I'd Really Rather Go Over Somethign That Pushes The Envelope Than Go Over Things I Answered Decades Ago

I'M SURE DENIS NOBLE would probably not agree with the use to which I will put something he said in an extremely interesting interview he gave to Curt Jaimungal, a scientific podcaster earlier this year but I can't see how my use of it outside of science is wrong.  Science isn't a self-contained activity anymore than history or any other intellectual activity is.  I think it's entirely legitimate for us to listen to what scientists say and draw inferences from it that about things which could not be properly a part of science.  I don't think there's anything illegitimate in what I'm about to do.  I'm as sure of that as I know that I disagree with Denis Noble about natural selection. 

At almost the one hour mark in the video after the host asked about the relationship of holism and the molecular reductionism of neo-Darwinism (Denis Noble is, as I stated the other day, a Darwinist though he has declared the neo-Darwinist synthesis of the mid-20th century to be dead) he made some very interesting points which are relevant to one of the issues in science I've gone over a number of times, the extraordinarily improbable chance of a cell's containing membrane to have come about and come to contain the necessary molecules for life to happen, just happening by random chance in nature.

My somewhat informal transcription of the video leaves out something said by the man conducting the interview which I've noted below.  I won't break into it.  At about 59:25, Denis Noble says

D.N. Let me also say something about holeism.   I know the neo-Darwinists in particular will dismiss me as completely off my head, when I talk about holism. they will think it's all terribly vague.  Actually it's a mathematical necessity.  And this may surprise people, about, let me see, it's 2016, so it's about eight years ago I published a book called "Dance To The Tune Of Life" . . . But I published a book subtitled "Biological Relativity."  . . . Biological relativity is the idea that there is no privileged level of causation within a biological system.  

Now, that is a mathematical necessity for the following reasons.  And I can illustrate it best by how I modeled the heartbeat, oh, over sixty years ago when I was a research student.  I was looking at ion channels in the heart cells,. characterizing those so we could fit equations to characterize their physical properties.  And then you could work out how that influences the overall electrical potential in the heart cell because the heart rhythm is an electrical process.  The voltage on the cell literally goes up and down like that [he makes a hand gesture going up and down].  Now, what I showed there was that you could not explain the rhythm from the molecular elements alone.  If you take those proteins and you put them in a solution with no membrane around them,. in other words, not in a cell, they will not oscillate.  There is no rhythm.  If, therefore, you remove the cell membrane and its electrical potential it doesn't work.  Incidentally, that's also true of mitochondria, our energy factories in our bodies.  If you remove the electrical potential across the membranes the system no longer works. So that's not, itself, a new discovery.  

Now, then, what I came up with is a very simple point, you can fit differential equations, sorry to be technical for a moment.

At this point the host interrupted to tell Denis Noble that he and his typical podcast audience were able to handle the technical content he was about to give. To which Noble said he was delighted.

The point is very simple.  However many details you put into the equations, or the differential equations and the functions used in those equations, you need the boundary conditions.  Otherwise there's no solution to those equations.  Every mathematician knows that.  Where do those boundary conditions come from?   

Well, in a sense the word gives it away, doesn't it.  In the case of a cell it's what the membranes constrain the molecules to do.  Those are the boundary conditions.  

So, a holistic view is simply the enumeration of the boundary conditions in a differential equation model.  So, that's why I call it a mathematical necessity.  And I think that your listeners who would understand the mathematics here, will readily understand when I say that there's no solution to a set of differential equations without the boundary conditions being put in.  Those are the influence from the higher levels of organization.  Because it is those higher levels of organization that constrain what the molecules themselves are doing.

Think of how life must have emerged long ago, in, we don't know exactly where - perhaps in the minute fissures and cracks in thermal vents - who knows?   But until the living system, the networks of interactions which were forming autocatalytic sets, meaning chemical reactions that could continue indefinitely,  until they were enclosed within membranes they would have just dispersed.  So, somehow or another, that constraint, the forming of a membrane around a catalytic set would have been a key element in any form of evolution of what we call life.  So, right from the very beginning the boundary conditions by the structure in which the molecules are to be found are a critical element in determining how they behave.  And so there's nothing terribly surprising in that. The principle of biological relativity is simply that you will always need the boundary conditions as well as the differential equations.  
 

