vol 2: Synopsis
part I: Motivations and possibilities
page 5: Body
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Body
Christian religions see our bodies as a burden, damaged by original sin and prone to temptation, sickness and death. They propose an alternative world of disembodied entities, pure spirits, and claim that we will live on in this world after death. The bad news is that this picture mistakes formal distinctions for a real ones. Although we can name spiritual and material features of the world, these parts are inextricably bound together.
What is my body? Quite simply: I am an ordered set of atoms. By mass, I am approximately 65% oxygen, 18% carbon, 10% hydrogen, and smaller amounts of other elements. Because atoms are so small, I contain a huge number of them, about ten to the power of twenty eight, or one hundred million million million million. This enormous figure indicates the amount of atomic cooperation required to create one human being.
We will burrow down into the atom in a moment. Moving toward more complex structure, we see atoms bonded into molecules. Some molecules are small, like water, with three atoms; others like proteins and DNA may contain thousands or millions of atoms. The molecules of life work together to form cells. Cells are structured into tissues, and tissues into bodies.
This gigantic unity is maintained by a dense networks of communication within and between cells. The whole thing is driven by the energy stored in food. This energy comes from the solar radiation collected by plants.
It seems to be a fact of life that all information is encoded physically in states of matter. The ancients thought of matter as inert and passive, but modern physics sees matter as forever active, moving around a transfinite network of states.
Although we began constructing a body with atoms, atoms are by no means simple entities. Apart from their ability to bind together to form an endless variety of molecules, each has an infinity of invisible internal states which it can communicate to other atoms by exchanging packets of information.
This interatomic communication maintains the structure and function of our bodies and so makes us what we are. Although atoms of the same element may substitute for one another, we cannot exist independently of atoms.
Quantum mechanics, like ancient philosophy, distinguishes between visible and invisible reality. During the confused birth of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg crystallized the distinction between observation and theory. Heisenberg Using quantum mechanical terminology, we may say that the body is observable. The spirit is not observable, but, its outlines can be discerned in the observed behaviour of the body. All language is body language.
How did this vast structure come to be? How were we created? The answer here is the same as the Christian answer: we were created by god. The difference being, of course, that here we identify god with the universe, and god's acts of creation with evolution by variation and selection, the subject of the next page.
Books
| Alberts, Bruce, and Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, Peter Walter, Molecular Biology of the Cell, Garland Publishing 2002 Description: 'The ... features of previous editions continue in the Fourth Edition. The book is designed with a clean and open, single-column layout. The art program maintains a completely consistent format and style, and includes over 1,600 photographs, electron micrographs, and original drawings by the authors. Clear and concise concept headings introduce each section. Every chapter contains extensive references. Most important, every chapter has been subjected to a rigorous, collaborative revision process where, in addition to incorporating comments from expert reviewers, each co-author reads and reviews the other authors' prose. The result is a truly integrated work with a single authorial voice.' Amazon back |
| Aristotle, and (translated by W S Hett), On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, Harvard University Press (USA) ; William Heinemann Ltd (UK) 1975 Introduction: 'This collection of treatises belongs to subjects on the borderline between bodily and mental. Aristotle was the son of a doctor and himself a biologist, who believed in experiment and dissection as a means of collecting evidence. Thus his views on the soul are influenced by his physiology. Yet he never falls into the meshes of materialism, and appears quite certainn that the body cannot possibly explain the mind. ...' Amazon back |
| Becker, Robert, and Gary Seldon, The Body Electric: Electromagenetism and the Foundation of Life, William Morrow 1998 Amazon Book Description: 'In this landmark book, Robert O. Becker, M.D., a pioneer in the field of bioelectric science, presents a fascinating look at the role electricity plays in healing, challenging the traditional mechanistic model of the body. Colorful and controversial, this is a tale of engrossing research, scientific and medical politics, and breakthrough discoveries that offer new possibilities for fighting disease and harnessing the body's healing powers.' Amazon back |
| Damasio, Antonio R, The Feeling of What Happens : Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness , Harcourt Brace 1999 Jacket: 'In a radical departure from current views on consciousness, Damasio contends that explaining how we make mental images or attend to those images will not suffice to elucidate the mystery. A satisfactory hypothesis for the making of consciousness must explain how the sense of self comes to mind. Damasio suggests that the sense of self doe snot depend on memory or on reasoning or even less on language. [it] depends, he argues, on the brain's ability to protray the living organism in the act of relating to an object. That ability, in turn, is a consequence of the brain's involvement in the process of regulating life. The sense of self began as yet another device aimed an ensuring survival.' Amazon back |
| Feynman, Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Qunatum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. ... In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.' Amazon back |
| Pais, Abraham, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press 1986 Preface: 'I will attempt to describe what has been discovered and understood about the constituents of matter, the laws to which they are subject and the forces that act on them [in the period 1895-1983]. ... I will attempt to convey that these have been times of progress and stagnation, of order and chaos, of belief and incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre; also of revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big moneys.' AP Amazon back |
| Sacks, Oliver, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the world of the Deaf, University of California Press 1989 Jacket: '... begins with a history of deaf people in the United States, the often outrageous ways in which they have been treated in the past, and their continuing struggle for acceptance in the hearing world. And it examines the amazing and beautiful visual language of the deaf - Sign - which has only in the past decade been recognised fully as a language - linguistically complete, rich and as expressive as any spoken language. ...' Amazon back |
Papers
| Heisenberg, Werner, "Ùber quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen", Zeitschrift fur Physik, , 33, 1925, page 879. translated in B L van der Waerden, Sources of Quantum Mechanics, Dover Publications, New York, 1968, pp 261-276. 'It has become the practice to characterize [the] failure of the quantum-theoretical rules as a deviation from classical mechanics, since the rules themselves were essetially derived from classical mechanics. This characterization has, however, little meaning when one realises that the Einstein-Bohr frequency condition (which is valid in all cases) already represents such a complete departure from classical mechanics, ... that even for the simplest quantum-theoretical problems the validity of classical mechanics simply cannot be maintained. In this situation it seems sensible to discard all hope of observing hitherto unobservable quantities, such as the position and period of the electron, and to concede that the partial agreement of the quantum rules with experience is more or less fortuitous. Instead it seems more reasonable to try to establish a theoretical quantum mechanics, analogous to classical mechanics, but in which only relations between observable quantities occur.' (van der Waerden pp 262-263.). back |
| Maniatis, Tom and Robin Reed, "An extensive network of coupling among gene expression machines", Nature, 416, 6880, 4 April 2002, page 499-506. Review Article: 'Gene expression in eukaryotes requires several multi-component cellular machines. Each machine carries out a separate step in the gene expression pathway., which includes transcription, several pre-messenger RNA processing steps and the export of mature mRNA to the cytoplasm. Recent studies lead to the view that, in contrast to a simple linear assembly line, a copmplex and extensively coupled network has evolved to coordinate the activities of thje gene expression machines. The extensive coupling is consistent with a model in which the machines are tethered to eachother to form 'gene expression factories' that maximise the efficiency and specificity of each step in gene expression. . back |
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