Philip C. Ball: The death of us all, coincidentally (1)

Summary: Serious scientists wait for the experimental evidence of biologically-based top-down causation to support their claims as they watch people like Philip C. Ball report that everything the serious scientists know may be based on coincidence in a Universe that is always watching.

An appeal to magic? The discovery of a non-enzymatic metabolism and its role in the origins of life

…it appears that the topology of metabolism is rooted in the non-enzymatic chemistry accessible to early life forms that existed irrespective of (and hence, before) the Darwinian selection process. For glycolysis and the PPP, the key enabling agents are Fe(II) cations, broadly available on the primordial planet, as evidenced from the sedimentary record. Hence, it appears that mundane conditions were implicated in shaping the topological organisation of metabolism, and yet, the existence of non-enzymatic metabolism-like reactions may explain why modern thermophiles can persist at temperatures that are beyond the thermal stability of some of their key metabolites. By serving as a ‘template’ in the Darwinian selection processes, the existence of non-enzymatic metabolism-like reaction sequences may have allowed life to overcome the end-product problem and facilitated the origin of metabolic pathways. Furthermore, there is growing evidence that enzymes might have exploited amino acid-based as well as metal ion catalysis since the beginnings of metabolism. Hence, the origin of life, often dismissed as a ‘philosophical problem’, is increasingly becoming a problem that is experimentally tangible.

Finally, someone else has put Darwin’s quantized energy-dependent (light-activated microRNA biogenesis and biophysically constrained) “conditions of life” before natural selection.

What is Life?  (Reprint edition:with forward by Roger Penrose).

How often do we still hear that quantum effects can have little relevance in the study of biology, or even that we eat food in order to gain energy? (8/8/91)

The battle for the soul of biodiversity (Nature, 8/22/18)

As with climate change, humans are the main culprit in biodiversity loss.

In The battle for the soul of biodiversity we are told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) helped to lay the groundwork for international treaties aimed at slowing global warming. The focus has changed. It is on the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which has not much impact in the context of climate change.

The difference between global warming and climate change makes it difficult to interest intelligent people in the works of government agencies. Intelligent people know that climate change occur daily.  Some days it rains.  That’s life. Without the rainfall and alternative days of sunshine, life on Earth would not exist. Philip C. Ball seems to be unsure about that fact. It may be nothing more than coincidence.

For example, see: Schrödinger’s cat among biology’s pigeons: 75 years of What Is Life?

…similar considerations of environment and contingency [sunshine or rain] are now seen to be central in quantum mechanics, with its ideas of entanglement, decoherence and contextuality. Whether this is more than coincidence, we can’t yet say.

Step outside. Is it raining or not? Is that a coincidence that can be viewed in the context of quantum mechanics? Is Philip C. Ball a fool?

Can his claim be placed into this context: “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die:” (The quickening does not occur in the absence of sunlight and water.)

But see: Quantum common sense

We don’t need a conscious mind to measure or look. With or without us, the Universe is always looking

If anyone with a conscious mind believed that With or without us, the Universe is always looking, they might also believe that life on Earth emerged outside the context of the creation of sunlight and water. People like that might never establish the obvious link from light-activated microRNA biogenesis in plants to the physiology of reproduction in all living genera via the pheromone-controlled physiology of reproduction in bacteria (on land and and in the water).

See for comparison: Virus-mediated archaeal hecatomb in the deep seafloor

We show here for the first time the crucial role of viruses in controlling archaeal dynamics and therefore the functioning of deep-sea ecosystems, and suggest that virus-archaea interactions play a central role in global biogeochemical cycles.

The virus-driven theft of the sun’s anti-entropic virucidal energy causes the degradation of messenger RNA that causes bacteria to become archaea before the archaea become L-forms (cells without walls.)

The virus-driven theft of the sun’s anti-entropic virucidal energy causes the degradation of messenger RNA also causes humans to become non-human primates via the loss of one food energy-dependent RNA-mediated amino acid substitution.

See: Nothing in Biology Makes Any Sense Except in the Light of Evolution

For example, the so-called alpha chains of hemoglobin have identical sequences of amino acids in man and the chimpanzee, but they differ in a single amino acid (out of 141) in the gorilla.

Coincidentally, in the same article, Dobzhansky claimed to be a creationist.

I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God’s, or Nature’s, method of Creation.

He was not well known for his jokes, but in Biology, molecular and organismic (1964) he claimed:

The notion has gained some currency that the only worthwhile biology is molecular biology. All else is “bird watching” or “butterfly collecting.” Bird watching and butterfly collecting are occupations manifestly unworthy of serious scientists!

He also claimed:

Ingram and others found that hemoglobin S differs from A in the substitution of just a single amino acid, valine in place of glutamic acid in the beta chain of the hemoglobin molecule.

He might have guessed that more that 1700 hemoglobin variants can now be linked from fixation of RNA-mediated amino acid substitutions to the prevention of all virus-driven pathology.

See: HbVar: A Database of Human Hemoglobin Variants and Thalassemias

But, serious scientists don’t guess. They wait for the experimental evidence of biologically-based top-down causation to support their claims and watch people like Philip C. Ball report that everything the serious scientists know may be based on coincidence in a Universe that is always watching to see how many biologically uninformed science idiots will be allowed to keep touting pseudoscientific nonsense until they cause the death of us all.