Rivulets of Life

Posted on 2025-07-15 by tmurphy

Rivulets; photo by Tom Murphy: CC-BY-NC.

I spend probably too much of my time (and now yours) trying to work out the apparent differences between animate and inanimate arrangements of atoms. In practice it’s not at all hard to tell one from the other, even if a mass spectrometer would confirm that all the same atoms comprise the collections. Children easily differentiate one from the other. Isn’t that definitive?

In a similar vein, it’s not hard to tell a star from a brown dwarf, even though they have essentially identical compositions. The one having more than 8% the mass of our sun will ignite fusion and light up, while the one not “tall enough to go on the ride” will continue sulking as a dim, warm lump.

It’s not hard to tell the difference in behavior between a piece of paper fluttering to the floor and the exact same piece wadded tightly and dropping straight down. A clear sheet of glass or ice becomes an opaque white powder simply by crushing it thoroughly. A log looks and acts much differently before and after burning, even though no atoms were created or destroyed—most are dispersed as invisible gas. Arrangement matters.

But I want to poke a little deeper and identify an arrangement that we would never call animate, yet displays many of the hallmarks of Life. This is my clumsy attempt at doing so. The purpose is not to find an exact match in this example, because that’s impossible: identifying flaws is easy sport. Rather, this exercise provides a window that might allow our crippled imaginations to dimly grasp how Life might develop behaviors that appear purposeful in the context of evolutionary feedback. So, instead of focusing on imperfections, the challenge is: are you able to make out the shape beyond the distracting foreground fog? What new insights does this perspective offer? How might you build upon it and make it even better?

This is the first in a two-part series on what constitutes Life, as far as I can gather.

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The Writing on the Wall

Posted on 2025-07-08 by tmurphy

Almost as if done deliberately to demonstrate mental incapacity, I recently found myself making a connection that was staring me in the face for years but that I never recognized. Surely, scads more sit waiting in plain view, yet will never be smoked by me as long as I live.

In this case, several overt clues tried waving it in my face, but I remained oblivious. I feel like my former best-buddy cat who was always mesmerized by water, never tiring of watching it slosh, splash, and splatter. My wife and I once took the cat(s) on a reluctant car trip passing along the coast of northern California. The road came right up on the beach, and I stopped with the idea that I would show the ocean to him, which would surely captivate his attention and blow his mind. We were so close that the ocean and waves dumping on the beach were almost all that could be seen out the window. I held him up to take in the sight, but in his squirming state—questioning what new cruelty I was subjecting him to on top of this already-heinous and interminable car ride—he somehow managed to completely fail in ever noticing the ocean. But it was right there in front of him! You can lead a cat to water…

Oh—I should get to the point? A couple weeks back, the post on Spare Capacity mentioned the outsized detrimental impact written language has had. I know. Here I am still using it. But like my cat, I failed to notice what kept filling my field of vision.

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Atomic Humans

Posted on 2025-07-01 by tmurphy

Some themes appear to exert a magnetic pull on my attention: I keep coming back to them and often feel like I’m on a treadmill. It’s hard to figure out why: why am I compelled to keep these topics alive? A recent insight ties some of it together.

Years ago, I wrote a post called A Physics-based Diet Plan. The premise is that humans do not create or destroy atoms within their bodies, and that the energetics are too minuscule to register measurable mass–energy conversion. As such, a person’s mass change—as measured on a bathroom scale, for instance—from one day to the next is completely captured by the difference of mass inputs and mass outputs. It’s just atoms in and out.

Now, the human body has many channels for mass loss. Bathroom functions, breathing (net carbon/water loss really adds up!), and perspiration being the main mechanisms. Mass gain is almost entirely through our pie-holes. And entry via that channel is almost always facilitated by a hand delivering food to the mouth under the control of a brain. If you want to lose weight, the directive is simple: eat less and breathe more. In other words: diet and exercise. I know: radical, right? Every successful program for weight loss involves essentially this same advice, in various guises. That’s because it’s just atoms in every single case, at the foundational level. But oh boy, you wouldn’t believe the resistance I get to this framing. Let’s talk about that…

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Spare Capacity

Posted on 2025-06-24 by tmurphy

Our prized cerebral capabilities at the level of awareness don’t stack up to very much when compared to the vastly-more-numerous-and-amazing capabilities of almost every other aspect of Life. The relatively meager mental capacity we tend to worship is in many ways the slightest addendum whose capabilities are comparatively rather modest. Yes, we have devised ways to lock in small gains and ratchet them into powerful forces, but the process is embarrassingly slow and limited compared to most processes carried out by Life.

