfromafar »

mrkstu wrote: post #106
talkingtab wrote: post #45

The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities can interact. The entities need a set of rules and sensors. Put it together and what have you got? Thinking. Or intelligence. Try building…

As can be seen by the specializations between human brain hemispheres. There is a bus between them, but when that communication is cut, and you can see that a lot of what we perceive as a single thought process, is a bunch of independent computing entities with an OS layer on top creating the unity that doesn't really exist.

Or well, it does exist. But maybe more in the "ant hill" sense than feels comfortable to admit.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#189

Post by arkey »

carapace wrote: post #159
basil-rash wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is objectively false. Evolution explains absolutely nothing creationism doesn’t, and creationism explains a whole lot that evolution cannot. For instance, universal origins and the formation of cells.

Creationism doesn't explain anything. You don't have to take evolution on faith. You can write a computer program that demonstrates that selection among almost-but-not-quite identical entities with heritable properties generates adaptive forms. Many people have. DNA is real. Reproducing lifeforms are real. We know how they work in some detail. There's no faith required.

> Creationism doesn't explain anything.

How so? For that to happen you'd need to have the usual "evolution-is-science-and-creationism-is-religion-which-denies-science" stance, no?

There are creationist scientists, there is "creationism-proving", or at the very least allow "creationism-compatible" evidence in science, and so on. Let's reduce it even more, science hasn't been able to disprove Creation.

Believing "God did it" should not invalidate science, wanting to understand more, and actually making experiments. On the contrary, it should encourage it, as it did with many scientists who, in a way, brought us to where we are.

And as other commenters say, your computer program would prove absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, primarily because micro-evolution (which can easily be understood as a feature of Creation) does certainly not imply macro-evolution or abiogenesis.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#190

Post by coldtea »

mrkstu wrote: post #106
talkingtab wrote: post #45

The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities can interact. The entities need a set of rules and sensors. Put it together and what have you got? Thinking. Or intelligence. Try building…

As can be seen by the specializations between human brain hemispheres. There is a bus between them, but when that communication is cut, and you can see that a lot of what we perceive as a single thought process, is a bunch of independent computing entities with an OS layer on top creating the unity that doesn't really exist.

>a lot of what we perceive as a single thought process, is a bunch of independent computing entities with an OS layer on top creating the unity that doesn't really exist.

How else could it be? At some level, it would inevitably be a top-level aggregation "creating a unity that doesn't really exist". The alternative would be for the whole brain to be a single elementary particle!

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