|
![](/i/fill.gif) |
On 07/01/2011 04:51 PM, scott wrote:
> For someone with no chemistry or biology education past basic
> school-level, that was really interesting, thanks. It answered some of
> the questions I had, and made me hungry to find out more...
The mark of a well-written piece. ;-)
Yes, I too have little chemistry knowledge, beyond what I could get from
The Osborne Introduction to Chemistry. In particular, the idea of
catalysis seems bizarre and inexplicable.
If you read a typical encyclopaedia entry, at best you'll discover that
DNA makes proteins, and proteins do chemical reactions, and that's how
cells work. It might even mention that there's an RNA step in between,
tell you which organelles do all this work, and perhaps even show you
the table of amino acids and which codons code for them.
The reality of the situation, as I wrote, is far, far more complex (and
interesting).
If a human being had designed the cellular machinery, they would
redoubtably have designed it as a set of independent little compartments
that all do their own thing in an orthogonal way, signalling to each
other as appropriate. But when you read about how /actual/ living cells
work, you find a tangled mess of haphazard interactions and fortuitous
reuses of molecules and structures for multiple simultaneous purposes -
/exactly/ as evolution would predict. It's really a very striking
demonstration, to me.
If you read a brick-thick tome like The Molecular Biology of the Gene,
it talks about Daltons and thermodynamic equilibria and van der Waals
forces and so forth as if you have any idea what the hell it's talking
about. Only Behe describes proteins as "the motors, gears, pulleys and
scaffolding of the cell". This explains what it's all about far more
vividly than any discussion of activation energy levels.
Still, not being an expert chemist, I find myself lacking an intuition
for how individual molecules of a substance behave. You can sort of
imagine an amino acid chains as being like a string of beads on a
necklace. The books tell us that some of these beads are watery, some
are oily, some electrically changed negative or positive, some are
acidic or basic, the beads are all different sizes... but it's difficult
to really visualise exactly how that makes them move. Or, for that
matter, how some RNA molecules can fold up and edit themselves, chopping
out introns automatically.
Basically, I lack an intuition for how these molecules float around in
their environment.
Then again, protein folding is one of the great problems of this decade.
(Remember folding@home, anyone?) So maybe the chemists don't yet
understand it either...
Post a reply to this message
|
![](/i/fill.gif) |