The Singularity of Nature

A Convergence of Biology, Chemistry and Physics

John S Torday, William B Miller Jr

• Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839162251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Entwicklung

Understanding how simple molecules have given rise to the complex biochemical systems and processes of contemporary biology is widely regarded as one of chemistry's great unsolved questions. There are numerous theories as to the origins of life, the majority of which draw on the idea that DNA and nucleic acids are the central dogma of biology. The Singularity of Nature: A Convergence of Biology, Chemistry and Physics takes a systems-based approach to the origin and evolution of complex life. Readers will gain a novel understanding of physiologic evolution and the limits to our current understanding: why biology remains descriptive and non-predictive, as well as offering new opportunities for understanding relationships between physics and biology in the origins of biological life at the cellular-molecular level.

Chapter 1

The Singularity of Nature

1.1 Introduction

“When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

1.1.1 Prologue

The following is not an exercise in sophistry. We are at a watershed in human history, in which humans are affecting global climate, considering delegating our intelligence to machines, and genetically modifying ourselves. All of this is happening without an understanding of our origins and evolution, Darwin notwithstanding. In light of that, we offer the following insights for your consideration.

Did you ever wonder why there is never a bad color combination in nature? Contemplating that realization has been an enduring focus of our thoughts from the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, across the breadth of the Aristotelian vitalistic concepts of entelechy, extending to E.O. Wilson's contemporary book, Consilience (1998). Wilson proposed that all knowledge could exist in one common database by reducing it to binary 1s and 0s. Others have struggled to build on that belief, in science (Smolin, 1997), metaphysics (Lipton, 2016; Sheldrake, 2017) and philosophy (Whitehead, 2010). Prior to Einstein's formulation of the equivalency of energy and mass (E=mc²), it was commonplace to dismiss such ideas as if they were one of Kipling's Just So Stories. However, that monumental equation changed our thoughts by radically equating energy and matter. Through this simple equation, the entire gamut of existence was circumscribed, the more surprising since this awe-inspiring breakthrough occurred to Einstein in a dream when he was sixteen years old (Isaacson, 2007). Just as physics was unsettled by this illuminating brilliance, that equation also challenges us to determine how biology conforms to this all-encompassing perspective. Biology is unlike physics. As a history of continuous dynamic changes, biology has long been presumed to exist without an underpinning of eternal laws. Nonetheless, one belief has become central to biology. As Dobzhansky (1973) memorably pronounced: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Any attempt at reconciling chemistry and physics must therefore explain how basic chemical and physical laws can seamlessly yield the biological forms that populate our planet.

In order to properly begin the process, it can be pointed out that the equivalency of energy and mass in Einstein's equation equally permeates all of the sciences, encompassing physics, chemistry and biology. Fundamentally, they are all characterized by the relationship between energy and mass. When this is properly considered, a facile exchange of concepts between the competing sciences of chemistry, physics and biology is worth encouraging. A continued challenge has been finding the correct means of placing biology alongside physics and chemistry, insofar as both of the latter have their own forms of exactitude. In this book, we will examine how biology can be placed within an equivalent template of predictive rigor. That path travels through the unicellular domains that cooperate to enable multicellular collaborative life. A window into this complex process can best be appreciated through the process of embryologic development, in which primordial germ cells communicate with one another through signaling mechanisms that determine the growth and differentiation of the developing fetus. Those processes are mediated by high-energy phosphates, as second messengers, which change the genetic readout of the cell. When seen as a series of linked energy and information transfers, from cell to cell, and from generation to generation, ontogeny and phylogeny can stand alongside physics and chemistry as being based within understandable and reiterative rules that govern life on the planet, and then might equally apply to any other life in our universe.

The Big Bang was the point source of the universe, radiating out the origin of the cosmos as microwaves that began our existence (Singh, 2005). Biology, too, has its own homologous point source, which has been identified as the unicellular origin of life (Torday and Miller, 2016a). This is not by analogy or expressed as a metaphor. Single-celled living organisms formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago and dominate to this day. The evolution of eukaryotes that enable our type of multicellular life was perpetuated by the synthesis and insertion of cholesterol into the cell membrane (Bloch, 1992). As a result, it facilitated the coordination of vertebrate metabolism, locomotion and respiration as the three foundational traits of vertebrate evolution (Perry and Carrier, 2006). Physico-chemically, the cell membrane became more fluid, enabling endo- and exocytosis, allowing for the internalization of environmental factors that periodically posed an existential threat – heavy metals, ions and gases – instead compartmentalizing them within endomembranes, making them useful for physiologic functions (Torday and Rehan, 2012). This concept is referred to as the endosymbiosis theory (Gray, 2017).

