Addy Pross
Appearances
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
In a few months' time, you will be a totally different person. Most of the stuff that is you won't be you anymore. It's still you, but the stuff has been turned over, and it's new stuff all the time.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
analog of that is there is there some particular kind of chemistry that we need to make the dynamic kinetic stability work not really just a source of energy generally typically it will be chemical energy uh the classic example um was when this work was uh this area was uh discovered um was with a very simple reaction, one of the most basic reactions in chemistry, esterification.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Now, if you take a carboxylic acid and you methylate it, which you can consider a source of material but also a source of energy, you end up with an ester. Now, that is a downhill reaction, because you started off high in energy, and you go downhill, and you end up with your ester, nice crystals. And that's a very familiar reaction that we've known for, I don't know, well over 100 years.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
But what two young Dutch chemists discovered, which was quite remarkable, that if you do this reaction in a dynamic way, namely, turn the acid into the ester, and then continually degrade the ester back to acid and then make more ester all the time in this dynamic way, you end up with a new form of matter. You end up with a hydrogel.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Not crystals, a hydrogel, which has unusual properties because it's composed of both the ester and the acid in a dynamic process. Now, the other thing that's very interesting here and very relevant to life is for that one thermodynamic process with one thermodynamic state, you have thousands,
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
literally millions of kinetic, potential kinetic states, depending on the proportion of the acid and the ester that you would have in the hydrogel. So if the hydrogel is primarily ester, it'll be more solid in its behavior and its structure. If there is more of the acid in there, it'll be softer. So you can play around with its properties. And guess what?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Life uses that flexibility of kinetic states all the time. In fact, every time you do any motion, you lift your hand, you scratch your nose, whatever, You're actually moving from one dynamic kinetic state. Your cells are moving from one dynamic kinetic state to another, which is more appropriate for the new conditions, which have been induced by, of course, your brain.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
And that's already a complicated system. But just to give the simple example that was discovered some years ago that shows how useful this is, is the cytoskeleton. Now, you have a skeleton, and it's fairly rigid in structure, happily. Cells have a skeleton as well, but the skeleton in the cell, the cytoskeleton, needs to have dynamic function in order to suit the cell's requirements.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So sometimes the cell wants a rigid structure, and sometimes it wants a softer one to facilitate transport of material, motion of the cell, and it can play around with that with that structure because it's a DKS system made up. The dynamic system is made up of tubulin dimers and microtubules, the equivalent, the analog of the ester and acid that I spoke about in the simple chemical reaction.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So the cell, if it wants a more solid structure, microtubules largely. If it wants a softer structure, it It degrades the microtubules to tubulin, but this is all continually done in a way that dissipates energy. In other words, this is very important. Just like the fountain is dissipating energy all the time, You put energy in, but of course the energy doesn't disappear.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
It dissipates, ends up as heat energy. The body does exactly the same thing, and that's why our body is releasing heat all the time, because the energy that is dissipated ends up in the lowest form of energy, heat energy.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Well, that's a good point. And let me be very clear here that human technology is always way behind natural technology. Nature is so very smart. And I mean, some Nobel Prizes were given out now for artificial intelligence and neural networks. Nature discovered neural networks very, Well, not billions of years ago. Let's say millions of years ago. So that's how it is.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
You know, nature is smarter than we are.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Well, Here's the problem. When people have tried to make life, they haven't thought too much about the dynamic state that life is. And they've tried to take chemical stuff, proteins, nucleic acids, to move in that direction. play around with it in the test tube and hopefully move it towards life.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
But that doesn't work just in the same way that if you're wandering around on the earth, you can wander around on a horse or walk or in a car. That's not going to get you airborne. That's a new dimension. That's another dimension. And you've got to do something different to access that dimension. And once we found flight, there, transport changed.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
It's the same with this new kinetic state of matter. It's the equivalent of flight in that we've discovered, we've accessed a new means of doing things. Nature discovered this new
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
new dimension of stuff and life is a manifestation of what can be done once you're in that new dimension extraordinary and i hope in the course of our discussion we'll be able to understand how life's most striking characteristics um its purposeful nature It's mental dimension. How can we think? What's going on here? Cognition. Where did all of this come from?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
