And that conclusion is the exact opposite to the central dogma of molecular biology
AS HAS BEEN COMPLAINED OF by a recent whiner, the question of cell membranes, especially in regard to the necessity of containing the internal structures and biologically active molecules to allow for the processes of life, metabolism, change within a range that permits life to be sustained, the incredible process of the original organism or, if you insist is possible, even more incredibly, original organisms dividing and producing two and then many living organisms has been a recurring feature of my skepticism about the materialist-atheist-scientistic orthodoxy about the origin of life.
Originally, I intuited that as a major hurdle for any mechanistic, random-chance creation of life on Earth while still holding what was, even then, a rather naive and simplistic view of cellular biology. Despite that naive conception of it, no died in the wool materialist atheist devotee of scientism ever came up with anything like an answer to how such a structure could have formed by mere random-chance assemblage containing exactly the internal chemistry and structures to exploit it to utter perfection the first time that an organism became alive, sustained its life and, most incredibly of all, manipulated the membrane it just happened to be contained in to make a copy of itself. If that happened by random chance even once in the known universe, it would be so stupendously improbable as to constitute a miracle more incredible than any one described in Scripture.
I doubt that the great biologist Denis Noble would necessarily agree with my use of the science he and his colleagues have done on the issues I use, they certainly have given me a lot more to go on since I started making reference to cell membranes twenty years ago during the new atheist fad of the 00's. It wasn't long ago that I listened to a lecture he gave in 2022 which relates the biology of cell and organism membranes to the issue I'm so interested in as an ideological egalitarian democrat, free thought, free will, free choice*. Given the complaint that recently came in I'm going to go over his talk over this week, as I get a chance to transcribe it. I will point out that he touches on something that I have become more interested in going over, as can be seen in my recent post about Thomas Merton's essay on "Liberty," what we mean when we carelessly talk about "freedom" and "liberty" as if those are abstractions which can be considered good without considering the context in which they are talked about. He talks about the only kind of freedom that philosophers think is worth having, which might be a good point of departure on an investigation of that from a secular point of view. I'll have more to say about that after I present my attempt at a transcription of the video.
The Chemistry of Life begins with Water
how it forms the basis for our freedom (freewill) as living organisms by Denis Noble from the University of Oxford given to the 22nd Congress of the Iranian Society of Biology
Denis Noble is one of those pioneering the deeper, far more science-based, far less ideologically driven ideas about evolution right now, what I think of as the long overdue overturning of the dominant ideology of biology and its parasites, mid 20th century Neo-Darwinism. It needs to be said at the start that I'm far more skeptical than he is in regard to natural selection, which I don't believe exists. He does, quite firmly, though, refute much of the current form of that that hegenonically controlls the relevant sciences, the mid-20th century Neo-Darwinian synthesis and its further developments in scientific dogmas derived from it by such as Francis Crick. I don't see how the dominant conception of that can withstand the discoveries covered by him and such other eminent biologists as James Shaprio. Their work so often cites the work of Barbara McClintok that I'd put her in the same group of those unafraid to find things that undermine the dominant ideology of their science, something which still rules the field and, certainly, does the largely illusory "popular understanding of science." Even the conventional scientists opposed to these new discoveries and their meanings and implications need to be questioned on their professional understanding of science. After a brief introduction, Denis Noble began:
I'm going to talk about how the chemistry of life, biology, begins with water and how it also forms the basis for our freedom, that is our freewill, as living organisms.
Now, first of all, the question of why that question, the question of do we have freedom, we organisms, living organisms have freedom, why is that so controversial. And I think that is because it may seem obvious that since organisms are made of and evolved from chemical compounds and processes, they cannot escape being chemically determined. Because we don't expect purely chemical processes to be capable of making responsible decisions. That's one of the reasons why we're cautious about driver-less cars on our streets. Because the ethical and legal problems don't depend on the science but on attributing legal responsibility whether to owners of cars or to the car makers. In both cases though, the ultimate responsibility is attributable to humans, organisms, not to the machine.
Now, what I'm going to do is to show you that precisely because of the kind of chemistry that enables organisms to exist, they cannot be determinate machines. And that conclusion is the exact opposite to the central dogma of molecular biology formulated by Francis Crick in 1956. That dogma says we are formed by our genes, its the idea of a very famous book, "The Selfish Gene." That from the genome alone we could predict the organism. I will show that it's just the other way around. Organisms, themselves, control their genomes. I showed this in my book, "Dance to the Tune of Life," published just six years ago, and I'm going to explain why.
