From owner-biophysics@net.bio.net Sat Mar 05 22:00:00 1994 Path: biosci!daresbury!doc.ic.ac.uk!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!news.delphi.com!usenet From: GREGORY C.O'KELLY Newsgroups: bionet.biophysics Subject: physics and biology Date: Sun, 6 Mar 94 17:07:20 -0500 Organization: Delphi (info@delphi.com email, 800-695-4005 voice) Lines: 79 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: bos1d.delphi.com Physics and Biology From the 17th century to the present living things have been seen as clever machines. Mental things and consciousness, for most, following Descartes, were seen as evidence of the 'ghost in the machine' that could only be found in human beings. In the attempt to escape this sort of vital- ism and to appeal to just 'natural' things, the more scientifically minded appealed to and tried to explain the functioning of the nervous system and the 'mind' in terms of mechanisms. There arose the idea that somehow the body was like a watch, with the nervous system a part. And through evol- ution the watch became more and more intricate until finally, in the case of the human being, the watch was so convoluted that a whole new quality emerged, the existence of consciousness and the world of the mind. The operant phrase was that the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. The phrase was easily understood because so commonsensical. Yet it did not stand up to scrutiny if rigorously considered; its meaning became more an ineffable intuition if one asked what was meant by the sum of the parts of a watch, and in what way this sum could be compared to the watch so that the speaker could say that the watch was 'greater' than the sum. Vitalist mechanists and natural mechanists agreed on the notion of mechanism, and how it was the epitome of scientificity since Newton. There were disputes were biological things left off and chemical things began that are carried on to this day. But the mechanism of Newton was terribly inadequate for accounting for such things as light, magnetism, and electricity. Hans Oersted's noticing of the movement of a compass needle close to a wire in which electricity flowed mystified the mechanists. Faraday spoke of 'lines of force' in the 1830's, and Clerk Maxwell described them mathematically in the mid 1870's. Only with the advent of the molecular and particle physics of the 1890's did the Newtonian world of mechanism begin to be threatened. The Quanta of Max Planck were articulated by Rutherford and Bohr in what became known as 'quantum mechanics'. This name was a result of seeing the electron as a particle similar to a planet in orbit around a sun, and therefore understandable in terms similar to the Classical Mechanism of Newton in which there was gravity and hard bodies, point masses, which had momentum and velocity. But this way of viewing the electron was replaced in the 1930's and 40's by people like Richard Feynman, Hans Bethe, and Julian Schwinger who offered instead 'quantum electrodynamics'. In the case of quantum electrodynamics, the second of four of the fundamental forces of nature was elucidated. The forces were: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. Newton's world and the world of the biologist was the world of gravity. The world of the chemist, the electrician, and the broadcaster was the world of gravity and electromagnetism. Oddly enough, the world of the biochemist remained the Newtonian world, with biochemists in search of mechanisms just like physiologists. The role of electrical charge was seen as perhaps playing a part in the functioning of cells (internally and externally), but in no way being per- tinent to behavior, though muscle contraction involved chemical function- ing of the body. Even so, the electrical charge that was involved in inter and intra cellular functioning was seen as the charge on atoms and molecules, on ions, and as so situated, this electrical charge was not seen as having any influence on the movement of the molecules themselves, or the cells in which or around which they were situated. Cells, like miniscule homunculi, communicated with another, identified other cells, and con- tained tiny 'factories' in which proteins were manufactured. All 'activity' both intracellularly and extracellularly was the result of mysterious changes in membrane permeabilities and the opening and closing of ion channels. When asked how one goes from this level to the level of a creature that evolves and behaves, the biochemist shrugs and says, "The whole is somehow greater than the sum of the parts; it's poorly understood." The implication if that there is some level at which cellular functioning and chemical functioning leave the world of gravity/electro- magnetism and enter the world at which only gravity and fluid dynamics are pertinent, and at this level one finds living creatures and 'ghosts' in machines. It is the thesis of the paper "Biology, Bioelectricity, and the Ner- vous System" that the behavior of living things and the functioning of the nervous system of those living things also are susceptible to events in the world of gravity/electromagnetism. And only after one is able to under- stand bioelectricity in terms of electron behavior of direct currents rather than some hypothesized 'saltatory conduction' will one be able to under- stand how CNS functioning can not only be simulated, but stimulated in such a way that motor and sensory functioning can be restored and enhanced. The issues in question are discussed in the above mentioned paper. If you would like a copy, contact me, gokelly@delphi.com, and give me your address. A small contribution to cover copying and mailing is requested (c. $4.50). If you have questions about these issues, feel free to ask about them. .