And physics is struggling with that because it's not in the physical description of stuff for stuff to think and to have feelings and to get angry and to be happy, etc.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Yeah, well, people have been making them now in the lab for some years to serve some particular purpose. for a purpose, because once you have these systems, they can be utilized in a functional way. You can, for instance, if you have vesicles, which are in this kind of state with a drug inside, you can activate it and tell it to release. You can trigger it to release the drug.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So you have what has been discovered here as a means of doing what life does to use matter in a more functional way, in a more dynamic, in a more useful way. And that's it. It's a new area in material science which is really just getting started.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
But the facet that fascinates me is not the material aspect, but the biological connection, because biology has taken this capability, you know, just so far, because as you say, it's had a lot of time to work on ways of doing that.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Yeah. Well, there have been different theories, of course, of how life began. And the problem is that there hasn't been any real way to check, you know, which is the right one. And an essential part of the problem is that It's hard to understand how it began if you don't know what it is. And I think what we've been talking about is starting to give some more insight into what it is.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So probably the strongest idea for the origin of life began with what was called is the RNA worldview. The RNA worldview, it was discovered some 60 almost 70 years ago that certain molecules have an extraordinary capability they can
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
replicate they can make copies of themselves actually the mechanism of it is very simple it's not it sounds like dramatic but basically a nucleic acid is a long chain molecule made up of segments now if you put such a molecule in a test tube with lots of the segments the component bits floating around, the component bits tend to be attracted to the long chain molecule, the RNA in this case.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So they latch on in a template type mechanism, and then those segments can join up. And then when the segments that have joined up separate from the original nucleic acid molecule, you end up with two molecules that And the molecule has copied itself.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So a very, very simple template mechanism, just like, you know, you can make, if you've got a rubber stamp, you can make copies of what's on that stamp just by stamping bits of paper many times. So that was a dramatic discovery. And it came about just a little after the discovery of DNA as the very important molecule of life. as I hope we'll get to as we proceed.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
It's been made to be more important than it really is, but we'll come back to that in a moment. Well, in several moments. So... But the problem was once replicating molecules were allowed to replicate like RNA, something dramatic happened, which was very exciting. The replication process showed that the molecule could evolve. In other words,
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
The replication didn't always come about perfectly, but there was a mutation. A slightly different replicating molecule was formed by mistake. The replication didn't work perfectly. And therefore, there was a process of evolution. Now, this was very exciting. So you start off with a replicating molecule. It makes copies of itself, and it evolves.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
And the feeling was, wow, we've discovered the origin of life, the beginning of evolution, except there was one problem. When it evolved, it didn't evolve towards something that was living. All that happened was the replicating molecule became shorter and shorter and shorter. It started out with something like 5,000 segments and ended up with something like 500 segments.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
And the reason was very simple. The 500-segment molecule replicated faster than the longer molecule. So the shorter molecule out-replicated the longer one. But that was going from complexity to simplicity as opposed to the other way, which is what we want. And that's been holding up that way of thinking about life, well, for 50, 60 years. So that hasn't been the way to get there.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
There was the metabolism idea that you get the organization coming about first. But already quite a few years ago, a physical chemist in Israel, Schneer Lifson, said there's a problem with the metabolism first idea. And the problem is you're asking people. disorganized matter to become organized. Now, the second law doesn't like that. The second law likes organized matter to become disorganized.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So you can't start off life with a counter thermodynamic process and that in a sense has run out into difficulties because of that simple issue. What this new dynamic kinetic state idea does is to overcome the metabolism problem, the fact that you're organizing, because if you get energy coming in, the rules change. I like to say that the rules governing balls rolling down a hill are
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
are different to the rules governing cars driving along a road and up a hill. Different rules. So once nature spontaneously, in some way, managed to form a dynamic, kinetically stable system, an important step towards the creation of life came about. But we need one more element for that to happen. And this is where we're struggling experimentally.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
