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April 2 - May 23, 2022
Mysteries, however small, are fascinating because there’s always the possibility that their solution may lead to a fundamental shift in our understanding of the world.
the world operates according to an entirely different set of rules from those that we are familiar with. The weird quantum stuff that happens at the level of the very small doesn’t usually make a difference to the big stuff like cars or toasters that we see and use every day.
The central puzzle of life is this: why does matter behave so differently when it makes up a living creature compared to when it is a rock?
ephemeral?
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire cat has a habit of disappearing, leaving only his grin, prompting Alice to remark that she has ‘often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat’. Many biologists experience similar bemusement when, despite knowing how thermodynamics operates in living cells and how genes encode everything that is required to form the cell, the mystery of what life really is continues to grin back at them.
All the statistical laws of classical physics are subject to this restriction: they are true for objects consisting of very large numbers of particles, but they fail to describe the behaviour of objects composed of small numbers of particles. So anything that relies on the classical laws for reliability and regularity needs to be composed of lots of particles.
as he saw it, at least some of the tiniest biological machines are just too small to be governed by classical laws.
process by which random molecular motion disrupts carefully aligned quantum mechanical systems is known as decoherence, and it rapidly wipes out the weird quantum effects in big inanimate objects.
Everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jiggling and wiggling of atoms … Richard Feynman
Peptide bonds between the amino-acid beads of collagen fibres are the difference between Marshmallow Man and Tyrannosaurus rex. Tough collagen fibres make real animals tough.
if you were to shrink down from your normal size to the nanometre scale, then to you that ‘o’ would appear to be roughly the size of the whole of the United States of America.
You may remember Richard Feynman’s famous dictum, ‘What I cannot create, I do not understand.’ This is relevant to enzymes because, despite knowing so much about enzyme mechanisms, no one has so far managed to design an enzyme from scratch that can produce anything like the rate enhancements delivered by natural enzymes.
By quantum standards, living cells are also big objects, so at first glance it would seem unlikely that quantum tunnelling would be found inside hot, wet living cells whose atoms and molecules would mostly be moving incoherently. But, as we have discovered, the interior of an enzyme is different: its particles are engaged in a choreographed dance rather than a chaotic rave.
Few scientists now doubt that electrons travel along respiratory chains via quantum tunnelling.
Why did Newton wonder about the comparatively trivial matter of the pull of the earth’s gravity on the apple and overlook entirely the utterly incomprehensible puzzle of the fruit’s formation in the first place?
Dyson went on to propose that what the nose detects is not the shape of an entire molecule but rather a different physical feature, namely the frequency at which the molecular bonds between its atoms vibrate.
He proposed that the nose ‘may be a spectroscope’ capable of detecting the signature frequencies at which different chemical bonds vibrate.
both the shape of the olfactory receptor and the bond vibrations of the odorant molecule play a role in smell.
Most remarkably, no single butterfly makes the entire journey. Instead, they breed en route so that the butterflies that return to Toronto are the grandchildren of the monarchs that first left Canada.
‘beautiful theory … killed by an ugly fact’.
However, despite now being in different atoms, the pair can still maintain their delicate entangled state in which they remain quantum mechanically coupled together.
a recent study of human genes concluded that those of our genes that are read at the highest levels tend to be mutated the most.
Cairns’s result contradicted the well-established principle that mutations occurred randomly; his experiments appeared to demonstrate that mutations tended to occur when they were advantageous.
the quest to understand this strangest of biological phenomena is often hindered by a pernickety insistence on defining it.
But if consciousness is common to both birds and mammals, then both probably inherited the property from a common conscious ancestor, perhaps something like the primitive reptile
But if there exist activities that can be executed without consciousness, then is it at least possible to imagine a creature performing all human activities on automatic pilot?
There isn’t even a consensus among neuroscientists, psychologists, computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers that there is a need for something beyond the sheer complexity of the human brain to explain consciousness.
the only record we have of contact between the two peoples is the remark from a Viking settler that the Inuit bleed a lot when stabbed;
The three greatest mysteries in science are generally reckoned to be the origin of the universe, the origin of life and the origin of consciousness.
There is no known non-biological mechanism by which the ribose sugar can be generated on its own.
The Scottish chemist Graham Cairns-Smith estimated that there are about 140 steps necessary for the synthesis of an RNA base from simple organic compounds likely to have been present in the primordial soup.
So, the odds of any starting molecule eventually being converted into RNA is equivalent to throwing a six 140 times in a row.
relying on chance alone, each of the 140 necessary steps would have yielded the right one of six possible products: it is one in 6140(roughly, 10109).
How likely is it that the random jumbling together of RNA bases will generate just the right sequence along the length of the string to make a self-replicating ribozyme?
Not very likely i guess
If you harbour any remaining doubts, try reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a dystopian novel describing the bleak world that would be left to us if we carelessly destroyed our living technology.
So, although self-replication is of course necessary for the long-term survival of any species, it is not an obligatory property of life.
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
This is currently a hot issue in quantum biology – namely, did life discover its quantum advantages, or is quantum mechanics just along for the ride?
