Molecular Basis of Life

Single Cell Algae

The mostly lifeless realm we know as our universe has no appearance of a recognizable plan beyond the physical laws that govern its actions.  The laws familiar to most of us are explained in mechanical terms and deal with, in a general way, the conservation of mass and energy.  Some aspects of our experience still elude real understanding.  People come up with analogies to explain gravity, for instance, but we don’t really know much about it.  It’s like the monk Mendel tending his peas and describing the effects of genetics without knowing anything about the nature of atoms, molecules or DNA.  We've discovered the existence of Black Holes but we don’t know their meaning other than that they provide a clue to a greater mystery.  Time is believed an aspect of physical dimension but what is the nature of this relationship?  We experience time as a sequence of events proceeding always in one predictable direction.  Is what registers in our biological minds all that there is to know about this phenomenon?  Not likely.  Atoms are no longer thought of as the fundamental building blocks of matter.  They appear now as discrete organizations of substances existing in a realm that doesn't defined them as clearly being of mass or energy.  We are dabbling on a fringe that threatens to break open our current notion of reality.

Our cumulative knowledge of the physical realm does not yet provide the basis for understanding the quality of ‘being alive.’  We are surrounded by entities of various sizes and shape that exhibit life.  We intuitively sense all manner of living creation as the result of a mystical vitality.  Life may form from dust and ash but it contains the breath of God.  The essence of life has been far too complex to entertain other explanations that rely solely upon an argument of reason.  This has mainly to do with our inadequate fact-based information describing the processes responsible for life.  The evidence obtained thus far, though, through the method of science, provides a compelling new narrative of life’s workings, but it still lacks a final chapter.  

Life continuously draws from its surroundings to maintain life.  Life reacts to, and sometimes learns from, its own life experiences.  Life creates new instances of itself.  Life goes to extraordinary lengths to sustain its quality of being alive, but life for the individual, must inevitably end.  When an entity can no longer sustain the processes it needs to live, it becomes disorganized.  Its activities are reduced to the quiet state of inanimate matter.  Its organic material is available for animals to consume and plants to, eventually, absorb.  Molecular resources that aren't salvaged by other living beings eventually break down into simpler, less exotic forms - structures not currently employed in the dazzling production of life.  

Microscopic cells are the simplest, most basic forms that exhibit independent life.  They are credited with providing for every complex plant and animal that inhabits our surroundings.  There is not an insect that crawls, a bird that flies, a tree that grows or a flower that blooms that doesn't result exclusively from cells.  While too small for our eyes to detect cells have size enough to display elaborate complexity.  Each cell is a carefully regulated environment encapsulated within a barrier that selects what resources may enter its domain and what is necessary to expel from it.  Its centralized information center oversees its many factories that synthesis a diverse variety of complex protein molecules needed for maintaining its structure and metabolizing energy.  Numerous reaction cycles must be constantly sustained if the delicate balance required for life is to be maintained. 

Life results from an elaborate choreography of processes that are entirely guided by the physical properties that dictate the interaction of molecules.  How this works and what it all inevitably means makes for a story still in the writing.

Biology Topics:

Protein Creation

Eukaryotic Cell

Archaeopteryx

Living - Why?

Good Morning Fred...

Letter to Fred

Romance Anonymous

Thanks for the recipe.  It looks very promising.  I particularly appreciate the fact that it does not call for eight pounds of animal parts.  I've never been charmed by the sight of blood vessels in my food.

I know nothing of astrology, not even enough to be puzzled by it.  The stars, orbits of planets, the pull of gravity; it is all there.  This is evidence.  So is the Periodic Table.  We thought we discovered something fundamental in atoms.  Oh, look!  Here are the basic mechanisms of physical reality.  Eureka, cries the ancient man.  Gather round as I tell you of the essential components of existence:  earth, wind, water and fire.  There it is.  No, wait.  We better also include spirit - the mystery behind life itself.  Yes, now we have it.  I think.

It doesn't end.  What are these things revealed as components of atoms?  Currently I am in love with the God Particle - the mechanism that gives physical matter the talent of attraction?  Can I breathe easy now, knowing we have identified a new element of the lower, more fundamental level of It?  Oh, that I should know more of It before life leaves me.  Forget about it.  It doesn't end.  What was the nature of existence prior to the Big Bang?  Why would  such an event occur? Did someone just mention God?  OK, what was God doing prior to creation?  Maybe God was wondering why adding one more number to infinity didn't make the number set bigger.  God was driving himself crazy with such thoughts.  Better to create a physical realm.  Place within it a creation driven to find answers to everything that occurs to it.  Watch with amusement as it eventually drives itself crazy probing the puzzle pieces worth stumping even God.  For every church, synagogue and mosque there is reserved an exhalation, a passport to give in and give up.  I can’t handle the challenge of my own mind.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention.  Here is your horoscope.  You discover It is itself a mere circular question, teasing you into an endless quest.

To Infinity and Beyond

Pelvis

We still know so little about our four dimensional reality – space plus time.  We have only the slightest inclination of an existence that remains beyond our detection.  Just a few years ago who would have heard the terms dark matter, dark energy, quarks or the Higgins boson?  These are vague catch-all terms for what, as yet, have no explanation.  All speculation about the nature of reality is valid until proven false.  There are plausible arguments for physical space having more than the three dimensions familiar to us.  Why not leave open the possibility that time itself is not as simple as we've described it?