The DKS system that you make has to be replicative in order to undergo change so that it will become more, I was about to say stable, but more persistent, stable in the kinetic sense. And that, we've only started working with these sorts of systems, so to make a system that is both DKS stable and replicative, we're not there yet.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
My comment here is the guy that figures that out, there's a Nobel Prize waiting for him.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Look – All I can say, it's early days. One group in Holland has been trying to work on that. But it's... I'm a theoretician, so I run away from experimental problems. So I can't deal with – can't make experimental suggestions as to how that might be done. But all I'm saying is we at least have an outline, a direction to think about in order to somehow create –
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
a system that could, once it replicates, it can evolve. And let me say here clearly, once it evolves, it will evolve in a direction that complexifies, that leads to not simplicity, but to complexity, because just as the second law is quantitative, there is a tiny quantitative element to the DKS system as well.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
When you do the differential equation that describes the formation of a system in the decay state, it's just the predator, the classic predator-prey equation, formation and decay. But once you have two... DKS systems competing for the same resource, the math says quite explicitly that the more stable, the more persistent one will drive the less persistent one into extinction.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
In other words, once you have a mutation in the DKS system, it will drive, it will be encouraged, and it'll push away. It, if you like, saps the water out of the other fountain, so the other fountain just collapses. And what will it do? it will take on characteristics that enable it to deal better with its environment.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So here is the beginning of memory, because the fact that it changes in a way that makes it more stable, that greater stability is not inherent to the system. It's environmentally dependent. It's stable for that particular environment. Just like, you know... A tiger might be stable in Africa, but if you put him in Alaska on an iceberg, it's not doing too well.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
The thing that has to be stated is that that will only happen for a limited period of time as long as energy is available. Once the energy stops, everything stops. Now, look, the fact that we build houses, we build lots of things, that's all counter thermodynamic because we're utilizing energy in order to bring about these systems that are counter thermodynamic.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
But we can only do that as long as energy is available. And most of the energy that enables life to proceed and develop on Earth is solar energy. Once the solar energy stops, and that will happen eventually, then all life will, just like if you stop pumping water into your fountain, the fountain will die and all of life in that same way will die.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
It'll collapse because you don't have the source of energy. So there'll be no life when we get to that state you physicists love to talk about, heat death. It's not going to be fun there. We won't have any No pleasure in being in heat, dear.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
I have to say that my understanding from the work of people in the field that making these DKS chemical systems is not easy. And that has to be worked on more as well. And I can't comment too much on that because... I'm the guy that doesn't dare go into the lab. So I can't say much on that. But just to say that it is being done, but the systems that arise have an extraordinary –
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Dynamic capability, flexibility, because as I say, the fact that for every thermodynamic state there are thousands of kinetic states means that once there's a driving force for change, and there is one, and we'll talk about that in a moment maybe because it's very important, Because biologists tend to think of evolution as without direction. That is not true. Evolution definitely has a direction.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
And the direction is very simple as that simple differential equation that I described earlier states. Systems go from less persistent to more persistent. But something here also has to be stated because it confuses biologists a lot and it troubled me initially. If I'm saying there's this tendency towards greater complexity, why are bacteria still around? Because they're simple.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So that seems to counter the complexification argument. The answer is bacteria aren't simple at all. They live in in networks, they don't live individually and all life is increasingly an interconnected network where all the living things are interacting with one another Your microbiome lives very comfortably off you. So it's wrong to think of bacteria as an individual as simple.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
But life is a complex network, and it's complexifying all the time. And that's why life has basically taken over the planet. It's everywhere in this very intricate network. And it goes back to the Gaia ideas of, who was it, Lovelock? Lovelock, yeah. It's very interesting that now biologists are starting to say, hey, you know what?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Maybe modern biologists recently are starting to say maybe he was onto something and one should view life as almost… I don't want to say one system, but there is something in that idea that it's a dynamic system where everything is connected to everything else.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Look, there's no question that the power behind life expanding as it has is the power of replication. If you take one single fertilized egg, a human fertilized egg, it undergoes something like 40 to 45 acts of replication to become something like 50 or 70 trillion cells. I mean, the kinetic power of replication is awesome.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
