On Aug 29, 9:18 am, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote: > On 29.08.2011 14:03 Stathis Papaioannou said the following: > > > On 28/08/2011, at 11:21 PM, Craig Weinberg<whatsons...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > ... > > >> Cells are not just physical and chemical. They are biological too. > >> That's what you're not seeing. There is a difference. There's > >> nothing magic about it, it's just that we have a skewed perspective > >> on it because the biological level gets closer to our own level, so > >> it seems less objective and mechanical to us. Subjectivity is > >> completely ordinary and concretely real, but it can only be > >> described in sensorimotive terms rather than the physical terms we > >> are used to, like mass, specific gravity, size, etc. > > > A molecule in a cell will behave exactly the same as a molecule > > anywhere else in the universe. Do you believe otherwise? Do you have > > any experimental evidence? > > Here you first have to define what a molecule is. It happens to be > tricky, as it is impossible to define a border between two molecules. > After all the electron density is everywhere. How for example do you > split it between two molecules? > > You may be interested to look at Quantum Microbiology > > http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2011/03/quantum-microbiology.html > > In a way one can say that a cell is just one big molecule. Well, we have > then the same problem to define a border between cells. > > Yet in any case, an individual molecule in vacuum is quite different > from the same molecule in a solution. And in different solutions the > properties of the molecule will be also different. >
Yes, those are all good points. As far as considering a cell one big molecule, linguistic categories are maybe even more tricky than molecules. I might say that a cell is one big molecular process, but it seems to me that there is a difference between the behavior of a living cell and the behavior of a dead cell which has a defining impact on the whole but does not permanently redefine the molecules which are part of it. Another living cell can still use the molecules of a dead cell but a dead cell can't use molecules to serve it's former purposes of growth, division, respiration, or whatever. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
