How Viruses Work

At 3 minutes 42 seconds she answers the question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"


At 18 minutes 53 seconds ... this is interesting! The virus breaks into the house and immediately starts destroying all the sensors on the alarm system before they can trigger the alarm. The interesting bit is the way the alarm system works, ... Here is another instance of a similar immune response mechanism at work in chemo-therapy:


See also Mitochondria Batteries.

Most evolutionary biologists think that replication evolved before metabolism. I suppose that is because metabolism, when analysed, seems almost impossibly complex. But Freeman Dyson produced a mathematical model showing that in fact physical conditions could produce at least rudimentary metabolic pathways without any elaborate replication machinery in place to ratchet the progress of random mutations towards metastasis. See The Origin of Life.


Here's part 2:


The reason I find this interesting is because, if you take the idea of functional isomorphism and formal cause seriously, as Putnam does here, then it not difficult to imagine that many processes which are now integral parts of cellular metabolism in multi-cellular organisms could in fact have developed outside the cells, in a general environment of more or less complex population dynamics, and then later been internalised as whole working systems in cells. This is the idea I tried to articulate towards the end of this post: Lori on Extraterrestrial Life. Here's Putnam's lecture:


... and here's a timely contribution from Anton Petrov:


See https://glaunsingerlab.berkeley.edu/ and https://www.ibiology.org/microbiology/kshv/

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