… and the presence of negative differential response in living organisms is no exception”:
Ever since the late 19th century, physicists have known about a counterintuitive property of some electric circuits called negative resistance. Typically, increasing the voltage in a circuit causes the electric current to increase as well. But under some conditions, increasing the voltage can cause the current to decrease instead. This basically means that pushing harder on the electric charges actually slows them down.
Due to the relationship between current, voltage, and resistance, in these situations the resistance produces power rather than consuming it, resulting in a “negative resistance.” Today, negative resistance devices have a wide variety of applications, such as in fluorescent lights and Gunn diodes, which are used in radar guns and automatic door openers, among other devices. Most known examples of negative resistance occur in human-engineered devices rather than in nature. However, in a new study published in the New Journal of Physics, Gianmaria Falasco and coauthors from the University of Luxembourg have shown that an analogous property called negative differential response is actually a widespread phenomenon that is found in many biochemical reactions that occur in living organisms. They identify the property in several vital biochemical processes, such as enzyme activity, DNA replication, and ATP production. It seems that nature has used this property to optimize these processes and make living things operate more efficiently at the molecular scale.
“This counterintuitive, yet common phenomenon has been found in a wealth of physical systems after its first discovery in low-temperature semiconductors,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “We have shown that a negative differential response is a widespread phenomenon in chemistry with major consequences on the efficacy of biological and artificial processes.” …
“Nature does everything for a reason, and the presence of negative differential response in living organisms is no exception.”
Lisa Zyga, “Counterintuitive physics property found to be widespread in living organisms” at Phys.org
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham, who notes,
Actually, according to Richard Dawkins and the presuppositions of Atheistic materialism, there is no reason to anything that Nature does:
“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” ― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
Is it getting to the point where you can say things that murder Darwin’s kid* and no one cares?
- Darwin accused Wallace of that when Wallace suggested that the human mind was not simply a part of nature: “I hope you have not too completely murdered your own and my child” (the Darwin-Wallace theory of natural selection)”