But of course, as Malthus pointed out some years ago, you can't keep doing that. You run out of resources. So what happens is the best you can hope for, and this is where we are all the time, a balance. You have rate of formation balanced by a rate of decay, and these have to be balanced. attuned to one another.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So flies replicate at a rate that requires them to live for one day because that's when the balance comes about. Humans, it's close to 100 years for that balance to be maintained, though I'm beginning to worry about that because we've become, you know, We're starting to edge towards that 9 billion or whatever.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
But maybe that'll... Because once you... Nature, once replication forgets about that Malthusian rule, nature is very cruel. Nature doesn't forgive. And it comes back one way or another back to equilibrium, either kindly or unkindly.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Yeah. Well, I owe a lot of credit to a young guy, Steve Grant, who wrote a wonderful book in the year 2000, Creation, where he said a statement that I saw was barely acknowledged in the literature. He said, the most important law of nature. That's quite an introduction to a law that you want to propose.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
And his most important law of nature was things that persist persist and things that don't don't. So he was claiming that a tautology was the most important law of nature. Well, I think that can be improved a little bit, taken away from being a tautology and changed to there's a general tendency for things to go from less persistent to more persistent.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
And the second law of thermodynamics fits into that category, but the persistence principle is wider than the second law because the second law is restricted to energetically stable whereas the kinetically the kinetic systems expand the space to kinetically stable, persistent systems that aren't energetically stable.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So there it is, you can have stability of this dynamic kind, and that's part of nature as well. So in that sense, life isn't a totally unexpected phenomenon, because you can see that now in this new thermodynamic or kinetic perspective, the only thing one has to realize is that it seems that the ability for this to get going is highly contingent.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So if you're going to ask me, are we gonna have life in every other planet in some form or other, the answer is I don't know, because the high contingency means the probability that it will happen, that the circumstances will allow Naturally, for a dynamic kinetically stable system to emerge and for it then to become replicative so that it can evolve and expand, I am at a loss.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
I do not know the likelihood of that, except that it did happen once. Happened once, right.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Absolutely, because every cell in your body is a DKS system because the cell is a dynamic kinetic system where all the molecules in the cell are continually turning over. Your body is a DKS system because your cells are turning over, some faster than others. Apparently, brain cells turn over more slowly. Skin cells, blood cells, you're shedding millions, billions of these daily.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So it's a dynamic system at many levels. So it's at the molecular level it's happening, at the cellular level, at the organismal level, and of course at the societal level. So, you know, in 100 years' time all the people roaming the earth will be different people to us.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Oh, well, maybe. Look, biology has been in a situation of ongoing crisis, developing crisis for several decades. The genomic paradigm has been very powerful and very useful, but it hasn't been able to answer certain things. And the way biology has gotten around that is by band-aids.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Well, you know, horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, continually looking for ways to maintain the fundamental idea that – which is genome-centric. And that is the essence of neo-Darwinian theory. But together with actually a bunch of some 20 very serious biologists, we put out a monograph just a year ago with the title Evolution on Purpose. So, you know…
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Biologists have been realizing for quite a while that this purpose, wherever we look, and that doesn't fit in with the physical perspective that biology was trying to push onto itself to kind of be respected by physicists. They want physicists to look at them respectfully. So they were saying random mutation, natural selection, all physically logical. But It's simply not the case.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
And what happens is you cannot replace an old paradigm with a new one The paradigm doesn't change through failures in the old paradigm, because what happens when the paradigm starts to not work, you add band-aids. What you need is a new paradigm that will encompass the new information, and that has been slow to come about.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So let me just quote a very respectable biologist from Oxford, Dennis Noble, who said, the general view is that The genome controls the cell. He says it's actually the other way around. The cell controls the genome, okay? That is quite a, you know, that's changing the way one should look at a living system. Now, let me give you an example which is very striking.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
The CRISPR system, what's her name again? Jennifer Doudna got the Nobel Prize for discovering how to edit DNA. Wonderful invention. Except bacteria discovered that billions of years ago. So it was a copy and paste process there. As I was saying earlier, nature is very clever. But let me just say something here, which is quite extraordinary. A bacterium, a very simple biological system,
