Re: Directed evolution
- From: feedbackdroid <feedbackdroid@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 15:05:39 -0500 (EST)
On Dec 31 2007, 12:09 pm, Lorentz <drosen0...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Dec 31, 2:22 am, feedbackdroid <feedbackdr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Which just shows that systems biology has nothing useful to
say about the origin of life.
;-)
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe just knowing the bits and pieces, ACGT, etc,
at the purely reductionist level will suffice.
I became a physicist because I like reductionist science.
However, I think that understanding things at a systems level is also
important because of redundancy. Redundancy is a fundamental property
in the universe that is hidden by reductionist explanations. Systems
models are complementary to reductionist models, and together provide
a more complete model of the universe than either could provide
alone.
I agree with all of your comments here. My comment to P-i-P was meant
to indicate possible "assumptions" inherent in the reductionist
approach .... maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.
At this day and age, however, it should be clear to everyone in the
universe that once you take the pieces apart, you need to put them
together again, in a way that recreates the original, both
structurally AND functionally ... or else you've only solved half the
problem.
During each higher level of such synthesis, "new" rules and forms of
interactions - both local and global - come into play, and these
interactions are what ultimately determines whether the "final" form
works properly or not.
P-i-P could take a dead cat found by the side of the road, and reduce
it to a soup of atoms and ACGT, but it's highly unlikely he could take
that soup and recreate the living cat. What is missing? All those
fancy [and correct] interactions that take place at every successively
higher level of the overall "system".
.
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