For example, CRISPR. Many people think that CRISPR was an amazing discovery, but really, it's just a biological system that has existed for a long, long time, where a collection of smart people realized that with some engineering it could be used for effective genetic modifications with high precision and no need for engineering custom proteins to bind specific sequences. That seems fundamentally different from, for example, the experiments that established that DNA is the molecule of heredity when nobody had an idea how DNA could encode information.
> merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles.
This is not a meaningful or thoughtful examination of even chemistry. 3D structure of proteins is "merely" an elaboration of physical properties, yet "physics" doesn't have the tools to make much progress on solving the 3D structure of a sequence of amino acids, despite it being a purely physics process.
Is the world "physical" in the sense that probably don't have new fundamental forces of nature? Of course. That doesn't mean that physics helps understand much of the physical world, because the "elaboration" in the "merely elaboration" has nothing to do what physicists or other scientists consider "physics."
Also, we can simulate protein folding well enough from classical physics and quantum approximations such that "rapid two-state folders" are considered solved. That was a major outcome in the course of my career, to which I contributed significantly :)
I worked in protein folding over 30 years ago at EMBL, and have loosely followed it since. I could easily have been led astray, but I was absolutely not under the impression that we can do this even close to "well enough".
The CASP results weren't really a big deal. It was a modest advancement using techniques that were already spreading throughout the community, coupled with a skilled team that understood the score metric very well.
Two state folders can be reversibly folded using empirically determined force fields (two state folders basically go from "any totally unfolded configuration" to "fully folded single structure" in milliseconds); we can just run simulations and let the (quantum-inspired, classically embedded) physics do the folding, or we can use other techniques, like Rosetta (monte carlo plus lots of empirical data from known structures), or evolutionary data-based techniques (like Deepmind and others used).
Is there a paper that describes the parameters of the peptide structure that go into the "physics do the folding" part? When I was at EMBL, I was focused on using local hydrophobicity to see how predictive it was (not at all). Is the physics model operating at this level, above it, or below it?
It may very well be that understanding emergent phenomenon at the appropriate level of emergence will turn out to be vitally important, and that reductionism (while undoubtedly useful in many scenarios) is impeding our understanding of emergent phenomena like consciousness and evolution.
Well done!
However, we more or less understand that morality of larger lifeforms is encoded in our DNA (e.g. telemers). Mortality seems to be a defense against cancer.
There is no particular reason that a human needs to grow old, except for the accidents of evolution.
Did I tell you about the time, in 7th grade biology class, the kid sitting next to me was asked to read something aloud from the textbook about ”organisms”, but of course she said “orgasms”. She might have died a little right there, whilst the rest of us got her energy recycled as a power-up.
Btw, in this sense cancer is just another tool, that limits lifespan and ensures generations change. Of course, it didn't appear as such, but most species have no natural incentive to develop a resistance to it.
Not exactly and i believe there are a rare few that are much much more resistant to it and as such have become subject of research (trough TP53 in elephants or P16 and P27 in naked mole rats)
At the end of the day this natural incentive depends on when the cancer can appear (generally right away at every step of the cell cycles) and how likely it is which probably depends on the turnover and amount of cells of a particular type or in the being overall which one would assume increases as the being grows and additionally how likely it is to inhibit reproduction as it grows.
As it stands i'd say whilst they're not too inhibiting on this front (for example humans are most fertile at relatively young age well before most cancer occurrences become a problem. We've just extended our lifespan quite a bit) they still can be (kids can die of cancer too) and thus an evolutionary incentive against it however minor is present.
I think there's a noteworthy distinction between science and its applications. In my mind, science is about understanding the world, whereas fields like engineering/medicine are about their practical applications.
I do think that there's a tremendous amount of progress that could be made in sciences like Biology, Psychology etc. But I would draw a distinction between the things that fundamentally change the way we understand the world, vs building really cool toys that we would love to have.