#48. Science and Proto-science [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

Why does religion continue to be so popular in today's supposedly enlightened age? In what category of things should we place religion for purposes of analysis? This is a very important question. The least bad answer that I have come up with is: "Religion is the last protoscience." (By this I mean "classical protoscience"; a contemporary field of study, string theory, has also been labelled "protoscience," a result I base on a DuckDuckGo search on "Is string theory a protoscience?" on 20 Feb, 2022.)

Protoscience is most easily defined by a few well-known examples: alchemy and astrology. These disciplines can be thought of as crude, primordial versions of chemistry and astronomy, respectively, and unable to quickly divest themselves of laughably bad theories, due to an over-reliance on aesthetics as a way to truth.

If religion is a protoscience, that then, is the corresponding science? Will religion someday transform into some kind of super-science, marvelous beyond all prior imagining, and capable of robustly duplicating all the miracles of Christ, just for starters?

08-03-2020: Formerly at this location, now deprecated: Religion is the protoscience of origins and Darwin's theory its successor via the clergyman Malthus. Malthus was one of Darwin's influences, as attested explicitly in the writings of the latter.

07-26-2020: The science that could replace the protoscience religion is likely to be the study of adaptive, distributed, and unconscious behavioral effects in human populations. <07-30-2020: This will be a division within sociobiology focused on human swarm intelligence acting on an historical time scale.> From my own examined experience, I have reason to believe that such things exist. I called them "macro-homeostatic effects" in the post "The Drill Sergeants of the Apocalypse."

Alchemy is thought to have become chemistry with the isolation of oxygen in pure form by Priestly, followed in short order by its recognition as an element by Lavoisier, who had met Priestly in Paris and learned of the new "air" direct from the discoverer. This clue led Lavoisier to a correct theory of the nature of combustion. Priestly published his discovery of oxygen (Lavoisier's term), which he called "dephlogisticated air" (an alchemical term), in letter form, in 1775.

06-28-2019: The corresponding intellectual hand-off from astrology to astronomy seems to have been from Tycho Brae (1546-1601), who seems to have been much involved with astrology, to his onetime assistant Johannes Kepler (1571-1630; "The Legislator of the Heavens"), who derived three famous mathematical laws of planetary motion from Brae's data.

While the former astrology continues to this day as basically a form of amusement and favorite whipping-boy of sophomores everywhere who are just discovering the use of their brains, and the former alchemy has utterly perished (as theory, not practice), religion continues to pay its way down the time stream as a purveyor of a useful approximate theory.

An approximate theory is useful to have if all you need is a quick and dirty answer. The theory that the Earth is flat is an approximate theory that we use every time we take a step. The corresponding exact theory, that the Earth is spherical and gravitating, is only needed for challenging projects such as travelling to the moon.

03-13-2020: Thus, the God hypothesis is the theory of natural selection seen "through a glass darkly." However, the experiences contributing to the formulation of the God hypothesis would have been due to any cause of seemingly miraculous events over the horizon or beyond the reach of individual memory. This would comprise a mixture of the fastest effects of evolution and the slowest effects of synaptic plasticity/learning (e.g., developmental sensitive periods). However, the capacity for learning is itself due to natural selection and learning is, like natural selection, a trial-and-error process. Thus, the two sources of biological order hinting at the existence of God should usually be pulling in the same direction but perhaps with different levels of detail. Modern skepticism about religion seems to be directed at the intellectual anchor point: the God hypothesis. Since I believe that they are best de-faithed who are least de-faithed, let us simply shift the anchor to natural selection and carry on.

I think it premature to abandon classical religion as a source of moral guidance before evolutionary psychology is better developed, and given the usefulness of approximate theories, complete abandonment may never be practical. However, in our day, humanity is beset with many pressing problems, and although atheism appears to be in the ascendent, it may be time to reconcile religion with science, so as not to throw out any babies with the bathwater.