The reduction of physiologic evolution to cell–cell communications has led to the realization that contemporary biology remains descriptive (Torday, 2015a) rather than being mechanistic (Nicholson, 2012; Moss 2012). Over the last several hundred years, physics and chemistry have matured into predictive “hard sciences.” Instead, biologists continue to amass observational data instead of formulating founding principles. To correct this problem, a “Central Theory of Biology” was formulated (Torday, 2015a), providing a basis for common ground between biology, physics and chemistry.

By superimposing the mechanisms of embryologic development on the phylogenetic “history” of organisms, a cellular–molecular common denominator for evolution was discovered (Torday and Rehan, 2017). Those interrelationships become particularly relevant when the interrelationships between the cellular–molecular mechanisms of physiologic development, phylogeny, homeostasis and dyshomeostasis (pathology) are further expanded (Torday and Rehan, 2007).

That reduction allows for a deep understanding of what had been merely descriptive biology, and now moves it in a forward direction. Beginning with the fundamental unicell, multicellular physiology can now be logically understood (Torday and Rehan, 2017), rather than through retrospective rationalizations that are dogmatic, teleological and tautological. By understanding our cellular selves at this fundamental level, our place in the great scheme of nature as individuals, social beings and as a species among species can be better understood. This might even lead to the creation of a periodic table of biology (Torday, 2004), integrating all of the natural sciences into one functionally predictive search engine, finally realizing the unity of science (Cat, 2017).

Ever since the works of the natural philosophers of Greece, the atomistic idea of the “Singularity” has subliminally occupied our thoughts. This ancient and alluring concept has extended from Anaxagoras to Anaximenes, and then to Parmenides, Heraclitus and Aristotle (entelechy). In our contemporary era, there have been those who have furthered that possibility of a fundamental universal unity across nature, such as L.L. Whyte (1949) and E.O. Wilson, in his book Consilience (1998). Whyte intuited that there must be inherent common principles that form a basis for the Singularity. In our computer age, Wilson proposed that since the world's knowledge is being reduced to 1s and 0s, there should be a common groundwork for a universal explanation of all knowledge as a universal database. As is always a certainty, not all agree. Unifying ideas for physics, chemistry and biology have been decidedly countered by Prigogine (1984) and Polanyi (1968), both preeminent physicist-polymaths, who concluded that biology was too complicated to be understood by this means. Their philosophical mantle was reinforced by biologists and physicians, such as Bruce Lipton, Richard Sheldrake and Richard Moss, who all defaulted to mysticism in order to explain the nature of life.

Over time, one of the systematic errors in any attempt to discern a universal unity from the Singularity forward has been the assumption that a solution could be found through the study of logic (Bohm, 1980). Instead, it is insisted that finding the proper connections rests in experimentation. The key to understanding The Singularity lies in the first principles of physiology as that singular unity (Torday and Rehan, 2012). That idea emerged from superimposing the cell–cell communication mechanisms of embryologic ontogeny on phylogeny, which are derived from the physical environment (Deamer, 2017). It is by this means that life can be fully understood, emerging from non-life on the basis of discoverable scientific principles, which lead backward in a step-wise manner to the Singularity of Nature.

1.2 On the Mechanisms of Biologic Evolution

Daniel Nicholson (2012) defines biologic mechanisms in three ways: “It may refer to a philosophical thesis about the nature of life and biology (‘mechanicism’), to the internal workings of a machine-like structure (‘machine mechanism’), or to the causal explanation of a particular phenomenon (‘causal mechanism’).” In a series of publications, biologically operative mechanisms have been addressed by examining evolution, starting from its unicellular origins (Torday and Rehan, 2012; Torday and Miller, 2016a; Torday and Rehan, 2017). It is proposed that this yields a novel predictive form of evolutionary etiology. Starting from the origin of life, which is based on cellular–molecular principles of ontogeny applied to phylogeny, the biological mechanisms for successfully coping with environmental stresses can be elucidated (Torday, 2015b). It can be correctly asserted that the first principles of physiology – negentropy, chemiosmosis and homeostasis – provide the initial conditions for evolution and homeostasis (Torday and Rehan, 2012), providing insight to how and why organisms have evolved.

Through developmental physiology, it can be appreciated that there is a reiterative pattern between the initiating conditions of the Singularity and the life cycle of the organism, extending from the unicellular state to the multicellular form. It is extremely pertinent that this process is bidirectional. In multicellular eukaryotic life, it extends back again through our obligatory recapitulation through the unicellular zygotic stage that enables one life cycle to the next. Up until recently, it was assumed that the organism was obligated to go through all of the stages of the life cycle in order to replenish members of the species that were either lost through attrition or were successful in evolutionary adaptations (Darwin, 1859). But formulating our conception of the cell as the first niche construction (Torday, 2016a) that permits cellular knowledge about its surroundings and authorizes epigenetic phenotypic agency (Torday and Miller, 2016c), the function of the life cycle could now be seen as an active process, rather than as an end in itself (Torday and Miller, 2016a; Torday, 2016b).

It had long been ...