Replicating like a crystal is, therefore, totally inadequate to the task

CONTINUING ON with Denis Noble's 2022 lecture, The Chemistry of Life Begins With Water, he said something which, if true, could generate even more problems for the explanation of how the earliest life, as a cell, could have come about by random chance but it does more to undercut one of the mainstays of the current conception of biological science as popularized by Richard Dawkins and his colleagues.

So when did intelligent life on Earth begin?  Well I suggest it began with membranes.  It's when the first cells emerge with their membranes during the evolutionary process and that is when intelligence became possible in living systems. The intelligence of life, therefore lies in our membranes and the processes they enable, not in our genomes.  Moreover, there are no genes for the fats, lipids in our bodies.  All the membranous structures are inherited independently of DNA.   Remember, the decision making processes cannot be in the genome.   

The level of complexity of cellular membranes is certainly a huge problem for any of the simplistic schemes of "earliest life" that are dreamed up by those allegedly doing science about it.  And I really wonder if any simpler conception of such membranes could work for such a model, it's a lot more than an imaginary plastic bag.  Cell membranes don't just contain the contents of a cell.  I wonder if any knowable anatomy of any organism could ever be conceived of without the necessary functions that such structures perform under the close observation of organisms, now.  I don't think that it's possible for scientists to come up with anything that is knowably relevant to a non-cellular earliest organism on any other basis and its origin seems to necessarily get more and more improbable as the complexities of "simple life" are discovered.  

Such ideas as are contained in Noble's last paragraph may seem extremely odd to us but that's not based on any kind of observation and real understanding of what intelligence is or how it could possibly come about by the instilled concept that it would have happend by random chance assemblages of molecules forming what would have to be biologically active structures.  That's especially true of what is probably the uniform conception of biology among all but the very oldest living People who would have studied biology before the structure of DNA was discovered and been so many enormously over-sold as a universal explanation of everything about us.  That short paragraph by among the current authoritative scientists in this field should show how over-sold DNA has been.  "Moreover, there are no genes for the fats, lipids in our bodies.  All the membraneous structures are inherited independently of DNA." That's a heck of a lot of the physical structures and parts of our bodies that had to come from something or things other than our DNA, yet I'll bet that hardly anyone outside of this very specialized branch of one field in science would have ever been introduced to that idea by whatever popularized source of information they believed they got their "public understanding of science" from.  You'd certainly not get it from the major sources of that in the past fifty years, since the invention of Sociobiology and "Evolutionary psychology" especially due to the merely persuasive writing of those like Richard Dawkins who sold a gullible public and, in fact, the academic fields where such would have relevance on the suprmacy of DNA.  It's an irony that the man whose name was, due to a tech billionaire's funding, made synonymous with that "public understanding" may be responsibile for one of the most widely believed distortions in the presentation of science.    

That's especially true if, as Denis Noble asserts, that the intelligence of organisms has its physical component in those parts of our bodies not coded for in DNA.  If that's the case then the entirety of evolutionary psychology with its imagniary basis in DNA is entirely wrong.  In that exercise I did of asking materialist-atheist devotees of scientism and the assertion that our consciousness was a product of our brainsm, an epiphenomeon of physical causation in the molecules in our brains, how any of us could come up with a novel idea in the time we experience that and it becomes active enough to, for example, make us put on the breaks or swerve the steering wheel when we see a car coming close onto us or any of a thousand things that happen to us during any of our waking hours.  "DNA" was one of the atheist gods that was grasped onto as if it explained anything about it, even though it's impossible for DNA to construct a novel structure in our brain to be the physical basis of a novel idea fast enough to account for the near immediate experience of that happening to us.  Another one that was gasped onto was by that most inept of all analogies, to the circuitry of a computer.   That one starts out being inept because computers are models of a human conception of how our minds work to start with so if it seems plausible that it can be a model of how a "brain-only" explanation of how our minds work, it is merely because the dolt making that proposal forgets what it was constructed to do, to start with.   That, interrestingly, becomes relevant to what Denis Noble said about computers later in his talk.  But there's a lot to get through first.


Now, I come to two other major properties of water that are very important in my story.

Another very unusual chemical fact is that the frozen form of water, ice floats.  And that's because water freezes in a very unusual way.  Ice is lighter than liquid water so it floats    on lakes, seas. All other possible solvents do the reverse.  Their frozen forms sink. But since ice floats, large expanses of water, in lakes, seas, remain open to living systems.   They continue to flourish, even beneath the ice.  The ice even acts as a barrier to heat loss because water ice is actually a good insulator.  That's why we think live on Earth survived long periods when the Earth was frozen over like an ice-ball.  Life may, therefore, exist elsewhere in the solar system.  On planets or moons that are completely iced over.  

Now I come to a fourth very important property of water and one that is really relevant to the question of why organisms have free action.  It's Brownian motion.

It was first observed in 1827 by a scientist called Robert Brown, which is why we call it "Brownian motion."   He ground up pollen grains to form even smaller particles, pollen dust if you like. He then sprinkled that fine dust onto the surface of water under a microscope and he saw all the particles were continually jiggling around in a random way and they were hardly ever stationary.  Nearly a century later, in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that the movements of the dust particles were due to their continual buffeting by the incessant movement of the water molecules.  So the jiggling of the dust particles was due to the random movements of the water molecules.