The modes of worship in use in many modern religions may well confer psychological benefits on the pious not yet suspected or articulated by mainstream science. Scientific investigation of the modes of worship that many religions have in common seems in order, especially since they amount to folk wisdom, which is sometimes on the money. Examples of common practices that seem to have potential for inducing neurophysiological changes are prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, incense-burning, and even simple congregating.

Photo by JJ Jordan on Unsplash

#46. The Goddesses of the Glacier [evolutionary psychology]

Sorry, not found on Unsplash. (Spirits are flying in bearing mukluks and a parka.)

EP

Red: theory; black, fact.

This post is about long hair, of all things (which I totally dig), and I will argue that humans evolved the trait to keep them warm during geologically recent continental glaciations. (Please pardon the teleological phrasing; I use it here only for the sake of brevity.)

Can having long hair really confer such a benefit under cold conditions? The anecdotal evidence supporting this idea seems abundant. For example, go to the site shown below

for a near-unanimous list of affirmative replies to the question: ‘Does long hair keep you warm?’ One respondent in particular (#32), from Sweden, seems to have exactly reproduced the method for ensuring this that must have been used in eras of glaciation, assuming that our distant forbears could at least make themselves simple parkas out of animal skins.

They would have supplemented this protection by tucking their long hair down inside the parka. Leaving it outside would have been good fashion but bad engineering, since the locks would have been quickly parted by the first gust of wind and precious, life-saving body heat lost.

I began this with mention of goddesses, but of course the males would have had long hair too, probably a meter long, in outrageous violation of modern gender expectations concerning hair length.

I find that this situation suddenly makes better aesthetic sense if you imagine this long hair as tousled in the males and smooth and perfect-looking in the females (and perhaps only in the portion showing above the neckline.) Seen this way, both males and females look gorgeous in the imagination and the aesthetic problem is solved. I call this the "rock-star solution." The females could have smoothed their hair by lubricating it with oil and brushing, and a brush is not hard to make. Meanwhile, the males would only need their fingers for cultivating a charming, insouciant look.

While moderns socially code gender as hair length, this parameter was unavailable to our glaciation-era forebears (the last glaciation maximum occurred 26,000 years ago) because they would have been unwilling to cut their hair, knowing at some level of insight that they needed it for survival and mating success. Therefore, they might have coded gender as hair smoothness as described above. 

I assume that these people were living in some glaciation "refugium," as such terrain is technically called, which is a fortuitously ice-free zone surrounded by continental glacier.

While writing this, I was struck by the amount of detailed information I was able to retrieve from my own aesthetic preferences, some of which would have evolved under stringent, cold-climate conditions to produce mate choices favoring traits with survival value. 

The heart may have its reasons that reason knoweth not, but reason is learning*.

11-26-2019 I have not mentioned beards yet and the main question there is why women do not have them. The answer seems to be that a long beard would interfere with breastfeeding, whereas long scalp hair can be pushed back. Moreover, women have more subcutaneous fat than men, so their thermoregulation problem in a cold climate would not be as severe.

*Based on a famous saying by the philosopher Blaise Pascal.

#41. The Sadness Cycle [evolutionary psychology, neuroscience]

EP     NE     

Red, theory; black, fact.

7-20-2018: This post builds on "Signaletics for Salvation," a post in the companion blog, "Experimentalist's Progress, " at https://nightbull.blogspot.com. The theory part of that post is reprinted below with slight modification for the convenience of the reader.

The anger cycle and the sadness cycle reach their full flower in wars of dispersal and wars of depopulation, respectively. These were discussed in the post "Two Kinds of War" in this blog.

Wars of depopulation serve to prevent Malthusian disasters such as general famine. The sadness cycle is a form of altruism that facilitates this depopulation by making a portion of the population sad and suicidal and the remainder contemptuous and entitled. The contemptuous ones take everything the sad ones have, ultimately their lives, and the sad ones let them.

If the sacrificial lambs were fighting what is essentially a form of cannibalism tooth and nail, the transfer of property would leave the heritors with many injuries, which would defeat the purpose of the whole process, which is to leave the residual population stronger and healthier than before under conditions of restricted food supply. However, always bear in mind that the sad ones and the contemptuous ones are playing two roles within the same adaptation; if you can play one role, you can play the other. However, if you unfortunately carry some unfavorable mutation, you will be predisposed to the sad role. This is another way the adaptation leaves the population more robust than before.

