For example, a democracy descending into an autocracy is foreseeable, and failure to see it coming is no excuse (your democracy will be taken away from you because of your failure to foresee):
"Nearly a year and a half later, surprisingly few understand what January 6 was all about.
Fewer still understand why former President Donald Trump and Republicans persist in their long-disproven claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Much less why they are obsessed about making the 2024 race a referendum on the 'stolen' election of 2020, which even they know was not stolen.
January 6 was never about a stolen election or even about actual voting fraud. It was always and only about an election that Trump lost fair and square, under legislatively promulgated election rules in a handful of swing states that he and other Republicans contend were unlawfully changed by state election officials and state courts to expand the right and opportunity to vote, largely in response to the Covid pandemic.
The Republicans' mystifying claim to this day that Trump did, or would have, received more votes than Joe Biden in 2020 were it not for actual voting fraud, is but the shiny object that Republicans have tauntingly and disingenuously dangled before the American public for almost a year and a half now to distract attention from their far more ambitious objective.
That objective is not somehow to rescind the 2020 election, as they would have us believe. That's constitutionally impossible. Trump's and the Republicans' far more ambitious objective is to execute successfully in 2024 the very same plan they failed in executing in 2020 and to overturn the 2024 election if Trump or his anointed successor loses again in the next quadrennial contest.
The last presidential election was a dry run for the next."
"The cornerstone of the plan was to have the Supreme Court embrace the little known "independent state legislature" doctrine, which, in turn, would pave the way for exploitation of the
Electoral College process and the Electoral Count Act, and finally for Vice President Mike Pence to reject enough swing state electoral votes
to overturn the election using Pence's ceremonial power under the 12th Amendment and award the presidency to Donald Trump.
The independent state legislature doctrine says that, under the Elections and the Electors Clauses
of the Constitution, state legislatures possess plenary and exclusive power over the conduct of federal presidential elections and the
selection of state presidential electors. Not even a state supreme court, let alone other state elections officials, can alter the legislatively written election rules or interfere with the appointment of state electors by the legislatures, under this theory.
The Supreme Court has never decided whether to embrace the independent state legislature doctrine. But then-Chief Justice
William Rehnquist, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in separate concurring opinions said they would embrace that doctrine in Bush v. Gore, 20 years earlier, and Republicans had every reason to believe there were at least five votes on the Supreme Court for the doctrine in November 2020, with Amy Coney Barrett having just been confirmed in the eleventh hour before the election."
We are here at the same place all civilizations before us were:
"Toynbee wrote volumes about two dozen or so civilizations that we only
think about when we are in a history class or a library, however, unlike
us he didn't just skim the surface, no, he followed ugly all the way to the bone:
"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but
always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the
former, as this chapter has shown."
(A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee). What? Suicide? Murder? ... He was no ordinary historian was he?
That is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, as a world famous encyclopedia points out:
"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations
in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose
by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of
creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority.
(Encyclopedia Britannica,
emphasis added). Previous posts in this series have zeroed in on the
question of what 'tyranny' and 'despotic minority' meant to him."
In a previous post I mentioned that in a future post we would take a look at the arrangement of atoms in base pairs (Quantum Biology - 8).
That was because the arrangement of atoms was said to be very important ("To create an accurate 3D model of a protein, we need to know the arrangement in space of all of the atoms in all of the amino acids that make up that protein" - ibid, quoting Structural Biology).
So, I have placed the basic A,C,T,G,U components that make up base pairs in graphic depiction so we can think about the atoms and the molecules.
The graphic at Fig. 1 shows the "A-T base pair" in DNA, the graphic at Fig. 2 shows the "A-U base pair" in RNA, and the graphic at Fig. 3 shows the "C-G base pair" in both DNA and RNA.
Thus, when we discuss "their arrangement in space" we are covering a very important subject in terms of how they do what they do.
That is not easily within our grasp because we have to do the goo goo doll thingy.
The problem with this carbon-based picture is that carbon is a "late-bloomer" (compared to the other dolls):
"The Big Bang was not an explosion in space, as the theory's name might suggest. Instead, it was [natural doll and selection doll quivering, causing] the appearance of space [space doll] everywhere in the universe [universe doll], researchers have said. According to the Big Bang theory, the universe was born [dolls R born] as a very hot, very dense, single point in space [space doll and universe doll are hot, dense, and single].
Cosmologists are unsure what happened before this moment" (Space).
So, the hot doll, a.k.a. universe doll, banged but did not explode, but the doll scientists do not know why it didn't choose to explode (gay dolls?).
