don't know much of biology

[Paul Mackin]

On Fri, 2003-06-06 at 03:03, Heikki Raudaskoski wrote:
> 
> probably not much of anything. Anyway, a local biologist
> friend of mine whom I consider hep to both biology and
> literature forwarded me the below essay this morning.
> 
> Now this writer does seem to me - clutching to the dichotomy
> "bad entropy-good antientropy" which he sees ironclad - one
> clumsy and simplifying reader of TRP. Anyway, TRP's novels
> have apparently acted as a fruitful catalyst for him:
> 

In life one takes inspiration from wherever one can get it.

But yes there does seem to be here some misrepresentation of the
Counterforce, which is usually interpreted as an effort to break away
from the "them" system, the system of paranoia, rather than having as
its goal to overcome the tendency toward maximum entropy.

Of course, entropy when used figuratively to apply to human scale events
such as death and decay does resonate with the "them" system. Would be a
nice thing to overcome.

Wonder what Dugdale would say.

P.





--------------------------------
> Current Biology, Vol 9 No 14 (1999), pp. R500-R501
> 
> The counterforce
> Gerald F. Joyce
> 
> In his novel V., Thomas Pynchon paints a picture of the twentieth century
> dominated by physics, and of human behavior swept along by the inescapable
> tide of physical laws [1]. What chance does an individual have in seeking
> order in his or her own world when the universe as a whole is streaming
> inevitably towards a state of maximum entropy? It is a distressing
> picture, made more chilling by Pynchon's observation that rather than
> resist the universal tendency toward disorder, humans have become highly
> adept at promoting it.
> 
> Pynchon again takes up the theme of the inexorable tendency toward maximum
> entropy in his later novel Gravity's Rainbow [2], this time drawing on the
> metaphor of the German V2 rockets raining down upon London towards the end
> of World War II. Despite the best efforts of British military intelligence
> to predict where the rockets will land, it seems that they are following a
> perfect Poissonal distribution. Once the rocket's engine cuts out over the
> North Sea, it is only gravity's rainbow that determines where it will
> fall. Destruction is not only inevitable, it is random and dispassionate.
> 
> And yet, as Pynchon continues in the last section of Gravity's Rainbow ,
> there is a "counterforce", an organizing principle that runs counter to
> the tendency towards maximum entropy, at least in some instances. His
> metaphor for the organizing force is the period immediately after the fall
> of Nazi Germany, when competing interests - national, commercial, and
> individual - scurried about to carve order out of the rubble. Pynchon
> ascribes almost mythical character to the counterforce, which he also
> refers to as the "green uprising" or the "Titans of the Earth." He
> suggests that there is a general principle, as fundamental as the second
> law of thermodynamics, but running in the opposite direction, that allows
> daisies to grow out of the ashes.
> 
> As a student of molecular genetics at the University of Chicago in the
> mid-1970s, I read Pynchon and ruminated on the doomsday message of V.
> Walking past Henry Moore's sculpture Atomic Energy, which marks the spot
> of the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, it was impossible not
> to appreciate how physics reveals the pathway toward randomness and
> destruction. But what about the counterforce? Can we achieve a scientific
> understanding of the organizing principle that, at least temporarily,
> stands in the face of physical law?
> 
> The green uprising is abundantly manifest on Earth in the origin and
> diversification of life. Erwin Schrödinger, in his 1944 monograph What is
> Life? [3], argued that order within living systems arises at the expense
> of the conversion of high-energy starting materials to low-energy
> products. Ilya Prigogine refined this concept, pointing out that living
> systems are open systems not at equilibrium. The second law of
> thermodynamics applies when one considers both the living system and its
> environment, with order increasing within the system at the expense of
> decay in the environment.
> 
> For biologists, the counterforce is Darwinian evolution based on natural
> selection. Driven by the metabolic flux of foodstuffs to waste products,
> living systems accumulate order in the form of genetic information. In the
> early 1950s, three scientific advances set the stage for harnessing the
> biological counterforce, just as advances in physics at the beginning of
> the century set the stage for harnessing the power of the atom.
> 
> First was the discovery by Watson and Crick of the structure of the DNA
> double helix, revealing the chemical basis for molecular information
> storage. Second was the experiment of Miller and Urey demonstrating that
> the chemical building blocks of life, such as amino acids, can be
> synthesized from simple starting materials in a simulated prebiotic
> environment. Third was the work of John von Neuman describing a universal
> self-reproducing automaton, a machine analogue of a living system.
> 
> Inspired by Pynchon's writings, I decided that I wanted to be a
> `counterforce engineer', and I carried this aim through graduate school
> and postdoc training. From a molecular biologist's point of view my task
> was clear: starting from simple chemical building blocks, construct a
> self-reproducing system that, like DNA-based life on Earth, would be
> capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.
> 
> Needless to say, this task has not been met. But, as Sol Spiegelman showed
> in the late 1960s [4], it is possible to cause nucleic acid molecules to
> evolve in the test tube. With the discovery of catalytic RNA, and advances
> in nucleic acid amplification techniques such as the polymerase chain
> reaction, it became possible to construct laboratory systems that allow
> the Darwinian evolution of functional RNA (and later DNA) molecules. This
> is not evolution based on natural selection, but rather directed evolution
> based on selection constraints imposed by the experimenter. We've been
> playing these in vitro evolution games in my own laboratory for the past
> 10 years.
> 
> The counterforce, it turns out, is not much to look at - typically, 20
> microliters of a clear, colorless solution. But in those solutions the
> Titans are rumbling. We can begin in the lab on a Monday with a population
> of 10 14 random-sequence nucleic acid molecules and by Friday witness the
> emergence of order in the form of macromolecules of a particular sequence
> that perform a specific catalytic task. Over the week, the evolving system
> has expended more than 10 17 energy-rich nucleoside triphosphates, but has
> created an island of order in a universe that is forever tumbling toward a
> state of maximum entropy.
> 
> References
> 1. Pynchon T: V. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott; 1963.
> 2. Pynchon T: Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Viking Press; 1973.
> 3. Schrödinger E: What is Life? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
> 1944.
> 4. Mills DR, Peterson RL, Spiegelman S: An extracellular Darwinian
> experiment with a self-duplicating nucleic acid molecule. Proc Natl Acad
> Sci USA 1967, 58:217-224.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> In connection with the essay it reads:
> 
> "The editors of Current Biology have invited a number of biologists
> to reveal the work that has influenced them most profoundly in their
> careers. These brief essays are published in the Turning Points series."
> 
> 
> Heikki
>