Since no altruism can evolve in the presence of selfishness unless the altruists are only altruistic to other altruists, a signaling cycle is required to lock the altruists together to the exclusion of non-altruists. Thus, sadness induces contempt and contempt induces sadness, and so on in a vicious cycle leading to the complete destruction of the sad ones and the transfer of all their property specifically to the contemptuous ones. This dynamic could be the origin of elder abuse and clinical depression.

Macchiavelli wrote, "He is made contemptible who is held to be changeable, light, effeminate, pusillanimous, irresolute, and from these the Prince must guard himself as from a reef." The traits listed appear to be the symptoms of unacknowledged sadness, and were no doubt quite lethal in Macchiavelli's time. Due to the present skyrocketing of the world population with the concomitant "Calhoun effect" from crowding stress, we are no doubt due for a remacchiavellianization of daily life. For example, should I even be sharing these insights with you instead of keeping them to myself to my own advantage or at least posting them on a commercialized blog? Does my slowness to commercialize indicate suicidally self-giving tendencies that will one day prove fatal?

6-29-2018: The Anger Cycle (reprinted)

Much of human unhappiness comes from destructive, escalating signaling cycles, usually between two persons. Examples: arguments, feuds, schools of thought, gang wars, revolutions. The signals exchanged are initially personal expressions of anger. Importantly, these expressions are multi modal, and therefore highly redundant. (e.g., threatening utterances, tones of voice, facial expressions, gait, crashing and banging things, spying, following, etc.) Your anger comes out of you "through every pore."

These signals are too many and varied for conscious control, which is why most people remain enslaved by their signals and cycles. The anger cycle is presumed to escalate until one of the parties must leave the country. When people are threatened, they seek allies, so all of society eventually gets drawn in and polarized as the escalation proceeds apace, like a black hole. Therefore, it is a group that must eventually leave, not a single individual, which is the basis of the refugee phenomenon. 

In ecological terms, the refugee phenomenon is clearly sub serving the function of dispersal. However, dispersal-producing behavior is fundamentally altruistic in a backhanded way. The benefit to the supposed loser, the group that eventually gets driven out, is that occasionally they find a newly-emptied vacant habitat in which to settle and therefore can reproduce without competition. This is a tremendous benefit in evolutionary terms and may once have been great enough to redeem all the waste and suffering of human-style dispersal. 

However, altruistic behavior cannot evolve in the presence of non-altruists unless a signaling system is established to ensure that altruists are only altruistic to other altruists. That is why I lay so much emphasis on signaling here. The reason why the signals are so multi modal is that the altruism program probably breaks down occasionally because of the short-term advantages of being a non-altruist. This has probably happened many times in the past and the broken algorithm was repaired each time by natural selection with the addition of yet another signal component. 

Multi modality implies the existence of a neuronal OR-element somewhere on the sensory side, and the amygdalae could be these OR-elements. More precisely, the amygdalae could be specialized for providing OR-elements generally to the brain by virtue of a characteristic, unique amygdalar cytoarchitecture.

7-20-2018: The various signal cycles may reinforce each other. The four signal cycles that seem to form the framework of human life seem to have such an interdependence. These are: mother-child bonding, which could potentiate man-woman bonding, which could potentiate the anger cycle (via jealousy), which could potentiate the sadness cycle. These insights come from introspection and my own biographical data.

#31. The Russian-dolls--multiverse Part II [physics]

PH
Red, theory; black, fact.

6-05-2017

Forget what I wrote last post about "thin dimensions"; leptons arise as electromagnetic wave functions originating in p2 that are transported into our p3 universe/condensate by ordinary diffusion and convection. Wave functions in p2 that are already leptons become our baryons when they are transported in. The only kind of wave functions that are "native" to a given frame of reference are electromagnetic (photonic) in that frame of reference. If they subsequently propagate towards increasing p (inwards) they gain mass as matter; if they propagate towards decreasing p (outwards), they first lose mass as matter until they are photonic (i.e., massless) and then gain mass as antimatter.