C.J. So, that's extremely interesting, are you making an analogy between the evolution laws and reductionism and the boundary conditions and holism?

D.N. I am saying the boundary conditions are what give the system its whole, yes, that's right.  If what you are referring to as the whole is the structure of the system, then it is that structure that creates the boundary condition.  Cells are packed with structures that do that.  The molecules are not free to move easily from one compartment to another. They're restricted to various compartments.  That is, itself a structural imposition of constraint on the molecules involved.  All I'm saying is all molecules in living systems are constrained in the same kind of ways.  So, yes, if you want to say that holism is the existence of boundary conditions from structure, then I think that's absolutely right.  But, then, you've got to look at the whole to see the structure.

None of it works without a containing membrane and the containing membrane of any living, reproducing organism is extremely complex, it may well have been the most complex structure BEFORE THERE WAS ANY LIVING ORGANISM CONTAINED BY IT.  It, itself would have to have been a part of the whole structure or there would never have been any life.

It was way back in the days that I was enjoying getting into brawls with materialists on the Scienceblogs that I first brought up the problem of the containing membrane that would have had to contain the theoretical first organism of life on Earth which I am fully prepared to believe in though I hold there will never be a way for us to know about live that far back or to have any real idea of what it was like.  I described the necessity of the membrane of the first organism in terms less explicit and detailed than what Denis Noble says though he leaves out the extraordinarily hard to comprehend matter of that first organism dividing successfully, rupturing its membrane and resealing itself, enclosing the internal molecular structures that would result in two living organisms instead of one and a host of other incredibly complex actions. the extreme improbability of which lead me to believe that that could only happen as a result of intelligent intent not found within the organism, itself.  I know that Denis Noble and his colleagues doing some of the most important and fascinating research into these areas of cellular physiology reasonably and probably correctly attribute far mor in the way of intelligent action to individual cells as they can observe them, both as individual organisms and, far more elaborately, as parts of multi-cellular organisms but surely, as Denis Noble says and implies throughout this interview and his talks, that individual molecules not contained within cell membranes and within living organisms exhibit no such intelligence, it could not have been there before there was a living cell to organize that molecular behavior.  

I do think there is an artificial boundary at the same place in physical reality which prevents science from taking that step to considering the possibility of the Creator of life being part of that but I don't think there is anything wrong, at all, with someone taking that step outside of science.  It makes entirely more sense to me than the materialist-atheist-scientistic claims that a mechanistic view of the start of life is a fact and that that removes the necessity of God from any respectable discussion.  They can't even sustain their model within science, as Denis Noble points out at the beginning of the interview, the four basic assumptions of the latest attempt to come up with a reductionist description of evolution have all fallen to recent scientific research.  I don't think trying to make a holistic model of that will be either successful or widely convincing.  They'll have to overcome the materialist-atheist reductionist fever dream that they've put the last nail in the coffin of God.  I do agree with him that Cartesian dualism got it wrong just as those who figure the Creator of the universe, somehow, had nothing to do with the physical creation God created.  The Cartesian-scientific concept of that in terms of humanly created machines was incredibly naive no matter what it motivated in the further effort to come up with such means of controlling stuff and forces.  People are so ready to forget that their metaphors are just metaphors and not real think the mistaken philosophical imaginings of those who favored that ideology has had little to nothing to do with the actual success of science and technology, getting things we wanted and which would achieve our intentions has more to do with that, which accounts for why it is also destroying us and life on Earth.  

Update:  Simps, you really want to accuse me of "candor" in responding to you?   

1 : unreserved, honest, or sincere expression : forthrightness
the candor with which he acknowledged a weakness in his own case—
Aldous Huxley
2 : freedom from prejudice or malice : fairness
… a heavy accusation … from a gentleman of your talents, liberality, and candor.—
Noah Webster

Merriam Webster Online

Not only do you not know how to read, you don't know what words mean.