Then the universe doll and space doll looked around at the environment [environment doll] and decided that the best thing to do was to change and become a gas or two while having an expansive feeding frenzy:
"When the universe [doll] was very young — something like a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second (whew!) [the time doll was not conjured until shortly after that] — it underwent an incredible growth spurt. During this burst of expansion, which is known as inflation [inflation doll], the universe [doll] grew exponentially and doubled in size at least 90 times [what about space doll and environment doll?]."
Fig. 4 First Doll Uterus
"The universe [doll] was expanding, and as it expanded, it got cooler and less dense [enlightenment]," David Spergel, a theoretical [doll] astrophysicist at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., told SPACE.com. After inflation, the universe [doll] continued to grow, but at a slower rate [diet doll]."
"As space [doll] expanded, the universe [doll] cooled and matter formed [matter doll]."
"Light chemical elements were created [light chemical dolls] within the first three minutes of the universe [doll's] formation. As the universe [doll] expanded, temperatures cooled and protons and neutrons collided [proton and neutron dolls] to make deuterium [deuterium doll], which is an isotope of hydrogen [of course dummy]. Much of this deuterium [deuterum doll] combined to make helium [helium and shelium dolls]."
"For the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang [bang doll], however, the intense heat [heat doll] from the universe's creation [heat doll was hot] made it essentially too hot for light to shine [it's dark inside hot dolls]. Atoms [atom dolls] crashed together with enough force [force doll] to break up into a dense, opaque plasma of protons, neutrons and electrons that scattered light like fog [fog doll]."(Space)
"Every carbon atom in the universe was created by stars [star dolls]" (ScienceDaily, emphasis added).
"So, what does that have to do with nucleotides, Dredd" you may be wondering, so, get ready for another dollar story (Big Bang nucleosynthesis).
Now "Small Things [but not too small moleculesatoms] Considered" scientists can play Firesign Theatre with their dolls.
III. Closing Comments
According to the doll narrative, all this doll banging and swirling eventually ended up as the carbon in the ATCGU stuff that nucleotide dolls are now made of (The Doll As Metaphor - 5).
Some readers have wondered, I suppose, about this doll business put forth in this series.
Ok, fair enough, so let me explain that basically it is the analysis of the notions of attributing intelligence to abiotic and/or inanimate objects on the part of microbiologists and virologists.
Scientists have spent considerable time on studying it, but have you watched your children, or children in general, indicating that their doll is saying something to another doll, which evolves into conversation and all manner of imagination?
Well, the point I was making is that some scientists do that with animals and microbes in the sense of those 'dolls' contemplating their surroundings and then making decisions to change their composition as a result of various environmental events.
My addressing of the issue is not imaginative:
"Examples of Intelligence
Atoms
When ice cubes are heated up, they melt, lose their cube form and don’t regain it after lowering the temperature below 0ºC. The transition from order to disorder is irreversible. The water molecules do not retain a memory of the state of order from their previous organization. Although this is true, it is not an absolute truth. Before a gas is cooled down to absolute zero -0K- and thus becomes a Bose-Einstein Condensate, first an intermediate state, called the prethermalized state, occurs. For a remarkably long time, the atoms keep some ‘memory’ of their previous quantum mechanical origin.
In 2012, Jörg Schmiedmayer of the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VSQT) described the background of that memory: “If we split the atom cloud into two parts and recombine them after some time, a wave pattern forms. That is proof that the atom clouds still contain information about having emerged from a highly ordered quantum physical state.” The so-called correlation length of the period of ‘memory’ does depend on the density of the gas cloud but not on its temperature. This dependence is supposed to indicate that the prethermalized state is a fundamental property of quantum physics.
Molecules
Researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University (LMU) connected one end of a synthetic polymer gently to an atomic force microscope (AFM),
and the other end to a gold surface. When the salinity of the medium was increased, the molecule gradually folded together. After the salt
content of the medium had been lowered, the molecule unfolded again. These, what are called ‘intelligent molecules,’ are designed to function
as nano switches, nano sensors, and chromatography procedures or to recognize diseased cells, while leaving healthy cells untouched.
Edwin Oviedo, from Carabobo University in Venezuela, designed a particular procedure to synthesize an appropriate new catalyst and assumed the resulting procedure to be specific to the source (a chosen commercial catalyst). After the outcome had been observed, the same experiment was repeated with two additional samples. To the surprise of the whole team, the results were not identical but had doubled. Each step was scrutinized to assure that the same chemicals had been used, and all steps of the concerned procedure had the same condition. What had happened? No explanation seemed to fit. Some mysterious traveler is
hiding in the background.
