Protein folding, essential for life, is immensely complex in a specified way:
Gilder notes that when DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat humans at the board game Go in 2016, it wasn’t just for the fun of winning a game. DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis (pictured in 2018) is more interested in real-life uses such as medical research (p. 11). The human body is very complex and a researcher can be confronted with thousands of possibilities. Which ones matter?
The area the DeepMind team decided to focus on is protein folding: Human DNA has 64 codons that program little machines in our cells (ribosomes) to create specific proteins out of the standard twenty amino acids. But, to do their jobs, the proteins fold themselves into many, many different shapes. Figuring it all out is a real problem for researchers and the DeepMind crew hope that AI will help:
News, “If AlphaFold is a product of design, maybe our bodies are too” at Mind Matters News
AlphaFold beat all the humans in 2019 just because it could handle the calculations. That’s what computers do.
But now, here’s the question: We are told by many philosophers that life came to exist on Earth purely by chance. How likely is that, given the intricacy of the machinery that governs our bodies, such that someone needs to design AlphaFold to figure it out?
Note: You can download tech philosopher George Gilder’s book Gaming AI for free here.
Protein folding – an ultimate proof of cell design (among others)
There are too many proteins that require chaperones to fold properly to say it was chance.
ET mentions chaperones. Here are a few notes along that line:
As to this comment from the OP:
As to the some of the complexity involved in figuring out, i.e. ‘computing’, protein folding.
‘Traveling salesman problems’ are notorious for keeping supercomputers busy for days, and are are considered ‘Just about the meanest problems you can set a computer (on)’. And “Solving the traveling-salesman problem is a little like finding the most stable folded shape of a protein’s chain-like molecular structure — in which the number of ‘cities’ can run to hundreds or even thousands.”
Moreover, if protein folding occurred by random processes, (as would be presupposed under Darwinian presuppositions), then a “random search could never find the final folded conformation of,,, even a small (say, 100 residue) unfolded protein,,, during the lifetime of the physical universe.”
Yet in real life, a protein folds into its shape in the microseconds to nanoseconds range, (not the billions of years range)
Of related interest, quantum computers excel at solving ‘traveling-salesman problems’,,,
And the following study found that, “if this process (of protein folding) were a quantum one, the shape could change by quantum transition, meaning that the protein could ‘jump’ from one shape to another without necessarily forming the shapes in between.,,,
Moreover, it is now found that proteins do indeed belong to the world of quantum physics, not to the world of classical physics, (as is presupposed within the framework of Darwinian materialism),
The following 2015 article experimentally confirmed that proteins are indeed based on quantum principles. More specifically, the following study observed that quantum processes “concentrate all of the vibrational energy in a biological protein into its lowest-frequency vibrational mode.”
As well, in the following 2006 article entitled ‘Classical and Quantum Information Channels in Protein Chain’ it was stated that, “On the basis of force constants, displacements of each atom in peptide plane, and time of action we found that the value of the peptide plane action is close to the Planck constant. This indicates that peptide plane from the energy viewpoint possesses synergetic classical/quantum properties.”
And in the following more recent 2015 paper entitled, “Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules” it was found that “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” and the researchers further commented that “finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,,
And as the follow up article further stated, “There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,,”
The interesting thing about finding quantum entanglement to be ubiquitous within life is that quantum entanglement is a ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, effect that requires a ‘beyond space and time cause’ in order to explain it,
Moreover, quantum information is also conserved, which means that it cannot be created nor destroyed. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Verse:
Even so-called synonymous mutations, mutations in the coding sequence that still codes for the same amino acid, can cause problems. That’s because not all tRNAs are equally represented. And if that leads to a delay in having the proper tRNA get to the ribosome the resulting protein starts folding, prematurely, which causes problems.
Prions are an example of heredity by contact. The infecting protein alters the shape of other proteins just by contact. That alteration leas to all kinds of problems and then death.