Opinion: Cooperating to Study Cooperation
Physicists and biologists are working together to understand cooperation at all levels of life, from the cohesion of molecules to interspecies interactions.
By David Smith | February 20, 2013
Excerpt: “…still other researchers are looking at cooperation at the sub-cellular level, investigating how proteins and nucleic acids interact to form complex structures.”
My comment: In recent studies, the thermodynamics of an alanine substitution for valine and downstream nutrient-dependent epigenetic effects on de novo protein biosynthesis appear to extend from natural selection for nutrients to sexual selection for physical traits linked to both thermoregulation and nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled adaptive evolution in a human population. That suggests to me that entropy has been defied by a system of ecological, social, neurogenic, and socio-cognitive niche contruction, which was required for the thermodynamically-controlled transition from physics to the biology of adaptive evolution of our socio-cognitive niche.
I don’t understand the physics but hope that someone who does will comment on the fact it appears that a short-term exception [i.e., to the second law of thermodynamics…a temporary organizing principle that permits a system to defy entropy for a short cosmic time –per LeeH] led to long term consequences manifested in adaptive evolution of multicellularity and more. If I’m not properly addressing cause and effect, is there another model for the transition that incorporates species-wide conserved molecular mechanisms?
See also the text and comments at: Molecules assemble in water, hint at origins of life. Everything I indicated depends on the likelihood that we are living in our “RNA World,” not a theoretical RNA world from our theoretical past. I prefer to stick to the facts of life!
James V. Kohl detailedl how quantized energy-dependent microRNA biogenesis links the pheromone-controlled physiology of reproduction to biophysically constrained viral latency and healthy longevity. Links from what organisms eat to the enzyme-dependent metabolism of food also link metabolic networks to microRNA-mediated genetic networks in the context of RNA interference. Drug therapies alter RNA interference by altering cell type differentiation in all cells of all individuals of all species. For comparison, during the past 26 years, Kohl has detailed how the chemistry of protein folding is biophysically constrained at every level of biological organization by conserved molecular mechanisms.