The best explanation in the world
Each year, John Brockman's website, The Edge, asks a question and gets many answers to it. This year, the question is: What is your favourite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? Some of the answers are fascinating. Here's mine:
It's hard now to recall just how mysterious life was on the morning of 28 February 1953 and just how much that had changed by lunchtime. Look back at all the answers to the question "what is life?" from before that and you get a taste of just how we, as a species, floundered. Life consisted of three-dimensional objects of specificity and complexity (mainly proteins). And it copied itself with accuracy. How? How do you set about making a copy of a three-dimensional object? How to do you grow it and develop it in a predictable way? This is the one scientific question where absolutely nobody came close to guessing the answer. Erwin Schrodinger had a stab, but fell back on quantum mechanics, which was irrelevant. True, he used the phrase "aperiodic crystal" and if you are generous you can see that as a prediction of a linear code, but I think that's stretching generosity.
Indeed, the problem had just got even more baffling thanks to the realization that DNA played a crucial role—and DNA was monotonously simple. All the explanations of life before 28 Feb 1953 are hand-waving waffle and might as well speak of protoplasm and vital sparks for all the insights they gave.
Then came the double helix and the immediate understanding that, as Crick wrote to his son a few weeks later, "some sort of code"—digital, linear two-dimensional, combinatorially infinite and instantly self-replicating—was all the explanation you needed. Never has a mystery seemed more baffling in the morning and an explanation more obvious in the afternoon.
Here's part of Francis Crick's letter, 17 March 1953:
"My dear Michael,
Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery...Now we believe that the DNA is a code. That is, the order of the bases (the letters) makes one gene different from another gene (just as one page pf print is different from another). You can see how Nature makes copies of the genes. Because if the two chains unwind into two separate chains, and if each chain makes another chain come together on it, then because A always goes with T, and G with C, we shall get two copies where we had one before. In other words, we think we have found the basic copying mechanism by which life comes from life...You can understand we are excited."
Comments (8)
Some fascinating answers indeed. It is only 9:49 in the morning, I haven’t even started working and my brain has already gone into overdrive...:o)
Absolutely. Thanks!
This made me think about a Sheldrake article I recently read. Although I don't agree with a number of things he say I found it to be interesting.
Sheldrake says in part: "In 1963, when I was studying biochemistry at Cambridge I was invited to a series of private meetings with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Brenner's rooms in King's College, along with a few of my classmates. They had just cracked the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists. They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness. They had not been solved because the people who worked on them were not molecular biologists—nor very bright. Crick and Brenner were going to find the answers within 10 years, or maybe 20. Brenner would take development, and Crick consciousness. They invited us to join them.
Both tried their best. Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on the development of the nematode worm Caenorhabdytis. Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but "to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism."
He failed. So did Brenner. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone."
Full article: http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/articles/RS_2009.html
Inspiring writing from Francis Crick. We should all wish to be so clear.
Inspiring writing from Francis Crick. We should all wish to be so clear.
What is your favourite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?
Not as important or world-shattering as yours but to an eight year old the "stopping-clock" effect really shook my thinking!
It was quiet, late and I was engrossed in a book when, without any discernible reason, I suddenly heard the loud ticking of a clock for a few seconds that then stopped.
The call to attention of this minor event was intense and got me thinking why this should be.
I came up with three explanations. The running down of the spring changed the sound of the ticking and brought it to my attention. I was psychic and foretold the running-down of the clock or my brain replayed the last few ticks of the clock after it had stopped to make me aware of the change!
I quickly discarded option two and finally settled on option three as the most likely explanation.
Twice more this scenario was repeated in future years and half a century later I still hold on to my first hypothesis that awareness of change may be due to the brain replaying the recent past.
The code may be infinite in combination but does this realisation really contribute to our understanding of specific behaviour?
Interesting as usual {and the comments too}
Sometimes framing the question in a particular way is conducive to the answer being interesting, elegant, convincing - or whatever.
I like Mike Hulme's question 'Why we disagree about climate change" - it's one that naturally produces instructive answers. As if the question is actually the answer obscured, and getting the question right facilitates the production of noteworthy answers.
I would shorten Hulme's answer to "Because we are dichotomous creatures!", Or "We have a digital (binary) mentality facing an analogue world", Or "We are yes/no, for/against, good/bad, true/false, us-and-them beings"
This also reminds me of an Eastern idea - 'Disputation is proof of a lack of understanding'
How many of us with a deep interest in the current climate debate can discuss without being and feeling tribal?
I think I recall that in Watson and Crick's original xray crystalography paper they had a "throwaway" line in the conclusion to the effect that "It has not escaped our notice that the DNA structure we have found could form the basis of a code for genetic inheritance".