6-20-2017

This scenario gives rise to previously unconsidered solutions to outstanding problems in cosmology. For example, dark matter could be just excess electrons that lack protons with which to bind. You would have to argue that we don't see them because they would collectively appear as a potential that is smooth on all but galactic scales, and it is only variations in potential, aka electric fields, that cause scattering of probe particles. Such variations would be common only in neutral matter.

6-05-2017

To produce stable leptons from in-migrating photons, the first condensates, the p2s, would have had to be rotating simultaneously about three mutually perpendicular axes, by the assumptions of two posts ago. If this is impossible for p3 physics, we have to appeal to the possibility of a different physics in p1 for any of these ideas to make sense.

A "universe" is something like an artist's canvas with a painting in progress on it. First, nature makes the blank canvas, and then, in a second stage, puts the information content on it. Consider the moon. It formed out of orbiting molten spray from the collision of two similarly-sized planetesimals. In the molten state, its self-gravity could easily round it up into a perfect sphere which could have solidified with a mostly smooth surface. Call this smooth surface the "canvas." Subsequently, the very same force of gravity would have brought down meteors to cover the surface in an elaborate pattern of craters. Call this the "painting." 

Now consider the neutronium core of a neutron star, viewed as a p4, or small universe. The tremendous energy release of the catastrophic gravitational collapse in which it forms homogenizes all the matter into pure neutrons, thought to be a superfluid. This creates the "canvas." Subsequently, matter and energy from our p3 migrate into the super fluid without enough energy release to homogenize them, producing a "painting" of leptons (our photons), baryons (our leptons), and "uberbaryons" (our baryons). Indeed, the neutron-star core is actually thought to be not pure neutronium, but neutronium containing a sprinkling of free protons and electrons (as seen in p3, of course).

#30. The Russian-dolls--multiverse Part I [physics]

Matryoshka/pupa

PH

Red, theory; black, fact.

The nucleus around which a TOE will hopefully crystallize.

6-03-2017

I usually assume in these pages that the space we live in has an absolute frame of reference, as Newton taught, and which Einstein taught against. Not only that, but that this frame of reference is a condensate of some sort, rather like the water that a fish swims in.

I also assume that the divide-and-conquer strategy that has served science so well thus far can blithely continue with the (conceptual) dis assembly of this space into its constituent particles. At that point the question arises if these particles are situated in yet another space, older and larger than ours, or if you go direct to spacelessness, where entities have to be treated like Platonic forms. In the former case, one wonders if that older, larger space in turn comes apart into particles situated in a still older and larger, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

I am told that infinities are the death of theories. Nevertheless, let us hold our noses and continue with the Russian Dolls idea, merely assuming that the nesting sequence is not infinite and will not be infinite until the entire multi verse is infinitely old, because the "dolls" form one by one, by ordinary gravitational collapse, from the outside in.

What, exactly, is it that collapses? Call them wave functions, following quantum mechanics. In the previous post, we see that wave functions are slightly particle-like in having a centre of symmetry. In the outermost space, previously called #, the wave crests always move at exactly the speed of light.

7-14-2017

This speed is not necessarily our speed of light, c, but more likely some vastly greater value.

6-03-2017

The space-forming particles of # are themselves aggregates with enough internal entropy to represent integers and enough secondary valences to form links to a set of nearest neighbors to produce a network that is a space. This space acts like a cellular automaton, with signals passing over the links to change the values of the stored integers in some orderly way. The wave functions are the stereotyped, stable figures that spontaneously develop in the automaton out of the initial noise mass left over from catastrophic gravitational collapse, or some abstract, spaceless equivalent. 

Gravity would enter as a geometric effect; impossible at 1D, poorly developed at 2D, commonplace but commonly stalled at extended systems in 3D, and irresistible at 4D and higher (The latter conclusion is based on an anthropic argument in "The Universe in a Nutshell", by Steven Hawking). 

