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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.'"
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.
...they were just listening to techno music during the experiments?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
"Mathematics reserves the right for universal truths."
^
Godel might have something to say about that.
"Mathematics reserves the right for universal truths."
^
Godel might have something to say about that.
In the most universal sense.
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.
e.g.
But he was never quite mainstream, and followers of his theorie(s) are rated to be in the vicinity of morons.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
If this is the case the photons should be detectable. We can design experiments sensitive to the level of a single photon so this is not too much to ask.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
I've read through the methods and I can't understand why either the journal editors or the referees didn't insist on replicating each experimental setup with a simple sheet of lead (or other dense material) interposed between each cuvette and sufficient to block the direct path of any putative photonic communication. Without the demonstration of an expected null result for each experiment given this setup and a photonic communication hypothesis, I can't take this paper seriously.
Da Blog
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.
Yes, anthropomorphizing it isn't a great idea. It would be more accurate to say that "many things evolve which humans would likely never have thought up on their own in any reasonable length of time." However, comparing evolution to a brute force search is extremely inaccurate. Indeed, genetic algorithms are frequently much more efficient than brute force searches. The solution space in biology isn't like a single password. A better analogy would be if there were many valid passwords each which gave slightly different degrees of access and each password was similar to passwords that gave access to similar areas. That's still a not good analogy but it is better. But genetic algorithms != brute force. The same way, evolution is not brute force at all.
Biologists recently discovered that the Komodo Lizard has poison glands, long thought to have filthy mouths full of nasty bacteria... big morphology changing poison glands - which should be un-missable. Yet they missed them for 40+ years.
If you're not looking for something and have already discounted it's existence, you're chance of seeing it is drastically reduced.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.