Ursula Goodenough

Duane — (Here’s the URL for the article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27730-this-singlecelled-bug-has-the-worlds-most-extraordinary-eye.html) — A cool critter to be sure. Importantly, there’s only one radiation that uses neurons to detect the outside world, called Animalia or Metazoa. All other organisms have ways of doing this w…[Read more]

Yes. Maybe before we go any further here, you might read (unless you’ve already done so) the paper by Terry and me that I lifted up early in this conversation. I think it would help our communications. http://www.edtechpost.ca/readings/Ursula%20Goodenough-%20The%20Sacred%20Emergence%20of%20Nature.pdf 

Well, um, it’s the term you used.

Why invoke a “knowing process”? Why not just say that, given the thermodynamic and molecular-shape constraints of the constituents, they self-organize? 

I wrote yesterday: “Ed indicates that some of his ideas could be subjected to empirical tests but that the scientific establishment is too biased to fund such inquiries. I would be interested in what such a grant application would look like.” First-year graduate students in our program take a class where their weekly assignment is to write a…[Read more]

Duane — well, I offered a definition of life a few screens ago. Of course you might not agree with it, in which case it could be said to already fail as a common definition, but I predict that most students of biology would agree with it.  But there’s something else afoot here, that Jon and Davidson have at various times pointed out as well,…[Read more]

Duane — Dr. Murakami is for sure a legitimate scientist — I wasn’t comfortable with “one of the top geneticists in the world” from his publisher. My publisher blurbs me as “one of America’s leading cell biologists,” which is also incorrect.  His description of the genome’s minute size and extraordinary complexity is totally correct.  Where we…[Read more]

Ed: Ah — epigenetics!  I didn’t realize that that was what Dr. Murakami was invoking.  For sure the expression of a given gene is turned on and off on a regular basis. Protein transcription factors, microRNAs, and DNA methylation are the agents/mechanisms we best understand, but others will doubtless be discovered. Stress, disease, exercise, on…[Read more]

Hi Duane, welcome back! Murakami may be a very fine man, but “one of the top geneticists in the world” is a line from his book publisher. The rice genome paper has 72 authors, where he is somewhere in the middle. His 2006 book, called The Divine Code of Life: Awaken Your Genes and Discover Hidden Talents…[Read more]

Ed wrote: Interestingly, there is now a raging debate in science about whether there is some sort of active intelligence behind what was hitherto through to be purely random processes behind the origin of the universe, the origin of life and perhaps evolutionary processes as well. If there is some sort of intelligence inherent in the universe, t…[Read more]

A lot has changed since 1981, Ed. You don’t need all 2000 enzymes in the initial proto-cell (and actually there are now a lot more than 2000). Have you had a chance to read this  yet http://www.edtechpost.ca/readings/Ursula%20Goodenough-%20The%20Sacred%20Emergence%20of%20Nature.pdf  ? 

I’m frankly surprised that you are using the dumb/random chance phrase when you are doubtless aware that random chance in biology only creates variability and that it’s selection for those that work that drives the process, selection being the antithesis of random. I’m again not an expert here, but it’s my understanding that the term “information”…[Read more]

“According to this controversial fine-tuning hypothesis, life can only evolve in rare patches of the multiverse where the fundamental constants are fine-tuned to support the existence of life.” The fine-tuning trope carries the implication of there being a fine tuner. I for one prefer the concept that in at least one universe of the multiverse, t…[Read more]

If you get hydrogen nuclei hot enough they fuse to make helium, and if you get helium nuclei hot enough they fuse to make carbon. http://aether.lbl.gov/www/tour/elements/stellar/stellar_a.html

Ed wrote: I suppose that a statistically minded cosmologist could compute the probability of (and thus the expected quantity of) carbon formation in the universe based on random processes alone and compare that with actual measurements. Perhaps in this way you could show that it is “necessary” for intelligence to guide otherwise inert matter,…[Read more]

Karen — This is known as the anthropic principle, which takes many forms. The wiki article is a good intro.  

As I am neither a neuroscientist nor a physicist, I invited a departmental colleague who is a physics-trained neuroscientist to read through some of this conversation and offer her/his assessment. Here’s the response:  The software analogy is deeply flawed both in discussions of computer “intelligence” and particularly with respect to life and…[Read more]

Re-posting my list with additional commentary in boldface.. I’ve lost track of which “Western science” definition(s) of life are to be included in the forthcoming glossary, but I’ll go ahead and offer the ” minimal list of list of features that constitute all present-day organisms on planet earth” that I offered in our course The Epic of Evolutio…[Read more]

I’ve lost track of which “Western science” definition(s) of life are to be included in the forthcoming glossary, but I’ll go ahead and offer the ” minimal list of list of features that constitute all present-day organisms on planet earth” that I offered in our course The Epic of Evolution. 1) Ability to capture and utilize energy from the…[Read more]