EVOLUTION: QUANTUM OR ANALOGUE PROCESSING?

We now know a little about molecular processing, but molecules are made up of particular combinations and precise arrangements of atoms. They are processors, logical processors.

But is the real processing power beneath the skin of those machines? If so, is it quantum or analogue processing? It certainly is not digital. Analogue might seem the most likely on the face of it, and perhaps on the face of it it is.

But beneath the beneath, what if it is quantum? That would certainly explain how there is the staggering amount of computing power needed to get from atoms to simple molecules to massively complex proteins and finally to us. And how there is such staggering processing power in the brain. Are billions of neurons, or quintillions of molecules really enough to accomplish what we do every second? Or what a miniscule flying insect does?

That seems unlikely. It also seems unlikely that all those sub-atomic particles are just there to make up larger entities, or even only to provide electrons and ions for subsidiary functions.

So perhaps the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was on the right track, and the earth is a computer--or more accurately the whole universe. As the poet said, 'The stars, which are the very brain of heaven'; and George MacDonald in At the Back of the North Wind used the phrase 'thinking stars.' Perhaps they were right, and the universe is highly active in a very different way to what traditional physicists imagine.

The universe: Heaven's creation-machine.

SORRY, DARWIN

It is logical selection, not natural. From atom to molecule to organ to organism it is logical selection.

The fundamental dictum in logic applies: If, if and only if the premise is true and the reasoning is true will the conclusion be true.

If the premise and reasoning are true, a true premise will be selected, which then becomes a premise for further logical processing ('reasoning').

It is not blind chance. It is sighted. It has been given the sight of logic, the intelligence of the aeons.

WATER FOR FUNCTION NOT LUBRICATION

To suggest that the dance of water round protein molecules that has been observed is for lubrication, as reported in an earlier post, must at best be a very limited description of why water is needed for life.

A lubricant is just a passive element in mechanical function. Water is obviously far more than that. It is part of the function. Without its presence the protein machinery could not work. It is as vital, in every sense of the word, as the chemical structure of a protein and its folding. The many different forms--physical, ionic, chemical, temporal, vibrational, etc--that the water molecule can take in different circumstances and proximities must also be bound up with the proper functioning of invidual molecules and their inter-functioning.

Water is part of the processing of bio-machinery, it is part of its logic, it is part of its logical power, it is part of its input and output. Without it nothing vital could work.

That dance shows it to be active, not passive.

Water is not only active for each molecule, it is active for the working together of all the molecules. A lubricant eases the working together of different parts; water enables them to work together.

INTELLIGENT EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOUR

Now that it has been established that behaviour switches genes on and off (see earlier posting), it must therefore be true that any behaviour that assists an organism's flourishing survival will establish genetic patterns that will persist through the generations.

Success breeds success.

So the bird that is best at building a nests stay put in a storm-tossed tree, or is best at choosing a site for them that will be most sheltered from storms, will have more chicks, and that genetic knowledge will be passed on.

Switches that are habitually switched on are likely to be on rather than off in future generations. Behavioural/genetic experiments and the processing of the ages fine-tunes genes and achieves ever better coding.

WE ARE THE SUMMATION OF TIME

Organisms exhibit the accumulated molecular processing of the ages.

As the poet Tennyson put it in Ulysses:

'I am a part of all that I have met,
Yet all experience is an arch where through
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.'