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
When it is attacked by a virus and the viral attack fails, it takes a little bit of that viral DNA and puts it into its own genome. In other words, it changes its genome. That's not an accidental mutation. That's a deliberate change in its genome.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
to incorporate some of the viral DNA as part of its immune system because once that DNA has a bit of viral elements in it, next time that virus comes around, it recognizes it and then it can protect itself by cutting the viral DNA in two and then it's harmless.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
The very opposite of what biology has been telling us for almost 100 years, well, since DNA, that DNA mutation is random and natural selection is how evolution comes about. Not true.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
Already the beginnings of that understanding were uncovered by Barbara McClintock in the 1940s, and people just thought she was talking nonsense when she noticed jumping genes, that genetic material was changing position in corn.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
With a microscope, she saw this, and she was just ridiculed until people saw some decades later that this was true, and she got, in 1980, what, three or something, a Nobel Prize for that work. Another biologist who makes this point very clearly is Jim Shapiro in Chicago, who says DNA is thought of as a read-only thing. He says it's a read-write system.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
In other words, this is starting to come around to what I was saying, what Dennis Noble is saying, and biologists still have to take this in, that the cell
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
basically controls the genome just as much the genome is an important location for memory for information for the cell but it's clear that it's not the be all and end all because it's an extraordinary thing that when that one fertilized egg became trillions of cells a human body
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
There are kidney cells and liver cells and brain cells and skin cells, and they're all different, but they all have the same genome. So basically, the cell uses the bits of genome that are relevant for the cell at any particular moment. So it's, as I say, it's not the genome. running the roost, it's the cell itself and that brings me back. So where did this all start?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
So now you see the beginning of the evolutionary process in a system that is the dynamic kinetically stable system has already a sense of self and an awareness of an outside. Now, this may be a little bit hard to comprehend initially, but I think the point is important. And again,
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
The fact that a daycare system is totally dependent, existentially dependent on its environment for resources and energy, that means it is aware in a very rudimentary sense of its environment because without that, it dies. And that external environment appreciation or awareness means there's the beginning of self-awareness. So it distinguishes between itself and the environment.
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Now that might sound, now a chemical system, that sounds a bit hard to swallow. But when you think of a leaf, this is how I think about it, a leaf blowing in the wind, it's hard to see the principles of flight in what happens with that leaf fluttering in the wind. But they're all there. So once you have a very simple decay system with the beginning of self,
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and the beginning of external awareness, if you now have an evolutionary process that enhances that for persistence, then the result will be an increasingly complex system that is increasingly self-aware and externally aware. So the bacterial cell... doesn't know too much about the planet. It only knows what's in its immediate vicinity.
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As we humans became more and more aware, well, animals like to know their environment, maybe a few kilometers or whatever. And we're looking, you know, far into space, into the solar system and beyond because of our increasing capability increasing self-awareness and increasing external awareness that's evolved over time.
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Yes, I agree with that. I think it was the physicist Max Delbruck who said that every cell contains within it its history going back millions of years because that's been a continual adaptation to its environment.
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Absolutely. I think just as the second law of thermodynamics is directed, very explicitly directed, and though we don't say it's purposeful, we just say there's a law of nature that directs it in the direction that it goes. change in the dynamic kinetic world is also directed, but because the topology of thermodynamic space is convergent, then the law of nature that describes that is very clear.
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The problem is in dynamic kinetic space, the space is divergent because when you're at a particular point, there isn't one pathway forward to increasing persistence. It's all contingent. So it's a divergent space. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a directive pushing it forward. It doesn't go backwards. Life never evolves in a reverse direction.
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It's moving forward towards increasing complexity for increasing persistence. So in that sense, the evolutionary direction – there is an evolutionary direction and – and the direction is towards, it's Steve Grant's principle, towards increasingly persistent forms.
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You can get to persistent forms in two ways, the thermodynamic way, Boltzmann's way, and you can do it the life, the kinetic way, but change has to have a directive, and it has a directive in the biological world as well.
