What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
31–40 of 56 posts
Re: What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
#32Relevant Smarter Every Day video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSm9gJkPxU
Really nice 3D animations in that video. Something like this, I find quite difficult to comrehend jsut off of a text description.
Re: What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
#33What I find fascinating is the extreme efficiency of what is effectively an electric motor, reaching nearly 100% efficiency. At human scale we struggle with heat dissipation and friction
But at the same time the motor is extremely finicky/fragile in the source of energy (negentropy) it will accept, while natural life is extremely hardy and adaptable. I wonder how much of machine-like "efficiency" is actually "overfitting" at the cost of robustness.
Or perhaps we are "overfitting" for robustness over time and also as a group (over society) vs just individual robustness at any given moment.
We also have extremely robust livers that allow us to eat a super wide variety of food as energy inputs
Re: What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
#34For those who remember, the flagellum was a major site of the Intelligent Design debate that gave us Christopher Rufo (via the Discovery Institute) The general idea was that there were specific examples of "irreducible complexity" that proved that there was an intelligent designer. The project on the part of certain Christian political factions was to add a veneer of hypothesis testing to creationism. The god of the…
this was addressed directly in TFA with a link to https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.03824-24
Re: What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
#35For those who remember, the flagellum was a major site of the Intelligent Design debate that gave us Christopher Rufo (via the Discovery Institute) The general idea was that there were specific examples of "irreducible complexity" that proved that there was an intelligent designer. The project on the part of certain Christian political factions was to add a veneer of hypothesis testing to creationism. The god of the…
Doesn't "irreducible complexity" here mean "it wouldn't function in any reduced form", e. g. "it would not be possible to build this up in tiny parts useful for other things and then have those things transformed into these things by tiny accretions and removals over the course of the lifespans of these creatures."? The article doesn't cite anything that would suggest that this argument is any less relevant now that…
It does raise the question of the steps that happened to reach that functionality (not suggesting intelligent design here). I'd assume there'd be quanta of evolutionary evolvement but it isn't clear what that would look like (especially to someone like myself who is not an evolutionary biologist).
Re: What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
#36at the scale that it operates, the flagella is more a drill than a propeller there's a good richard feynam video about how things feel when they're that small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c
I could listen to him all day - great video
Re: What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
But at the same time the motor is extremely finicky/fragile in the source of energy (negentropy) it will accept, while natural life is extremely hardy and adaptable. I wonder how much of machine-like "efficiency" is actually "overfitting" at the cost of robustness.
The need to reproduce and repair our bodies is a big trade-off. Electric motors are sort of like hermit crab shells - Hard and long-lasting, but they only exist because they piggyback off of a living species.
I mean, we are getting to the point where we can build self completing loops of machinery.
Re: What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't "irreducible complexity" here mean "it wouldn't function in any reduced form", e. g. "it would not be possible to build this up in tiny parts useful for other things and then have those things transformed into these things by tiny accretions and removals over the course of the lifespans of these creatures."? The article doesn't cite anything that would suggest that this argument is any less relevant now that…
It does raise the question of the steps that happened to reach that functionality (not suggesting intelligent design here). I'd assume there'd be quanta of evolutionary evolvement but it isn't clear what that would look like (especially to someone like myself who is not an evolutionary biologist).
One thing to know about DNA is chunks of it can around not doing anything for long periods of time till suddenly more DNA comes in from somewhere and suddenly you have working behaviors. Things like Transposons are crazy.
Re: What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
#39Article stopped exactly where stuff got interesting. This whole "protons entering bacterium and being pumped out" is exactly the ancestor of the mitochondria, that's what it does, except now the "outside" is the inside of the parent cell.
This is very similar to mitochondrial respiration with both using an electrochemical gradient of protons, the proton motive force, as an energy source.
Re: What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations. Which if you want an actual feel for the true scale of things, must be multiplied by (order of magnitude) the number of bacteriums on the planet.
Good point, forgot about that. Add another 10-20 zeros?
And when you get into things like lateral gene transfer it's not even a tree any longer.