Interesting to see all this fervent and unquestioning faith in reductionism here. No surprise.
However, reductionism is incapable of explaining the real world.
Consider protein folding. A good rough approximation model of a protein is a string with a hundred magnets tied to it.
Now throw the string up into the air.
The notion that the string would immediately fold into a precise shape every time you throw it, is the same as the notion that a protein would fold into a precise shape, very quickly, every time you make it. And yet that is what proteins do. And we have no reductionistic explanation that fits the facts.
There are billions of very close to minimum-energy configurations for each protein sequence based on the electrochemical forces between the amino acids in the chain and hydrophilic / hydrophobic considerations. And yet only one of them is chosen, often in a few microseconds. This is totally inexplicable based on a reductionistic analysis. We CANNOT predict protein conformation based on the physical and chemical properties of the amino acid chains.
All of the protein folding software uses the folding behavior of known proteins and sub-domains of known proteins (such as α-helices and β-sheets) to attempt to guess protein structures, and even then there are many solutions to the equations (in a “successful” analysis the actual tertiary structure will match one of the possible structures that the software came up with, but not any of the others, and reductionism is at a complete loss why). Rupert Sheldrake suggests an answer based on an evolving set of holonic structures where each more complex level includes the behaviors of its constituent holons, yet also includes additional properties basically “chosen” by the universe through a repetition and reinforcement of habits.
Even with supposedly “well known” phenomena like snowflake crystallization the reductionist explanation simply fails to ring true. Why in a probabalistic structure like a very well-formed snowflake is there so much symmetry between arms (and most especially the mirror symmetry on each arm) between areas that are millions or billions of atoms away from each other? The “contact mechanics” explanation simply doesn’t wash. Snowflake branches are very obviously probabalistic structures, so the “changing growing conditions of the snowflake” explanation simply doesn’t wash, since probabalistic structures ought not show such high amounts of symmetry unless some kind of resonance is occurring between the arms and reflections of arms in the snowflake.
Unquestioning reductionism blinds people to some very simple observations about the world. . .
The notion that the string would immediately fold into a precise shape every time you throw it, is the same as the notion that a protein would fold into a precise shape, very quickly, every time you make it. And yet that is what proteins do. And we have no reductionistic explanation that fits the facts.
Doesn’t that just demonstrate that the protein-to-magnet-string analogy wasn’t a very good one in the first place?
Why in a probabalistic structure like a very well-formed snowflake is there so much symmetry between arms (and most especially the mirror symmetry on each arm) between areas that are millions or billions of atoms away from each other?
So this turns out to be a really cool question. Part of what makes snowflakes unique is that each one is grown in a slightly different environment, and over the course of the growth of a snowflake this has a startlingly big impact. There are some cool attempts to model this with nonlinear systems / differential equations, and it does seem to be the case that if you have uniform growth conditions, you can get really different looking snowflakes that are still symmetrical.
Its not a string of magnets, sure, but the same principle applies.
The fact that we can’t explain how something happens, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have an explanation.
Why in a probabalistic structure like a very well-formed snowflake is there so much symmetry between arms (and most especially the mirror symmetry on each arm) between areas that are millions or billions of atoms away from each other? The “contact mechanics” explanation simply doesn’t wash. Snowflake branches are very obviously probabalistic structures, so the “changing growing conditions of the snowflake” explanation simply doesn’t wash, since probabalistic structures ought not show such high amounts of symmetry unless some kind of resonance is occurring between the arms and reflections of arms in the snowflake.
[A] team of mathematicians has for the first time succeeded in simulating a panoply of snowflake shapes using basic conservation laws, such as preserving the number of water molecules in the air.
Interesting to see all this fervent and unquestioning faith in reductionism here. No surprise.
However, reductionism is incapable of explaining the real world.
Consider protein folding. A good rough approximation model of a protein is a string with a hundred magnets tied to it.
Now throw the string up into the air.
The notion that the string would immediately fold into a precise shape every time you throw it, is the same as the notion that a protein would fold into a precise shape, very quickly, every time you make it. And yet that is what proteins do. And we have no reductionistic explanation that fits the facts.
There are billions of very close to minimum-energy configurations for each protein sequence based on the electrochemical forces between the amino acids in the chain and hydrophilic / hydrophobic considerations. And yet only one of them is chosen, often in a few microseconds. This is totally inexplicable based on a reductionistic analysis. We CANNOT predict protein conformation based on the physical and chemical properties of the amino acid chains.
All of the protein folding software uses the folding behavior of known proteins and sub-domains of known proteins (such as α-helices and β-sheets) to attempt to guess protein structures, and even then there are many solutions to the equations (in a “successful” analysis the actual tertiary structure will match one of the possible structures that the software came up with, but not any of the others, and reductionism is at a complete loss why). Rupert Sheldrake suggests an answer based on an evolving set of holonic structures where each more complex level includes the behaviors of its constituent holons, yet also includes additional properties basically “chosen” by the universe through a repetition and reinforcement of habits.
Even with supposedly “well known” phenomena like snowflake crystallization the reductionist explanation simply fails to ring true. Why in a probabalistic structure like a very well-formed snowflake is there so much symmetry between arms (and most especially the mirror symmetry on each arm) between areas that are millions or billions of atoms away from each other? The “contact mechanics” explanation simply doesn’t wash. Snowflake branches are very obviously probabalistic structures, so the “changing growing conditions of the snowflake” explanation simply doesn’t wash, since probabalistic structures ought not show such high amounts of symmetry unless some kind of resonance is occurring between the arms and reflections of arms in the snowflake.
Unquestioning reductionism blinds people to some very simple observations about the world. . .
Doesn’t that just demonstrate that the protein-to-magnet-string analogy wasn’t a very good one in the first place?
How is “unquestioning reductionism” possible?
So this turns out to be a really cool question. Part of what makes snowflakes unique is that each one is grown in a slightly different environment, and over the course of the growth of a snowflake this has a startlingly big impact. There are some cool attempts to model this with nonlinear systems / differential equations, and it does seem to be the case that if you have uniform growth conditions, you can get really different looking snowflakes that are still symmetrical.
Now watch what happens. (Biased chains, starting @ 4:30.)
Its not a string of magnets, sure, but the same principle applies. The fact that we can’t explain how something happens, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have an explanation.
[Edit: Fixed link]
This bulwark of irreducible mysteriousness seems to be falling fast: