What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?(quantamagazine.org) |
What physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?(quantamagazine.org) |
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/17squg1/ho...
Imo the explanation is also done better than in the article.
Actually, someone even commented in that thread about how it was similar to biological mechanisms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390619
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-116_Rolling_Airframe_Missi...
This whole "protons entering bacterium and being pumped out" is exactly the ancestor of the mitochondria, that's what it does, except now the "outside" is the inside of the parent cell.
I wonder how much of machine-like "efficiency" is actually "overfitting" at the cost of robustness.
Electric motors are sort of like hermit crab shells - Hard and long-lasting, but they only exist because they piggyback off of a living species.
We also have extremely robust livers that allow us to eat a super wide variety of food as energy inputs
Which if you want an actual feel for the true scale of things, must be multiplied by (order of magnitude) the number of bacteriums on the planet.
The caveat is that more zeros do nothing for our comprehension of the scale. That's the problem because most people can't comprehend how evolution is even possible. We just don't have a mental model for a trillion, it's all the same to us after a certain threshold.
there's a good richard feynam video about how things feel when they're that small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c
I learned recently that the actual mechanism of the energy transfer is one of the most interesting parts of molecular biology.
ATP doesn't just store chemical energy. ATP synthase constructs the molecules by literally mashing the two halves together and mechanically twisting them. ATP can later slot into proteins, releasing that energy by mechanically moving parts of a molecular machine. It can also be split for simple heat and participate in other chemical reactions more directly.
But I find it absolutely fascinating that ATP operates as a mechanical battery. Storing actual mechanical motion in a chemical bond that can be reversed to recover the motion and transform it into work. Molecular machines are one of the most incredible things in the universe.
The general idea was that there were specific examples of "irreducible complexity" that proved that there was an intelligent designer. The project on the part of certain Christian political factions was to add a veneer of hypothesis testing to creationism. The god of the gaps retreats further
Also can work as atp generator by applying rotation ?
They can even repair their own DNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair
The author passed away 15 years ago so I will mention the PDF of the book shows up in the first few search results on Google.
The takeaway should be "mutations that confer massive benefits can become universal across the globe even if they only happen once, no matter how unlikely they are", which is obvious and intuitive.
[0] Which is an extremely low ball number for worldwide bacterium, even billions of years ago, I think, given your average human has around 30 trillion inside them.
[1] Like "anomalies in Minecraft" series - given how many seeds there are, how many people play it, and how big the worlds are, eventually even the rarest things generate naturally.