Viruses
Viruses can choose their victims and if necessary wait a long time inside the body of their choice before they strike. They can infect a victim as a prophage, and integrate into the chromosome of their victim until the most appropriate moment to come out of the box and replicate. They are predators, biological killing machines and unfit to cooperate. Not entirely true! They are killing machines, but also capable of co-operating, although they lack feelings of empathy. Helen Leggets work at the University of Exeter showed that they only cooperate if it serves their interest to kill as many cells as possible. When a virus works with related viruses, it kills slower, because by doing so it can replicate more. Conversely, when a virus cooperates with unrelated viruses, it kills faster to dominate the other viruses. Who can deny that this practice is smart and efficient? Only one little problem is worth mentioning here: neither viruses, nor organelles, nor cells, have brains and neurons.
Plants
In the late 1980’s, a severe drought occurred in South Africa. People, plants and animals suffered. The Greater Kudus, big South African antelopes that are herbivores, sought their hope in the still green Acacias. Then, thousands of Kudus started to die. The mortality rate appeared to be related to the number of Kudus on a farm. On small farms, there were even no deaths at all. Post-mortem investigation of the Kudus showed that the rate of fermentation in the stomachs of the animals on the big farms was much lower than the ones on the small farms. Not only that, all dead kudus had unusually high doses of tannin in their stomach. Big animals can easily absorb the small amounts of tannin that plants produce to kill parasites and insects. The extremely high amounts of tannin in the Kudus stopped the fermentation in their stomachs and they died of starvation.
Then the acacia trees were investigated. On the big ranches, the level of tannin in the trees was four times larger than on the small
farms. It was obvious; something caused the acacias to overproduce tannin. The air around the branches was researched and appeared to
contain Ethylene, CH2=CH2, a very light and odorless gas. When it gets to the branches of acacia trees, it causes the mitochondria in their
cells to produce enzymes that catalyze the production of more tannin. This was a chemical chain reaction of the trees, to prevent a certain
death of their identity in already difficult circumstances. How could the trees think of this practical solution and implement it?
Plants may have intelligence, but are they also able to learn? To find out about this, a team from the University of Florence designed a test in which mimosa pudica plants (touch-me-nots) were dropped 15 cm. Definitely a significant shock, but not life threatening. The plants were variously grown in low light (LL) and high light (HL) environments. The team expected the LL plants to learn more quickly. The first test clearly showed the fright of the plants; they closed their leaves. Eight hours later the test was repeated, with the same result. Then a large group was trained by dropping them 60 times with an interval of some seconds, and this was repeated seven times a day. Gradually the plants stopped closing their leaves. However, when a different shock was
performed, the plants closed their leaves again. Remarkably, the plants remembered their training. Six days later the plants that were subjected
to the lengthy testing did not close their leaves at all. When both HL and LL groups were tested again after 28 days, both groups were shown to
have learned that the drop was harmless and even opened their leaves wider than before.
How do plants transmit their intelligence, learn and remember, since they don’t have brains and a neural system? According to Dr. Gagliano: “Calcium based cellular signaling is one possible explanation, as is the processing of information by cells via ion flows – plants have well-established pathways to transmit information via electrical signals.”
Amoebae
Cooperation is a widely spread phenomenon in the course of evolution. However, it is mixed with various forms of the opposite strategy: cheating. Cheaters do not cooperate with the overall group but still gain the advantages of the cooperation within their group. Nevertheless, they may co-operate with other cheaters or in some instances they may cheat, while in others they do not. To go with the flow may be a sign of intelligence, but the conscious choice to sometimes cheat and sometimes cooperate hints at intelligence, as well as a feeling of identity.
Insects
According to Linnaeus, Insecta had no brains. Now we know by research, that both human beings and insects have brains and are smart, but does this also mean that intelligence depends on the quantity of neurons? The content of whale brains is about 30 dm3, of human beings about three dm3, and of honeybees 1mm3. We can memorize places and have a sense of time. We can learn, collect and interpret information and cooperate for targeted action, but honeybees can also do this. Our brains are one million times bigger than the brains of a honeybee. Are we one million times smarter? It could very well be that the intelligence of insects per mm3 will outsmart our brains. More efficient or not, the presence of their intellect and intelligence is not a point of discussion."
(Evolving Intelligence: From atoms to higher organisms). Some may consider this to be outside of the range of "the believable" in western thought, but if we look carefully we can see that it is part and parcel of modern western science too.
