What makes life vital; each part is not alive (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 30, 2020, 00:29 (1459 days ago) @ David Turell

It is a series of functional relationships:

https://evolutionnews.org/2020/04/the-parts-of-cells-dont-explain-the-origin-of-cells/

"Here is a paper that should be in the files of everyone thinking about biological design. It is Peter Tompa and George Rose’s “The Levinthal Paradox of the Interactome” (2011), from the journal Protein Science.

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"Starting with basic facts about cell biology, Tompa and Rose explain that the parts of cells do not explain the origin of cells. To understand the origin of cells, one must focus on the functional interrelations of those parts, which relations occupy the very tiny space of “alive” in the incomprehensibly larger space of “not alive.”

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"Any relation or interaction within a cell is not a material object. It is not a part or a thing. The relations that matter to the living state are functions, and, while requiring material parts, the functions cannot be reduced to those parts. Relations are inherently higher-level properties. Tompa and Rose argue that the space of possible interrelations that fail to yield the living state is so much larger than the tiny neighborhood of “alive” that, if the living state is disrupted, the parts of the cell will never find their way back to that state. Instead they embark on a one-way or irreversible random walk out into the universe of not-alive. This is why a bacterium whose membrane or cell wall is disrupted by sonication in a sterile buffer will never come back to life — even though, at that moment, all the molecular parts (DNA, RNA, ribosomes, proteins, lipids, etc.) are co-present in the same microenvironment.

"The essential relations have been lost, irretrievably. The living state, a system of relations, presupposes material things. It is not, however, a material thing itself, and cannot be reduced to materiality. Thus, the bottom-up approach to the origin of life cannot possibly succeed, because it is committed to a category error (i.e., error = the parts of a system are causally primary). Category errors do not yield to further effort. (my bold)

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"Note carefully: Tompa and Rose do not themselves support a design view of the origin of life. They argue that some unknown, incremental pathway assembled cells: “Presumably, early‐earth life forms originated through an accumulation of changes of ever increasing complexity” (p. 2077). But their interactome analysis does not explain how that pathway would have been traversed, without design – only that (as noted above) having the parts on hand will not yield a cell.

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"Einstein, in a famous 1918 letter to his friend Michele Besso, put the general epistemological point this way (quoted by Gerald Holton, emphasis added):

…"a theory which wishes to deserve trust must be built upon generalizable facts. Old examples: Chief postulates of thermodynamics [based] on impossibility of perpetuum mobile. Mechanics [based] on grasped [ertasteten] law of inertia. Kinetic gas theory [based] on equivalence of heat and mechanical energy (also historically). Special Relativity on the constancy of light velocity and Maxwell’s equation for the vacuum, which in turn rest on empirical foundations. Relativity with respect to uniform [?] translation is a fact of experience. General [Relativity]: Equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass. Never has a truly useful and deep-going theory really been found purely speculatively."

Comment: Darwinism is purely speculation, although he used some generalizable facts that were true to this day. Darwin was wise not to attempt origin-of-life speculation in view of this definition of life. Tompa and Rose make the full case for design and refuse to follow it to the logical conclusion. I believe this is because religions have contaminated human thinking about the non-human greater power that must exist.