Finally, assume that the dimensionality of a space increases steadily over time, suggesting that the number of links emanating from each node in the underlying network increases slowly but surely. Macroscopically, this dimensionality increase could look something like protein folding. This does not yet explain gravity, a task for another day&&, but static nonlinearities in the automaton's representation system may be involved.*

To facilitate discussion, let us label the Russian-dolls universes from the outside in, in the sequence 1, 2, 3,...etc, and call this number the "pupacity" of a given frame of reference. (From the Latin "pupa," meaning "doll.") Let us further shorten "pupacity" to "p" for symbol-compounding purposes. Thus, the consecutively labelled spaces can be referred to as p1 (our former "#"), p2, p3,... etc.

A final, absolutely crucial assumption is that pn can exhibit global motions ("n" is some arbitrary pupacity), such as rotation, in the frame of reference of p(n-1). Yes, we are talking here about a whole, damned universe rotating as a rigid unit. Probably, it can drift and vibrate as well.

Now, by the assumptions of the previous post, these global motions must be subtracted from the true, outer, speed-of-light speed of the wave crest to produce its apparent speed and direction when seen from within pn. Thus, the universe's love of spinning and orbiting systems of all sizes is explained: a spinning, global-motion vector is being subtracted from the non-spinning, outermost one. As the0-pupacity of our frame of reference increases, more and more of these global vectors are being subtracted, causing the residual apparent motion to get progressively smaller. We would assume under current physics that the wave functions are acquiring more and more mass, to make them go slower and slower, but mass is just a fiction in the scenario presented above. However, the reliance of current physics on the mass construct is a golden opportunity to determine the pupacity of planet Earth.

It is three.

Three, because physics knows of three broad categories of particle mass: the photon, leptons, and baryons. The photon would be native to p1, leptons, such as electrons and positrons, would be native to p2, and baryons, such as protons and neutrons, would be native to p3, our own, dear home in the heavens. 

01-09-2019: it is an interesting coincidence that our pupacity equals the dimensionality of our space. Are dimensionality and pupacity linked during cosmological evolution?&&

6-03-2017

Some interpretations follow. The positron atom would be a standing-wave pattern made up of oppositely rotating wave functions, an electron and a positron, both native to p2. A neutron would be exactly the same thing, but native to p3. Note that both are unstable in isolation.

How is it that we observers in p3 can even detect electrons, say, if those are not native to p3? Because p2 is necessarily older than p3 and has had more time to develop extra dimensions. This will give p3 thin dimensions when seen in the frame of reference of p2, and it is along these thin dimensions that the electrons of p2 approach our own, native protons closely enough to participate in our p3 physics.

Neutron stars would be p4, but I haven't figured out black holes. Just big p4s?

*6-05-2017

or an amplitude-speed coupling.

#20. The Two-clock Universe [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact.

The arrow of time is thought to be thermodynamic in origin, namely the direction in which entropy (disorder of an isolated system) increases. Entropy is one of the two main extensive variables of thermodynamics, the other being volume. I would like to propose that since we live in an expanding universe, the direction of cosmological volume increase makes sense as a second arrow of time; it's just not our arrow of time.

One of the outstanding problems of cosmology is the nature of dark energy, thought to be responsible for the recently discovered acceleration of the Hubble expansion. Another problem is the nature of the inflationary era that occurred just after the Big Bang (BB), introduced to explain why the distribution of matter in the universe is smoother than predicted by the original version of the BB.

Suppose that the entropy of the universe slowly oscillates between a maximal value and a minimal value, like a mass oscillating up and down on the end of a spring, whereas the volume of the universe always smoothly increases. Thus, entropy would trace out a sinusoidal wave when plotted against volume.

If the speed of light is only constant against the entropic clock, then the cosmological acceleration is explainable as an illusion due to the slowing of the entropic increase that occurs when nearing the top of the entropy oscillation, just before it reverses and starts down again. The cosmological volume increase will look faster when measured by a slower clock.

