Addy Pross
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Addy Pross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So let me just quote a very respectable biologist from Oxford, Dennis Noble, who said, the general view is that The genome controls the cell. He says it's actually the other way around. The cell controls the genome, okay? That is quite a, you know, that's changing the way one should look at a living system. Now, let me give you an example which is very striking.
The CRISPR system, what's her name again? Jennifer Doudna got the Nobel Prize for discovering how to edit DNA. Wonderful invention. Except bacteria discovered that billions of years ago. So it was a copy and paste process there. As I was saying earlier, nature is very clever. But let me just say something here, which is quite extraordinary. A bacterium, a very simple biological system,
When it is attacked by a virus and the viral attack fails, it takes a little bit of that viral DNA and puts it into its own genome. In other words, it changes its genome. That's not an accidental mutation. That's a deliberate change in its genome.
to incorporate some of the viral DNA as part of its immune system because once that DNA has a bit of viral elements in it, next time that virus comes around, it recognizes it and then it can protect itself by cutting the viral DNA in two and then it's harmless.
The very opposite of what biology has been telling us for almost 100 years, well, since DNA, that DNA mutation is random and natural selection is how evolution comes about. Not true.
Already the beginnings of that understanding were uncovered by Barbara McClintock in the 1940s, and people just thought she was talking nonsense when she noticed jumping genes, that genetic material was changing position in corn.
With a microscope, she saw this, and she was just ridiculed until people saw some decades later that this was true, and she got, in 1980, what, three or something, a Nobel Prize for that work. Another biologist who makes this point very clearly is Jim Shapiro in Chicago, who says DNA is thought of as a read-only thing. He says it's a read-write system.
In other words, this is starting to come around to what I was saying, what Dennis Noble is saying, and biologists still have to take this in, that the cell
basically controls the genome just as much the genome is an important location for memory for information for the cell but it's clear that it's not the be all and end all because it's an extraordinary thing that when that one fertilized egg became trillions of cells a human body
There are kidney cells and liver cells and brain cells and skin cells, and they're all different, but they all have the same genome. So basically, the cell uses the bits of genome that are relevant for the cell at any particular moment. So it's, as I say, it's not the genome. running the roost, it's the cell itself and that brings me back. So where did this all start?
So now you see the beginning of the evolutionary process in a system that is the dynamic kinetically stable system has already a sense of self and an awareness of an outside. Now, this may be a little bit hard to comprehend initially, but I think the point is important. And again,
The fact that a daycare system is totally dependent, existentially dependent on its environment for resources and energy, that means it is aware in a very rudimentary sense of its environment because without that, it dies. And that external environment appreciation or awareness means there's the beginning of self-awareness. So it distinguishes between itself and the environment.
Now that might sound, now a chemical system, that sounds a bit hard to swallow. But when you think of a leaf, this is how I think about it, a leaf blowing in the wind, it's hard to see the principles of flight in what happens with that leaf fluttering in the wind. But they're all there. So once you have a very simple decay system with the beginning of self,
and the beginning of external awareness, if you now have an evolutionary process that enhances that for persistence, then the result will be an increasingly complex system that is increasingly self-aware and externally aware. So the bacterial cell... doesn't know too much about the planet. It only knows what's in its immediate vicinity.
As we humans became more and more aware, well, animals like to know their environment, maybe a few kilometers or whatever. And we're looking, you know, far into space, into the solar system and beyond because of our increasing capability increasing self-awareness and increasing external awareness that's evolved over time.
Yes, I agree with that. I think it was the physicist Max Delbruck who said that every cell contains within it its history going back millions of years because that's been a continual adaptation to its environment.
Absolutely. I think just as the second law of thermodynamics is directed, very explicitly directed, and though we don't say it's purposeful, we just say there's a law of nature that directs it in the direction that it goes. change in the dynamic kinetic world is also directed, but because the topology of thermodynamic space is convergent, then the law of nature that describes that is very clear.
The problem is in dynamic kinetic space, the space is divergent because when you're at a particular point, there isn't one pathway forward to increasing persistence. It's all contingent. So it's a divergent space. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a directive pushing it forward. It doesn't go backwards. Life never evolves in a reverse direction.
It's moving forward towards increasing complexity for increasing persistence. So in that sense, the evolutionary direction – there is an evolutionary direction and – and the direction is towards, it's Steve Grant's principle, towards increasingly persistent forms.
You can get to persistent forms in two ways, the thermodynamic way, Boltzmann's way, and you can do it the life, the kinetic way, but change has to have a directive, and it has a directive in the biological world as well.
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