Break down the life process of a single living cell and it can all be explained by the properties of organic molecules.  Is it at all surprising that life, which occurs only at the cellular level, should faithfully follow the laws of physics?  It appears so mechanistic, doesn’t it?  Score one for believers of sterile materialistic existence.  But wait.  How does one explain human consciousness?  What life-sustaining biological purpose does our level of inquiry serve?  Molecules organize into cells that contain the properties of life.  Cells, in turn, organize into more complex organisms.  As these organisms evolve into increasingly sophisticated forms they develop the capacity for an ever expanding awareness of, not only their surroundings, but of abstract understanding and appreciation of their own identity and of a unique inner life.  Our questions range beyond the source of our next meal to ones having for us no possible answer.  Why is there need for existence?  What is the nature of God, if God?  What role did God play prior to creation?  Was there ever a time of Nothing?  If not, why not?  If so, how does something come from absolute Nothing?

Our biological nature limits our ability to perceive and understand.  We are, after all, the mere result of an ingenious organization of simple cells.  We can stare steadfast into the face of existence itself and come away with no more understanding than does a dog peering at the printed word.  It is all there before us but we are not yet ready to know. 

Atheism is a word used by people unwilling to be limited by teachings thousands of years old.  The cantankerous old man of the Old Testament doesn’t fit what we know today except possibly as a literary metaphor or as a vengeful boogie man taught in a Sunday School class.  He might as well be Mother Goose when it comes time to answer our own more serious, probing questions. 

What happens when we die?  No one has the faintest idea.  We are completely free to speculate on the nature of existence following the physical demise of our own life-sustaining vessel.  I’m sure there are those that actually look forward to the solving of this age old mystery.  The good news is that we will either find our answers or we will never know that we didn't.

Green Isn't

Letter to Christa
Green Isn't

C L I C K     T O     E N L A R G E

R O B E R T       M O T H E R W E L L

The world isn’t as your eyes and ears tell you.  Existence is beyond our imagination without the interpretation of our own biology.  What we believe to be first hand fact is, in reality, our subjective interpretation.  The physical realm is most likely as our scientific instruments suggest, but its perception varies, depending on the survival needs of the particular life form.  The tree outside probably has green leaves in summer.  The sound of thunder can be startling.  Sugar is sweet.  Those seem basic facts describing our world.  Yet none of these phenomenon exist outside biology.  They are all subjective, mental interpretations enabling us to know an existence that would otherwise be beyond our understanding.  Without our senses we would have no reason to assume we exist – or should we want to.  In fact, can we not hypothesize and say death may be a form of existence robbed of the ability to perceive?  Our body’s enable us to interact with the physical realm.  Whatever conceivably survives the wearing out of this mechanism is left without the means to know physical existence.  It’s cut adrift.  The senses are gone, and the brain is unavailable for mental thought.  Of course, existence transcending one’s physical identity is left for conjecture alone.  Our essential, nonphysical being has yet to register on any apparatus constructed for science.  We are more evanescent than Higgs boson, the God Particle, in that regard. 

We think of our senses as being our eyes, ears, the touch of our skin as well as our ability to taste food and smell cookies baking in the oven.  It’s true they are all receptors, sending simple nerve impulses to their own, corresponding specialized portion of the brain.  That message alone, though, is like the zeros and ones that make up computer information.  It’s meaningless data without interpretation.  The brain receives rudimentary impulses and manifests light in an existence devoid of this appreciation.  The mind not only fabricates sound, it editorializes the experience, lending it emotional value.  The same can be said of all our senses.  We seek sweetness and salt because they have biological benefits.  We avoid putrefied meat because the smell is unpleasant, instinctively warning us away from its sickly contents.  Another form of animal may thrive on this meal and the smell entices it to have its fill of this ghastly road kill rotting in the sun.  In many instances, involving all of our senses, our biological minds use the sensation of pleasure to encourage activities benefiting life and creates for us a feeling of revulsion for that which endangers our existence.  The mind does what it can to find order and meaning in a physical realm that provides only the raw basis for existence… whatever that turns out being.  Yet from this environment, revealing no sign for concern of any kind, comes life.  Life responds, acknowledging existence.  Life protects life, valuing its separateness from that being absent of life.  From life comes consciousness.  We are probably the best representative of conscious life on this planet.  We want always to know and we investigate most everything.  We have questions for what is knowable and we wonder over thoughts having no possible answer.  We invent instruments that enable us to slip beyond the deceptive veil of our biological sense.  We create the language of math because words alone are incapable of portraying the world we come to know.  Existence that avails itself to our minds seems best explained with the tools of logic and reason.  How fortunate for us our minds have that ability.  Chances are good, though, that we are not complete for the task of knowing, comprehending, all that there is to know.  Our biological brains, honed on survival based reasoning skills, couldn’t anticipate the ambition of our quest.  The brain’s limitation won’t stop us.  We’re already finding ways to enhance our biological potential.  We’ll tamper with our minds.  Our curiosity will be too great to do otherwise.  We will undoubtedly lose some of our humanity in the process.  We will take that risk because the human’s nature is to risk its own existence in the desire to know more and to be more.  We’ve known that about ourselves since ancient times.  It is the temptation of the Tree of Knowledge.  The Garden of Eden seems never enough.  What put that seed in our brain?  Is there somewhere in this realm of matter and energy an inherent need for Existence to find a way to look back onto itself?  The mechanism of life may well be purely physical but how do we explain consciousness?  How do we explain the desire of our consciousness to know what it is we have no need for knowing?  We’ll find the Higgs boson and describe how it creates the physics of mass.  The question remains, though, what is in the nature of the atom that sent us on this search in the first place?  

L  E  T  T  E  R  S

M O R E

  COLD VALENTINE