What is our chemistry? What exactly are we made of? Well, life is largely made of the most common elements in the universe, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. And they're combined in an unimaginably large number of possible ways. DNAs RNAs and proteins are all long polymers made of those elements. Threads of sequences of either nucleotides or amino acids. Human DNA, yours and mine, is about three billion such nucleotides in length. And genomes are unique to each individual because there wouldn't be enough stuff in the whole universe for every possible sequence of three billion genomes to exist. The mathematics of that can be found in my little book "The Music of Life" published in 2006. There could actually be ten to the seventy thousand combination of different interactions from our genes but there are only about ten to the eighty atoms in the whole visible universe. Each of us, therefore, is unique and a highly improbable, specific organism with its own unique DNA.
Now, each of us might be just a highly unique and improbable machine, but we might still be machines determined by our genes and proteins.
So why am I arguing that can't be the case. Well, it comes back to water, again. Because water is a very unusual form of chemical. First of all, the range over which it is liquid. Those two elements, hydrogen and oxygen, combined to make the smallest and the great majority of the molecules in our body, that is water molecules. They depend on the fact that water is liquid in a range of temperature way above the maximum temperatures at which both of its atoms could be liquid. Oxygen vaporizes at minus 90 centigrade, hydrogen at minus 253 centigrade. So the bonding of hydrogen and oxygen is responsible for an enormous increase in the temperature of condensation, that's why water is liquid at the kind of temperature at which life can occur.
The second reason why it's a very unusual chemical is it's a good solvent for most chemical compounds. It's flexible and nearly all the molecules can be dissolved in it. But the ones that can't are very important to my talk, they are the fats. Fats cannot be dissolved in water. They can exist in a water suspension. Every good cook knows how to make a sauce by whisking up an oil-water suspension, which we call a sauce. But the fats in us are not like suspensions, they're more like soap bubbles than fat globules and those bubbles form the vast structures of membranes in our cells, tissues and organs. And those membranes are where nearly all the control processes in our bodies are located. Those proteins in our lipid membranes are important.
So the book of life, the genome? How did the genome come to be described as the book of life creating us body and mind? as Richard Dawkins says in his Selfish Gene. If that were so the conditional logic of life would have to be found in the genome, but if, as a computer programmer, like me for example, you look for where all of those conditional logic statement are, the if-then-else control routines, if you look for where those are in a genome you will not find them in the genome. There are switches in genomes, places where genes are switched on or off, but those switches are controlled by other physiological processes. So there is no book of life in the genome.
So, where are life's control routines? In those fatty membranes and their protein channels. Those are our conditional on-off switches. Those are the processes that are sensitive to electrical-chemical processes in the world around us and within us. And without those membrane processes there could not be choice between various behavioral options. Choice is an essential element in any theory of variable free action. Also interestingly, all our nerve cells have these controllable on-off switches. So do all the other cells in our bodies.
So when did intelligent life on Earth begin? Well I suggest it began with membranes. . .
I'll continue on from there in the next of these posts. I will say that as a scientist, Denis Noble presents the possibility of freedom, free will, in terms of the molecular chemistry of bodies. Considering the denial of the possibility of free thought, free will, of free action is based in the molecular chemistry of our bodies, that refutation is a necessary step, though I think minds are not, actually, governed by the same rules as molecules are governed by, though that can never be demonstrated by science because such an entity cannot be fit into the rules and methods and object of science since it would have to escape the limits of material existence. I think minds use bodies but minds are not the products of bodies.
I will say that what's coming is bound to be controversial because I will link the conventional denial of free thought, free will and free action, the ideology of material determinism to political oppression, scientific racism, scientific sexism and everything up to and including totalitarian governments. I think such a link is the unadmitted to consequence of the dominant ideology of academia and secular culture, materialism and scientism. Just as I am confident scientific racism and eugenics is inevitable if those retain a belief in natural selection, I think it is inevitable that materialism, atheism and scientism will lead to oppressive government in a de-moralized society. I also think it's why a college-student-faculty based "left" is bound to be counterproductive because that ideology is so embedded, so deeply in that cultural milieu. I don't know if Denis Noble would agree with me but I think his thinking is an essential line in protecting egalitarian democracy from its cultured enemies, some of whom believe they're anti-fascists when their ideology leads right back to it.
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