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Yes, this is very interesting because the problem, biology has given, of course, physicists hard burn for a century. I mean, Schrodinger and Wigner and Bohr, They basically said life doesn't make sense according to the known physical principles. And I think it was Schrodinger that hinted that there may be laws of physics that need to be discovered yet to be able to explain all of this.
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But it turns, you know, now I'm going to say something cruel, that between physics and biology, there's this other little subject called chemistry that can help bridge between the two. And I think the kinetic dimension is suddenly allowing that physical biological connection to come together.
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Yeah, this is a wonderful question. And I think... What we can see through this approach is the beginning of cognition because we're saying inherently the DKS system is cognitive. If cognitive means an awareness of the environment, it is aware. There's a definition of cognition that is a system that is able to store, access, and and act on information.
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But that's exactly what a D-care system does. The energy and material that are coming in are, if you like, information input, and it acquires that information and responds to that information. So we can see essentially the beginning of cognition in in the way that a DK system behaves. By definition, it is cognitive.
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And then we come to the tricky bit that one couldn't have predicted that this internal sense, this since the inner sense that we have comes about as a result of self-awareness. Because in order to be able to deal better with the outside, you've got to look after your inside. You've got to be aware of what's happening inside of you. Your internal state is relevant to your ability to
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respond and react to the external environment. So there's a growing tendency of self-awareness that comes about naturally, if you like, through this evolutionary process. By knowing ourselves, look what we humans have done. We know ourselves to the extent that we understand all of the physiological processes, the metabolic processes that are going on within our bodies. Amazing.
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But apparently, one can argue that the cell, the bacterial cell, already is aware of its own state and response to changes in the environment through... interacting with the environment and its state may change. And of course, phenomena like, you know, changing, locating, moving toward chemo taxes, moving towards food.
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It's an awareness of its environment and its internal state says, I'm hungry, go get some food.
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Yeah. Look, actually, this way of thinking has helped me reach the conclusion that sometimes there's a tendency for philosophers to say that everything we see around us may be illusory. It may not exist. But I actually say now that that can't be right because –
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If we, everything, nature has given us all of these tools to persist and we, our understanding of the environment is important for our persistence. So it is there for a purpose. Consciousness, our mental activity apparently takes up something like 20% of our energy, a huge amount. amount of energy is put into our cognitive state, nature wouldn't do that if there wasn't some return for that.
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And so our... The fact that what we see is what is really there has to be true because otherwise the cost, if we get confused about it, then we won't persist. People who lose track with reality can't survive. So I'm comfortable with that idea. In fact, it's very interesting. In our eyes, the vision, the image on our retina is an inverse image.
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But nature knows that the image is the other way, so we correct for that. In other words, nature wants us to see things as they are. And I think – and that is an interesting thought, which has a bearing on whether the whole world is an illusion. And as Descartes said, the only thing I'm sure of is that I exist. Well, maybe we can take that given the –
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The understanding of the interaction between self and the environment, maybe we could go a step further and be convinced that there is a universe out there after all and we're not making all of this up.
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I think in that sense that... that consciousness and cognition started off from the very beginning of the evolutionary process. And it's remarkable, I have to make a comment on this, because Darwin, in his... Endless wisdom already foresaw that. He said in his treatise that the process of evolution takes place along both physical and mental dimensions. He was extraordinary.
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He understood that the mental dimension couldn't just pop up in the middle willy-nilly, out of a physical situation on its own, that's not how evolution works. Evolution improves on something that had to be there. So Darwin already foresaw the mental dimension as being there from the beginning of the evolutionary process. So going back to that point, so bacteria are...
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cognitive and i'm wary of the term conscious but obviously on the spectrum from naught to 10 if we're a 9.5 the bacteria are 0.3 yeah but they have something there in order for them to deal with the problems that they encounter and that they have to solve
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Exactly. Exactly. In that sense, what was it called? The central dogma with which we started information flows from the genome, DNA, RNA, protein. We have to modify that. It's a more dynamic type of The cell is holistically, a wonderful term from Stuart Kaufman, the cell is holistically self-replicating. In other words, no element in it on its own is self-replicating.