Now I want to ask an interesting question. Could silicon or metals in your computer do the same?  because this could explain why liquid is important. You see the atoms in silicon and metal structures may be vibrating but they are not moving around as they do in water based systems.  All the molecules in water based systems, dissolved or suspended in water, all have shown Brownian motion.  And this is a fundamental difference between living organisms and solid state computers.   

Now we come to another important fact, our genetic material, DNA, it cannot be exempt from Brownian motion because its being continually buffeted by water.  The DNA threads must, therefore, also experience that random motion.  They exist in a water based environment, they are threads suspended in the water based environment.  And what happens sometimes is what we call DNA breakage.  

Now, my opponents in evolutionary biology, the neo-Darwinists, they call themselves, they also say, yes, there is chance, there is stochasticity but I don't think they understand it.  Importantly, they will say it's blind chance because during our lifetimes none of those blind chance events   can be used by us or other organisms in any functional way.  As a consequence, they say, there can be no physiological basis for free choice based on molecular level stochasticity.  That's why neo-Darwinists like Jerry Coyne, illustrated here, conclude that free choice is just a magnificent illusion.  He writes, actually, and I'll quote from his book, "The illusion of agency     is so powerful that even strong incompatibilists like myself will always act as if we had choices even though we know we don't.  We have no such choice in the matter," he says. "But we can at least ponder why evolution might have bequeathed,us given us, such a powerful illusion."  

Incidentally, notice the striking contradiction, who is this "we" that can ponder why?  Because from Jerry Coyne's viewpoint why are we even capable of doing that and to choose either to agree or disagree with his statement?   

But I will leave that contradiction to one side because I want to explain why this is such a common idea taken by neo-Darwinists.  Because, even though neo-Darwinism makes blind chance a cornerstone of its case, it denies that applies to DNA replication. On the contrary,   DNA is claimed to be a highly accurate "self-replicator" only occasionally suffering chance variations.  The claim is that it does so by replicating like a crystal.

So, does DNA replicate like a crystal?  Well, that would be possible and, indeed, it happens but that process alone produces many, many errors. Because replicating like a crystal can only occur if the individual components, the nucleotides C, G, A and T, can automatically insert themselves into the correct position in a DNA sequence.  Now, to some extent that does happen, C likes to combine with G, T likes to combine with an A,  This is straight forward chemistry, we can call it "crystal-like" if we wish,  But stochasticity insures that every so often the wrong nucleotide gets inserted.  And we actually know the frequency with which that happens it is one mistake in roughly ten thousand nucleotides.  Now, that may not sound very much.  If you or I wrote an article of ten thousand words it corresponds to just one typing mistake in ten thousand words.  But our genomes are three billion nucleotides long.  The error rate of natural, crystal-like formation would generate hundreds of thousands of errors, no organism would survive that degree of damage to its DNA.

Replicating like a crystal is, therefore, totally inadequate to the task.

I have a major qualm about the idea that any aspect of our minds are a product of stochastic or chance motions in molecules and particles, though I think the idea,  in the context that Denis Noble uses it, is very useful to refute a different, fixed, modeling of consciousness based on what is imagined as a more or less fixed crystalline structure.  I don't experience my mind to be anything much like Brownian motion, it is too directed by itself to be a product of mere randomness on the level of experience.  But his idea is useful for one thing.  That imaginary model of DNA is certainly invalidated by the more developed and far more complex knowledge of what DNA is and how it actually is part of the biological actions within our cells and within our bodies.  As he points out, if DNA, as it really is, as it really functions in life acted as a crystal, independent of the vast cellular chemistry and structures that use it to carry out life functions, that life would soon end because of the number of errors that would result. Clearly that imaginary life of a DNA molecule is wrong.  But I doubt that the mere fact that the physical system is far more dynamic and far less satisfyingly held in the imagination or told in a few words (no matter how elegantly written or easily persuasive) doesn't tell us much more about how our experience of our minds originates or acts.  He does say some extremely interesting things about that in the next part of his lecture which I hope to transcribe soon.  

I might be able to have some faith in the assertion that our minds use the randomness inside our bodies or take advantage of it, that could give us some clue as to how an incorporeal mind could interact with what we conceive of as the mindless physical structures of our bodies, crudely thought of as "the mind-body problem."   Though I don't think that science could ever demonstrate anything like that because, in that case, one part of the system would escape the limits of physical causation.  

But the issue of freedom of thought, free will, and freedom in general doesn't interest me as anywhere as much as a philosophical brawl as it does what it means in human reality, in societies, in laws, in politics and in using the force of concerted intent to change our lived reality.   Any university based dolt who doesn't realize the catastrophic consequences of convincing People that living beings, People included, are no more than machines needs to have the hard lessons of life from the past century drilled into their thick skulls that have been focused on their materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology instead of reality.   Materialism has had the most deadly and genocidal consequences in its relatively elite forms as well as in its deadly vulgar form in Mammonism.

I'd like to tie this into the questions of freedom in human life and how there is freedom which is good and must be allowed and freedom which is anything but good and has to be constrained or, if the human is unwilling to constrain themselves, prevented by isolation or force.  That's the kind of freedom that really has to be addressed by politics and, one hopes, the laws that are adopted and enforced by an egalitarian democracy in which a majority of voters are People of good will possessing sufficient accurate information.  I'm not at all in favor of freedom for People of bad will, in so far as their actions are harmful or dangerous, I don't think that can be left to chance, random or otherwise believing, as the stupidest of those in the "enlightenment" seemed to, that nature would sort it all out for us.  I don't think with more than two centuries of seeing that stupid idea in action that we can depend on it, anymore.