The immensely rapid cosmological expansion imputed to the inflationary era would originate analogously, as an illusion caused by the slowness of the entropy oscillation when it is near the bottom of its cycle, just after having started upward again.

These ideas imply that entropy at the cosmological scale has properties analogous to those of a mass-and-spring system, namely inertia (ability to store energy in movement) and stiffness (ability to store energy in fields). The only place it could get these properties appears to be from the subatomic particles of the universe and their fields. Thus, there has to be a hidden network of relationships among all the particles in the universe to create and maintain this correspondence. Is this the meaning of quantum-mechanical entanglement and quantum-mechanical conservation of information? However, if the universe is closed, properties of the whole universe, such as a long circumnavigation time at the speed of light, could produce the bounce.

These ideas also imply the apocalyptic conclusion that all structures in the present universe will be disassembled in the next half-period of the entropy oscillation. The detailed mechanism of this may be an endothermic, resonant absorption of infrared and microwave photons that have circumnavigated a closed universe and returned to their starting point. Enormous amounts of phase information would have to be preserved in intergalactic space for billions of years to make this happen, and here is where I depend heavily on quantum mechanical results. I have not figured out how to factor in the redshift due to volume expansion.&&

#14. Three Stages of Abiogenesis [evolution, chemistry]

The iconic Miller experiment on the origin of life

Abiogenesis chemistry outside the box

EV    CH    

Red, theory; black, fact

Repair, growth, reproduction

"Abiogenesis" is the term for life originating from non-life.

Self-repair processes will be important in abiogenesis because life is made of metastable molecules that spontaneously break down and have to be continually repaired, which results in continuous energy dissipation. I will assume that self-repair in non-reproducing molecules is what eventually evolved into self-replication and life.

I also assume that the self repair process was fallible, so that it occasionally introduced a mutation. Favorable mutations would have increased the longevity of the self-repairing molecules. Nevertheless, a given cohort of these molecules would relentlessly decrease in numbers, but they would have been continuously replenished in the juvenile form by undirected chemistry on the early Earth. Eventually, at least one of them was able to morph self-repair into self-replication, and life began. I call this process of refinement of non-reproducing molecules "longitudinal evolution" by analogy to a longitudinal cohort study in medical science. The process bears an interesting resemblance to carcinogenesis, where an accumulation of mutations in long-lived cells also leads to an ability to self-replicate autonomously. Carcinogenesis is difficult to prevent, and so must be considered a facile process, suggesting that longitudinal evolution to the threshold of life was also facile.

A simple self-repairing molecule

The "enzyme ring" shown above is an example of a possible self-repairing molecule that I dreamt up. It is a ring of covalently-bonded monomers that are individually large enough to have good potential for catalyzing reactions, like globular proteins, but are small enough to be present in multiple copies like the standardized building blocks that one wants for templated synthesis.

If the covalent bond between a given pair of monomers breaks, the ring is held together by multiple, parallel secondary valence forces and hydrophobic interactions, until the break can be repaired by the ring's catalytic members. With continuing lack of repair, the ring eventually opens completely, and effectively "dies." To bring the necessary catalysts to the break site reliably, no matter where it is, I assume that multiple copies of the repair enzyme are present in the ring, and are randomly distributed. I also assume a temperature cycle like that of the polymerization chain reaction technology that repeatedly makes the ring single-stranded during the warm phase and allows it to collapse into a self-adhering, linear, double-stranded form during the cool phase. This could simply be driven by the day-night cycle. In the linear form, the catalytic sites are brought close to the covalent bond sites, and can repair any that are broken using small-molecule condensing agents such as cyanogen, which are arguably present on the early Earth under Miller-Urey assumptions. When the ring collapses, it does so at randomly selected fold diameters, so that only a few catalytic monomers are needed, since each will eventually land next to all covalent bonds in the ring except those nearby, which it cannot reach because of steric hindrance and/or bond angle restrictions. The other catalytic monomers in the ring will take care of these.

