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Author | Topic: Moving towards an ID mechanism. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
RAZD Member (Idle past 1426 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
yep
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randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
My belief: God can and does interact with the universe but it is not through any observable mechanism. Likewise with ID. God is not so impotent that he cannot create a universe with humans as the final product without tinkering on a step-by-step basis. I find ID the greatest insult to God's creative abilities. I would be a YEC long long before I would ever consider ID. And finally, I personally believe that no matter how deep our physical theories delve, we will never uncover a spiritual layer. Thanks for clarifying your beliefs, and the fact they are faith statements, and not based on science, but your personal faith in how you think God must do it. For clarification, I think God works in everything, period, and that there is no arena, natural, spiritual, or whatever, that God's presence and principles are not at work. My point which you object to as childish is that your fundamental disagreement with me is not based on science, but based on your personal religious theology which is not based on anything that I can tell, but mere personal bias. I give my reasons why I think modern science has ventured into the spiritual arena of reality. You dismiss the idea out or mere prejudice. Some of my reasons are the descriptions among many spiritual traditions including biblical theology and Christianity include a number of principles that dovetail with what we see in QM, specifically: 1. Most spiritual experiences relate increases or unusual dispositions of energy. That is subjective, sure, but it appears the spiritual (what people have called spiritual) includes energy and energy that can be felt by the mind and body of people. That places that aspect of the spiritual squarely in the domain of what modern science calls physical reality. It is something experienced by the natural world. 2. Faith principles relating consciousness to what happens in the real world. This is tentative, but QM appears to involve informational transfer and interaction with consciousness, at least the dominant interpretations of the data (as I have heard). Spiritual traditions teach things like what you sow is what you reap, what goes around, comes around, and ideas that internal subjective states (faith) can affect the external world. QM appears to show, or many explanations of QM, appear to show connections exist, and thus appear to be delving into the connections (spirit) between the energy, position and perspective of one's subjective state (faith), and the observed physical world. 3. QM indicates a deeper reality which to some extent forms and governs the reality we live in. This is also true for TOE. The concept of a deeper reality, invisible to the human eye, that is an integral part of the physical world, but which can exist in states somewhat non-physical in the layman's sense of the term, in an energy-state, is pretty much the definition of spiritual. Spiritual is an energy state that interacts with the physical world, is integral to the physical world, but is a deeper reality. So in one sense, you can call spiritual a part of "physical" or vice versa. The spiritual/physical dichotomy preceded QM. You can call it "a deeper reality." It looks exactly like what men refer to when by "spiritual", and you have offered no scientific evidence to refute that, except your claims of personal bias. The spiritual world is "deterministic" too in the loose sense that there are principles involved, principles that work seemingly on their own, although I would argue nothing works completely on it's own without God's presence enabling the existence of that thing. I will add that this does not preclude God from reserving deeper and more hidden aspects and mysteries. At the same time, God created both the physical and spiritual realms and says they are connected. All spiritual traditions I know of claim the spiritual realm is part and parcel of the universe, and as such, the spiritual realm should properly be referred to as part of the natural, material or physical world if one is speaking in scientific terms if one hypothesizes it's existence as real. This message has been edited by randman, 12-04-2005 03:54 PM
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randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
WK, does QM apply more than classical mechanics for mutations?
Tautomerisation is essentially a chemist’s way of describing a quantum mechanical property of fundamental particles: that they can be in two or more places at one. Quantum mechanics tells us that the protons in DNA that form the basis of DNA coding are not specifically localised to certain positions but must be smeared out along the double helix. But these different positions for the coding protons correspond to different DNA codes. At the quantum mechanical level, DNA must exist in a superposition of mutational states. http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/O4.htm I'm asking because I am just learning about this stuff. The paper you cited declares QM effective for mutations, and so do others, but I am not yet clear on how mutations work, in that level of detail. Seems like a pretty major issue to me.
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
I would say there is a definite contribution. The level of chemical interaction occuring is clearly at a level where QM influences may be operating at least transiently. I don't think you can seperate quantum and classical mechanics in this way. One is merely the result we perceive, at our gross level of perception, of the operation of the other.