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If you take a DNA molecule and put it on the table, and even if you throw nucleotides at it, it doesn't make copies of itself. It doesn't work. We're in a cycle that closes A makes B, B makes C, D, E, F makes A. And once the cycle is closed, you have a self-replicating system. And the cell is, if you like, holistically self-replicating where everything plays a part.
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And the genome is one part, a very important part, but it is just a part of the holistic cycle.
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Great talking to you, Sean.
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Yeah, well, that's where the difficulties start. There are literally hundreds of definitions of life. And the fact that there are so many definitions means that probably none of them are very good. Otherwise, you wouldn't need hundreds of definitions. And the biological ones tend to be focused on biological aspects, nucleic acids, proteins, replication, evolution.
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And the more physical ones tend to look at more physical aspects, self-organization, information, stability, instability, etc. But that hasn't somehow, that hasn't been enough. And I think there have been developments in the last several years in systems chemistry, which I think can make a definition that enables you to have a recipe how to make life in principle.
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An outline would be useful, and that's which I will mention in a moment. It's based on the idea that we've just learned, as I say, that there's a new – There's a new state of matter that's been uncovered in chemistry in the last 10, 15 years, a remarkable thought. Chemistry is a very established science now, and yet we've discovered that beyond the familiar thermodynamic states of matter,
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There are kinetic states of matter, and we'll need to talk a little bit about that and what that means. And life, if I have to define life now, I would say it's a replicating chemical system in this dynamic kinetic state, this new state of matter that's been recently discovered.
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Well, that's exactly the nature of this new state of matter that I'm going to describe a little bit. We're very familiar with the thermodynamic states that basically say that matter wants to be in a low-energy state. Right. But the strange thing is that stability has, which we use frequently in science, but not just in science, has two meanings which are actually quite different.
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One is in science we tend to think of stability as low energy, but stability in an everyday sense means energy. persistent, unchanging over time. And these two terms don't have to be overlapping, and they're not always overlapping. So when we talk about thermodynamic stability, they're overlapping. Why? Because when something is low in energy at its lowest energy state, it is also persistent.
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It sticks around effectively forever. But it turns out you can have stuff that is unstable in energy terms but stable in time terms. And time stability is, in a sense, more fundamental than energy stability because it encompasses both kinetically – stable systems and energetically stable systems.
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So this is the essence of what I'm going to talk about, that you can have something that is unstable energetically, but it's stable in the time sense. It persists. And just to make that clear, life has been around for close to four billion years, bacteria for most of that time. That is pretty persistent, pretty stable in the time sense.
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Well, that's the bottom line. The answer is yes. And some forms of that are actually very familiar. And the metaphor I like to use, a physical metaphor for this kinetic stability, is the simple phenomenon of a water fountain. There's this wonderful fountain in Geneva. It goes up, you know, whatever, 150 meters or so. And it is stable in a time sense.
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Whenever you go to Geneva, there it is doing what fountains do. But it's clearly unstable in an energetic sense. The water in that fountain is suspended in midair. So what's going on here? You can have something stable in a time sense because it is being created in a dynamic way so that the fountain as an entity is stable.
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persistent, stable in this time sense, but the water drops in the fountain are continually turning over. Now, that's a physical, a very simple physical phenomenon. description of kinetic stability, but some 15 years ago, chemists discovered chemical fountains.
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In other words, materials that are unstable in an energetic sense, but persistent and stable in a time sense because they're turning over consistently, continually through Yeah, the stuff coming in all the time, the energy coming in all the time in particular.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah. Well, as you say, physicists have been familiar with this idea actually for a while. Prigogine, in fact, got a Nobel Prize for its contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics. And the familiar examples then, there are, I mean, I spoke about fountains, but hurricanes, whirlpools are such structures that are stable,
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persistent in the time sense, as long as you have energy provided to them. But what was not familiar is that you can have chemical systems that behave like that, and life is the ultimate example of dynamic, kinetically stable material, which is continually undergoing change, and just as I said, the water drops in the fountain are turning over all the time.