How it would grow

The mutation process of the enzyme ring could result from random ring-expansion and ring-contraction events, the net effect being to replace one kind of monomer with another. Expansion would most likely begin with intercalation of a free monomer between the bound ones at the high-curvature regions at the ends of the linear conformation. The new monomer would be held in place by the multiple, weak parallel bonds alluded to above. It could become incorporated into the ring if it intercalates at a site where the covalent bond is broken. Two bond-repair events would then suffice to sew it into the ring. The ring-contraction process would the the time-reversed version of this. 

In addition, an ability to undergo ring expansion allows the enzyme ring to start small and grow larger. This is important because, on entropy grounds, a long polymer is very unlikely to spontaneously cyclize. The energy-requiring repair process will bias the system to favor net ring expansion. Thus, we see how easily self-repair can become growth.

How it would reproduce

If large rings can split in two while in the linear conformation, the result is reproduction, without even a requirement for templated synthesis. Thus, we see how easily growth can become reproduction.

Onward to the bacterium

To get from reproduction-competent enzyme rings to something like a bacterium, the sequence of steps might have been multiplication, coacervate droplet formation, cooperation within the confines of the droplet, and specialization. The first specialist subtypes may have been archivists, forerunners of the circular genome of bacteria; and gatekeepers, forerunners of the plasma membrane with its sensory and transporter sites. Under these assumptions, DNA would not have evolved from RNA; both would represent independently originated lines of evolution, but forced to develop many chemical similarities by the demands of templated information transfer.

Back to chemistry

During the classic experiment in abiogenesis, the Miller-Urey experiment, amino acids were formed in solution, but no-one has been able to show how these could subsequently have polymerized to functional protein catalysts. The origin of the monomers in my enzyme ring thus needs to be explained. However, the formation of relatively large amounts of insoluble, dark-colored "tars" is apparently facile under the Miller-Urey reaction conditions. The carbon in this tar is not necessarily lost to the system forever, like a coal deposit. In present-day anoxic environments relevant to the early Earth, at least three-quarters of modern biomass returns to the atmosphere as marsh gas. The driving force for these reactions seems to be not enthalpy reduction, but entropy increase.

Seen in the library of the University of Ottawa

Retrofractive synthesis

I therefore propose that if you wait long enough, and a diversity of trace-metal ions is present, then the abiogenesis tar will largely break down again, releasing large, prefab molecular chunks into solution. Reasoning from what is known of coal chemistry, these chunks may look something like asphaltenes, illustrated above, but relatively enriched in hydrophilic functional groups to make them water soluble. Hydrolysis reactions, for example, can simultaneously depolymerize a big network and introduce such groups (e.g., carboxylic acid groups). I propose that these asphaltene analogs are the optimally-sized monomers needed to form the enzyme ring.

#4. My First Theory of Everything (TOE) [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact.

The nucleus around which a TOE will hopefully crystallize.

Alocia and Anaevia

In my first post, I made a case for the existence of absolute space and even suggested that space is some kind of condensate (e.g., a crystal). The divide-and-conquer strategy that has served us so well in science suggests that the next step is to conceptually take this condensate apart into particles. The first question that arises is whether these particles are themselves situated in an older, larger embedding space, or come directly out of spacelessness (i.e., a strange, hypothetical early universe that I call "Alocia," my best Latin for "domain of no space." Going even further back, there would have been "Anaevia," "domain of no time." Reasoning without time seems even trickier than reasoning without space.)

What came before space?

The expansion of our universe suggests that the original, catastrophic condensation event, the Big Bang, was followed by further, slower accretion that continues to this day. However, the resulting expansion of space is uniform throughout its volume, which would be impossible if the incoming particles had to obey the rules of some pre-existing space. If there were a pre-existing space, incoming particles could only add to the exterior surface of the huge condensate in which we all presumably live, and could never access the interior unless our universe were not only embedded in a 4-space, but hyper-pizza-shaped as well. The latter is unlikely because self-attraction of the constituent particles would crumple any hyper-pizza-shaped universe into a hypersphere in short order. (Unless it spins?) Conclusion: the particles making up space probably have no spatial properties themselves, and bind together in a purely informational sense, governed by Hebb's rule. 