The problem is whether any superposition could last for long without running into problems of decoherence. The cell is a very chemically dense environment and the number of potential interactions are vast. All mutation is going to involve events at a quantum level, how can anything not? At the same time this doesn't effectively change our approach as QM is a probabilistic framework and our general understanding of mutation is likewise probabilistic. It may be that certain environments constrain the probability space of mutational events as the parrallel mirrors in the casimir effect constrain the range of virtual particles possible between them, but at the moment this is essentially pure speculation and in itself offers no more scope for intervention than would be offered by an organism being moved to a new environment. The interface between QM and biology is so newborn that it will be some time before reliable conclusions can be drawn. TTFN, WK
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
A recent paper has suggested that the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium could have influenced the rate of spontaneous mutation on Earth (Pedersen , et al., 2005). They support this with QM calculations for reductions in zero point energy with deuterium substituting for hydrogen , and previously reported experimental work showing D2O can affect the stability of double stranded DNA.
TTFN, WK
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randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
Hmm...I would think it would be helpful if we understood how and if any entanglement occurs in such a dense environment. I would think that would be a place to look for possible major effects, but then again, maybe not.
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
Its hard enough detecting entanglement in photon pairs in highly controlled labs, doing so in a cell is going to be hugely problematic. It would be interesting, but it is a considerable leap beyond the current level of integration of QM and molecular biology.
TTFN, WK
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randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
Well, if we cannot detect it yet because we haven't devised experiments to do so, I wonder if it's still not the case that QM would predict entanglement effects. I have heard some physicists say they would expect that. I suppose we'll have to wait to know for sure.
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
I'm sure they would expect them to exist at least transiently, but that hardly argues for them having a significant role in the process of mutation.
Any references for physicists putting forward such a model? TTFN, WK
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randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
I've just heard statements they are working on it; no actual models yet, although there could be and I am unaware of them. Vedral was the last name of one of the physicists. He was a student of Zeilinger.
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
Vedral's homepage doesn't give any indication of work in this area. His work on macroscopic effects of entanglement certainly might be applicable to biological molecules, but at the moment they seem to require rather restrictive environments i.e. very low temperatures.
TTFN, WK This message has been edited by Wounded King, 05-Dec-2005 04:10 PM
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nwr Member Posts: 6409 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Hmm...I would think it would be helpful if we understood how and if any entanglement occurs in such a dense environment. I would think that would be a place to look for possible major effects, but then again, maybe not.
It is easy to find major entanglement effects. A physicist discovers some small scale entanglement effects. He publishes a research paper. That publishing involves the cutting down of trees and this has effects on the local climate near the forest. Lots of people are also involved, from editors to peer reviewers to printers to research journal readers. That sure seems like a major entanglement effect to me. I suggest that these kinds of effects are the only major effects you are likely to find.
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randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
Not everything someone works on is posted in detail, is it? He's stated in interviews that he's working on this or something to that effect, but not divulging anything on it. I suspect there is a lot of work to be done before he can develop some experiments to test whatever he's thinking of. But as you point out, this would be an area of macroscopic effect which the web-site says he's working on.
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randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
I suggest that these kinds of effects are the only major effects you are likely to find. Your suggestion contains no real analysis. So I take it for what it's worth. I think someone actually working on macroscopic effects, like Vedral, that has publicly and openly discussed the idea entanglement might relate to life is the more informed opinion. So I'll put more weight on his suggestion than your's here.
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
Well since you haven't let any of the rest of us in on what his suggestions are I can't really comment.
Are any of these interviews available online? The closest I can find in his published works is this...
might it be not only that quantum effects are responsible for the behaviour of inanimate matter, but that the magic of entanglement is also crucial in the existence of life4? Which is pretty speculative, and certainly not original. The reference he gives is to a 1964 letter to Nature called 'Does quantum mechanics exclude life' by P.T. Landsberg, sadly I can't get to access to this paper as yet. There is also a large leap between a role for entanglement in the chemistry of life and a significant role in the non-random nature of certain mutations. TTFN, WK This message has been edited by Wounded King, 05-Dec-2005 04:56 PM
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