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Cells May Communicate Through Light
SilverLobe writes "The hypothesis that living cells may use photons for communications has been on the fringes of cell biology for a while. No proof positive exists, but there is some strong circumstantial evidence. Byte Size Biology reports on a simple experiment that shows how the unicellular protozoan Paramecium may use so called 'biophotons' to signal for growth and feeding. The original academic paper in PLoS ONE concludes: '... not all cellular processes are necessarily based on a molecule-receptor recognition. The non-molecular signals are most probably photons. If so, cells use more than one frequency for information transfer and mutual influence.'"
To be fair, there is never any _proof_ in biology. Only observations of occurances and patterns. You can only disprove things in biology. Mathematics reserves the right for universal truths.
FTFA: "Depending on the cuvette material and the number of cells involved, these effects were positive or negative."
Occam's razor: These are stochastic effects.
Seriously, he replicated these studies 4 times TOTAL. "Depending on the cuvette material and the number of cells involved, these effects were positive or negative" basically fits the definition of a null hypothesis, which I certainly won't reject on the basis of 4 trials. Call me when an outside lab replicates this in a large number of trials.
This can't be emphasized enough. Life finds incredibly clever ways of doing things. And we are only just really beginning to understand just how amazingly sophisticated life is.
That said, this really shouldn't be that surprising. We know that many larger life forms use light to communicate. It is quick and efficient. It doesn't take time to disperse like chemical signals. And many life forms have the ability to sense light anyways so it shouldn't be that hard to evolve the use of light as a signaling mechanism.
Godel might have something to say about that.
No, he really wouldn't. Godel's primary results are that a) we can't be sure that certain systems are self-consistent and b) there are some statements that we can't prove. That in no way alters the level of access mathematics has to universal truth. When a statement is proven from a set of axioms it does follow from those axioms and anything which satisfies those axioms will satisfy the statement. Godel's theorems have nothing to say about that. There are good arguments against the notion that mathematicians have access to universal truth. For example, we all make arithmetic mistakes comes to mind. Also, there are published papers that have incorrect results that need to be retracted. Arguments can be made in this regard, but Godel has little to do with this matter.
Interesting idea. ... everyone can look in a paper and assess results themselves. Instead of this I want to mention that in my opinion paper is a little biased in direction of "bio-photons idea", and ask about two things (in paper there was not mentioned about this problems):
I want to omit experimental part of this work
+ Communication needs for working simple mechanism: place where the signal is encode, reveal and point where revealed signal should be deliver, catch and interpret. Because radiation mentioned in paper is very weak, so I suppose, that one cell is able to emit only few photons. Of course photons cannot hit anywhere into neighbor cell, because this system of communication is very inefficient. Photons should hit in specific molecules into neigh. cells.
Q. Thus, what is the mechanism of finding the direction in which photon should be send ?
+ As we know authors choose waves in UV range (I omit the reasons why they did it). And we know also that the cells are mixture of proteins, nucleic acids and so on, ... in short: mixture of many, many dipoles (not all are dipoles but many of them). As we know from basic physics any dipoles which is in non-uniform motion - radiate. To take into consideration thermal motions into cytoplasm, there is no hard to state, that molecules immersed into cytoplasm radiate in very wide spectrum of radiation.
Q. Have any tried to compare power of bio-photons radiation with integral from (0+epsilon) to 340 nm for thermal radiation ? Maybe bio-photons radiation is neglected small or inversely ?
Maybe answers on this two questions are essential.