How many times a day do we hear this? Just wait, eventually, sooner or later, some day, all of biology will be explained by means of physical causes, and physical causes alone!
Fortunately, not all scientists are willing to hold their breath while they wait for this grand culmination to occur. Here's Dr. Grandpierre's view of the matter:
"When physics applies the maxim of ignorance, and ignores biological inputs to fit the closure thesis, it misses the main point of the problem. Moreover, the physicalist dogma that 'one day we will be able to determine the actual behavior of living organisms by exclusively physical methods when all the physical details of the most complex organisms of the universe will be clarified' merely postpones the aim to solve the scientific questions of biology by plausible and simple scientific methods to an indeterminately distant future. We find this attitude as decelerating the development of science. Referring to the 'impenetrable complexity' instead of real explanation does not seem to differ from the methods of the 'occult sciences' -- since it plays the role of a Jolly Joker at all places where we need scientific explanations instead."
He also writes this, so very germane to our present discussion:
"The tricky machinery of life is not contained in the laws of thermodynamics. And it is just this tricky machinery that contains the large amount of information necessary for life. Berkovich notes: 'The functioning of living systems has little to do with physics and chemistry. It is a problem of information control' (Berkovich, 2003, 2). This implies the ability of biological information to direct the behavior of cells utilizing the smallest amount of energy. All living systems manifest energy transformations from numerous microscopic motions converging into macroscopic behavior, e.g., as when we write with our hand (Elitzur, 2004). The control processes of living systems act at the molecular scale (Dolev, Elitzur, 1998). Moreover, thermodynamic state functions are macroscopic at the global level of the system; therefore they cannot determine the complex behavior of the cells and of individual molecules. But if there is a relation between energy and manifested biological information, then the astronomical amount of information present in living organisms still needs thermodynamically significant energies to become effective, and so thermodynamics can be really efficient in the study of the nature of life."
When you consider that the human organism is made up of roughly 6*1013 cells, and in each cell more than 105 chemical reactions occur per second, which generally involve localized, "neighbor relations"; and yet the living system is able to organize and integrate all of its astronomically large number of parts distributed throughout its physical extent into one single, dynamic, self-organizing, sensitively-responsive global whole -- well, you've got to figure an enormous amount of information is required. And "information" does not appear to be a physical quantity.
How many times a day do we hear this?
Haven't heard it much since the members of the Vienna School passed on. The style now is that we can't ever get to a final physical explanation. That's what I think, and that State-sponsored science will come to an end without arriving at a final physical explanation.
How many times a day do we hear this? Just wait, eventually, sooner or later, some day, all of biology will be explained by means of physical causes, and physical causes alone!
Seems reasonable to me. 100 years ago, we didn't know the medium of genetic information. 50 years ago we had just learned the very basics of that information. Today we know the sequence of the entire human genome, and those of several hundred other organisms.
100 years ago we really didn't know what an enzyme was. 50 years ago we were learning the physical structures of the first enzymes. Today, we're getting close to determining the structure of the entire proteome (all of the proteins that are ever expressed in a living cell.)
100 years ago, we knew a very small part of the chemistry of the living cell. 50 years ago we had worked out the most basic pathways. Today they've coined the word 'metabolome' (the sum total of all the metabolic chemistry of the organism).
We're no more than 20 years away from a complete, mechanistic description of the entire life-cycle of a bacterial cell. That means you will be able to put an E. coli cell into a computer, set it going, and predict everything about it - structure, chemistry, constituents, reproduction, etc., using deterministic physical equations. I doubt any credible scientist doubts this will happen.
Fortunately, not all scientists are willing to hold their breath while they wait for this grand culmination to occur. Here's Dr. Grandpierre's view of the matter: "When physics applies the maxim of ignorance, and ignores biological inputs to fit the closure thesis, it misses the main point of the problem. Moreover, the physicalist dogma that 'one day we will be able to determine the actual behavior of living organisms by exclusively physical methods when all the physical details of the most complex organisms of the universe will be clarified' merely postpones the aim to solve the scientific questions of biology by plausible and simple scientific methods to an indeterminately distant future.
Dr. Grandpierre will likely be proven wrong in his own lifetime.
When you consider that the human organism is made up of roughly 6*1013 cells, and in each cell more than 105 chemical reactions occur per second, which generally involve localized, "neighbor relations"; and yet the living system is able to organize and integrate all of its astronomically large number of parts distributed throughout its physical extent into one single, dynamic, self-organizing, sensitively-responsive global whole -- well, you've got to figure an enormous amount of information is required
On the other hand, the amount of knowledge is increasing exponentially. Computer power is increasing exponentially. It took us less than 100 years from the time we figured out where the genome was, to a complete description of it. As I've said, I doubt it will take us even 20 more years to figure out a single cell.
Scarier still, though, the gaps left for guys like Grandpierre to bloviate about are getting smaller and smaller. We reductionists will inherit the earth, and the last will and testament has already been written.
(Insert obligatory evil laugh here)
Truly, I am amazed - especially here and now, in the information age - that so many still don't accept that "all that there is" extends beyond the physical. Many believe with all sincerity that there is nothing beyond that which is corporeal.
To illustrate, I’d like to borrow a phrase from RightWhale‘s post 1967 where he says:
On the Plato thread we labored diligently to come up with a definition of life v. non-life v death as the first step in trying to investigate the theory of abiogenesis.
My personal favorite was Shannon information: a thing (in nature) which is successfully communicating is alive, when it ceases to communicate, it is dead. If it never communicated, it is non-life. That particular definition is not prejudiced against dormant life cycles, viruses, prions and such. Jeepers, it is not even prejudiced against non-carbon based life (should any be discovered), etc.
We also discussed the Irvin Bauer and Javor definitions – both of which contain important observations of biological life.
Perhaps someday we shall have an elegant, ideologically neutral, widely accepted, definition of life v non-life v death. And if we do, the definition itself will prescribe whether life is to be known by biochemical criteria or information theory or both (or perhaps something else).