Hebb's rule was originally a neuroscience idea about how learning happens in the brain. My use of it here does NOT imply that a giant brain somehow underlies space. Rather, the evolutionary process that led to the human brain re-invented Hebb's rule as the most efficient way of acquiring spatial information. 

Hebb's rule pertains to signal sources: how could hypothetical space-forming particles come up with the endless supply of energy required by pumping out white noise, waves, etc., 24/7? Answer: these "particles" are the growing tips of time lines, that themselves grow by an energy-releasing accretion process. The chunks that accrete are variable in size or interrupted by voids, so timeline extension has entropy associated with it that represents the signals needed by Hebb's rule.

I am well aware of all the space-bound terms in the previous paragraph (underlined), supposedly about goings-on in Alocia, the domain of no space; however, I am using models here as an aid to thought, a time-honored scientific technique.

Is cosmological expansion some kind of accretion?

I imagine that Alocia is home to large numbers of space-like condensates, with a size distribution favoring the microscopic, but with a long tail extending toward larger sizes. Our space grows because these mostly tiny pre-fab spaces are continually inserting themselves into it, as soon as their background signal pattern matches ours somewhere. This insertion process is probably more exothermic than any other process in existence. If the merging space happens to be one of the rarer, larger ones, the result would be a gamma ray burst bright enough to be observed at cosmological distances and generating enough pure energy to materialize all the cosmic rays we observe.

The boundary problem

I suspect that matter is annihilated when it reaches the edge of a space. This suggests that our space must be mostly closed to have accumulated significant amounts of matter. This agrees with Hawking's no-boundary hypothesis. The closure need not be perfect, however; indeed, that would be asking a lot of chance. Imperfections in the closure of our universe may take the form of pseudo-black holes: cavities in space that lack fields. If they subsequently acquire fields from the matter that happens to hit them, they could evolve to closely resemble super-massive black holes, and be responsible for nucleating galaxies.

Conclusions

• Spatial proximity follows from correlations among processes, and does not cause them.
• Any independence of processes is primordial and decays progressively.
• The universe evolves through a succession of binding events, each creating a new property of matter, which can be interpreted as leftover entropy.
• Analysis in the present theoretical framework proceeds by declaring familiar concepts to be conflations of these properties, e.g., time = change + contrast + extent + unidirectional sequence; space = time + bidirectional sequence.

#1. Intro [evolutionary psychology, evolution]

This is the sort of thing I write:

EP       EV      

Red, theory; black, fact.

EP

Religion is the last proto-science (e.g., alchemy, astrology). 
(Parts cut to Deprecated page, Part 2.)

***

EV

The eukaryotic cell arose from a clonal array of prokaryotes that selectively lost some of its internal partition walls while following the colony path to complexity. The remaining partitions gave rise to the internal membrane systems of present-day eukaryotes. Those prokaryote colonists specializing in chemiosmotic processes such as oxidative phosphorylation and photosynthesis could not lose any of their delimiting walls because of the need to maintain concentration gradients, so they remain bacterium-like in morphology to this day. This is an alternative to the phagocytotic theory of the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts. Modern blue-green algae genetically resemble the DNA in chloroplasts, and modern aerobic bacteria have genetic resemblances to the DNA in mitochondria, but this is not necessarily differential support for the phagocytosis theory. The resemblances can be accounted for by convergent evolution or by the existence of an ancestor common to the modern organisms and the ancient colony formers I suppose here.

11-15-2017

These prokaryote colonies would have originally reproduced by sporulation, not mitosis, which would have come later. The "spores" would be actively-metabolizing prokaryotes and before growing into further colonies, would be subject to natural selection. In the spore phase, the rapid evolvability of typical prokaryotes would have been recovered, allowing the formation of large, slow-growing colonies without sacrifice of the high evolvability of the original solitary prokaryotes. Modern-day eukaryotes often secrete tiny bodies called exosomes containing all the macromolecules of life. Exosomes may be the evolutionary vestige of the sporulation phase of the original eukaryotes.