But the scientists who disagree with those hypotheses do not always disagree with them because they deny the evolution from atoms to cognition, they just point out that either way it is of no lasting import:
"I'LL BEGIN with an interesting debate that took place some years ago between Carl Sagan, the well-known astrophysicist, and Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of American biology. They were debating the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And Sagan, speaking from the point of view of an astrophysicist, pointed out that there are innumerable planets just like ours. There is no reason they shouldn't have developed intelligent life. Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it's very unlikely that we'll find any. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let's take a look at Earth. And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation ... you're just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won't find it here for very long either because it's just a lethal mutation ... With the environmental crisis, we're now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we'll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us."
Today's post is about the "goo" used in commercial biology to cover up "where the rubber meets the road" (atoms of molecules).
"In molecular biology, RNA polymerase (abbreviated RNAP or RNApol), or more specifically DNA-directed/dependent RNA polymerase (DdRP), is an enzyme that synthesizes RNA from a DNA template."
(RNA polymerase, emphasis added). The "-ase" family of goo is plastered over the "enzyme" layer of goo in order to make sure the cracks don't show so much:
"The suffix "-ase" is used to signify an enzyme. In enzyme naming, an enzyme is denoted by adding -ase to the end of the name of the substrate on which the enzyme acts. It is also used to identify a particular class of enzymes that catalyze a specific type of reaction."
"Helicases are a class of enzymes thought to be vital to all organisms. Their main function is to unpack an organism's genetic material. Helicases are motor proteins that move directionally along a nucleic acid phosphodiester backbone, separating two hybridized nucleic acid strands (hence helic- + -ase), using energy from ATP hydrolysis. There are many helicases, representing the great variety of processes in which strand separation must be catalyzed. Approximately 1% of eukaryotic genes code for helicases.
The
human genome codes for 95 non-redundant helicases: 64 RNA helicases and 31 DNA helicases. Many cellular processes, such as DNA replication,
transcription, translation, recombination, DNA repair, and ribosome biogenesis involve the separation of nucleic acid strands that necessitates the use of helicases. Some specialized helicases are also involved in sensing of viral nucleic acids during infection and fulfill a immunological function."(Helicase). "As of 2020, the smallest atomically precise molecular machine has a rotor that consists of four atoms." (Synthetic molecular motor) ... "which consists of a single acetylene (C2H2) rotor anchored to a chiral atomic cluster provided by a PdGa(111) surface that acts as a stator." (Molecular motor crossing the frontier of classical to quantum tunneling motion).
Practically, then, all "biochemical reactions" clearly are indicated to be mechanical, even though the goo words used in biology cover that up:
"Practically all of the numerous and complex biochemical reactions that take place in animals, plants, and microorganisms are regulated by enzymes [molecular machinery]. These catalytic proteins are efficient and specific—that is, they accelerate the rate of one kind of chemical reaction of one type of compound, and they do so in a far more efficient manner than human-made catalysts."
(Enzymes). It's just that they plaster the "-ase" family of words over the enzyme family of words, etc., instead of cutting to the chase, which is:
"To tell this story, we’re focusing on proteins. These large molecules facilitate just about every chemical process in our bodies: They “read” the genetic code, they catalyze reactions, they act as the gatekeepers to our cells. Proteins are made up of chains of small molecules called amino acids. Knowing how these chains fold up to create a three-dimensional structure is crucial, because it’s the 3D shape of proteins that determines how they work.
To create an accurate 3D model of a protein, we need to know the arrangement in space of all of the atoms in all of the amino acids that make up that protein. We can’t see atoms because they’re smaller than the wavelength of visible light. To detect them, we need a different kind of wave — a wave with a shorter wavelength and one that can penetrate surfaces to show us not just the atoms on the outside but also the atoms within the protein."
If you will notice, the B. bacteriovorus looks like the human chromosome tables in the previous post linked to above.
The vastly different biology of humans compared to B. bacteriovorus, is not obvious, which supports the quote above ("we need to know the arrangement in space of all of the atoms") to really grasp what is happening where the rubber meets the road.
All the goo talk does not clue us in on as much as the arrangement of the atoms in the molecules of the genes does.
"A chemical reaction rearranges the constituent atoms of the reactants to create different substances as products."
(Chemical reaction, emphasis added). The molecular machines at work never comes to mind accurately when the goo words are bantered about but molecular dynamics are left out.
The graphics at Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 in action show us what is going on without mentioning the goo words.
In the next post of this series I will provide the graphics of "thearrangement in space of all of the atoms" now that the molecular formulas have been posted.
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