The Impressive Base

The overwhelming share of what makes humans amazing operates far beyond mental awareness. Outside the sacred cerebrum, we breathe, circulate blood, digest a diverse menu of food, filter and clean internal fluids, eliminate wastes, heal wounds, coordinate movement, generate the cells for reproduction, build and rebuild ourselves from a cryptic blueprint, and perhaps most impressively solve very thorny open-ended problems of devising antibodies tailored to disable novel pathogens. For all their “massive” brain-power, the average living human would not have the first clue how to devise a functioning, fully-integrated replacement for any of these and thousands more tasks our bodies handle without a thought. Even the best teams in the world wouldn’t be able to pull it off (though would at least have “the first clue,” and in so doing would know it to be beyond their capability).

Now add the cerebrum and a whole suite of additional capabilities emerge—still beyond our awareness. Perhaps most stunning is visual processing. Among other attributes, it’s nearly instantaneous, seamlessly combines vision from two optical instruments, fills in gaps, enjoys excellent color representation, and has extraordinary dynamic range (putting our film/print or electronic cameras/displays to shame; it’s why total solar eclipses can neither be captured nor displayed adequately by technology). Add to this an incredible capacity for auditory processing able to differentiate subtle sounds and comprehend language. What’s easy for a two-year-old still stumps technological implementations. Our brains perform pattern recognition tasks that are light years ahead of what lots of investment and smart people have been able to cobble in crude technological form. Remember the self-driving car hype from about a decade ago? And the fact that captchas work at all is remarkable testimony.

Don’t ask us how we do it—we have no idea. We just know so many things that we can’t articulate or are not even aware of: we take them for granted—as must be the case when literally unaware of the underlying processes.

Unbidden, the Disney Jungle Book tune for “Bare Necessities” slid into my brain in connection to the “spare capacity” title and theme of this post. Maybe I should try a song version sometime…

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How Much for One Protein?

Posted on 2025-06-17 by tmurphy

Proteins are made of party ribbon curled by scissors. Image by CAChamblee via Wikimedia Commons.

Showing my age a bit, a young Chris Rock in a 1988 movie amusingly asks: “How much for one rib?” Given that the crafting of a single protein plays a central role in this post, and ribs are a source of protein, the association was too much for me to pass up in the title.

I’ve pointed out before that our most elaborate inventions absolutely pale in comparison to even the simplest form of Life. Our gizmos can’t self-replicate, heal wounds, feed themselves, stave off pathogens, or self-evolve. Even though both gadgets and Life appear to be based on atoms and the same fundamental interactions, the level of complexity in Life is far beyond our means to create. At best, we bootstrap and copy.

To make the point, we’ll embark on a well-funded thought experiment that is able to assemble the top talent from around the world in a team given one mission: generate the genetic coding that would carry out a specific novel function by way of synthesizing a novel protein specific to that task. We stipulate a novel function that hasn’t arisen in any lifeform, otherwise the open-book (Google-connected) nature of this test would instantly result in “cheating” off a billion-year heritage.

Let’s see how they do.

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Food Makes Babies

Posted on 2025-06-10 by tmurphy

From Boston Public Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Daniel Quinn returned to the theme that “food makes babies” so often in his writings that it would seem he was continually dissatisfied either with the clarity of his case, or with objections people had, or both. I get it. I often return over and over to the same thorny themes, each time thinking I’ll finally nail it. The exercise is as much for improving internal clarity as anything.

Many of the comments following my coverage of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael focused on the food–baby issue. The more recent post on The Story of B dwells on the topic as well, so I figured it would be worth dedicating a post to the matter, trying to covering all the angles.

The statement that increasing food production leads to increases in population touches a nerve for some people, which is what makes it a valuable topic to explore. For some, the statement seems to be an affront to their notion of control. It implies that humans are “no more than” animals, which takes direct aim at our most prized mythology: human supremacism—relating to Ishmael’s second dirty trick: that we “evolved from the slime”—barely tolerated by modernists, but only in a narrow technical sense.

Now, the objections are not without demonstrable legitimacy. In this post, I will start with the basics, point out key objections, then see what we can make of it.

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The Story of B

Posted on 2025-06-03 by tmurphy

Ammonite fossil, by Liez (H Zell), from Wikimedia Commons.

Oh No. Is Do the Math about to get hijacked for another long series about a Daniel Quinn book, like it was for Ishmael?

How about just a really long post?

The Story of B is the second in a series of three books associated with the wise gorilla, Ishmael, and his teachings. Some report “B” as a more powerful book than the first (Ishmael). For me, they sort-of run together, and I have trouble remembering which book focused on which point. That’s part of why I started the project of capturing the Ishmael content, and here do something similar for The Story of B. I figure if it helps me keep the books straight, it will help others, too.

In this post, I sketch the content of the book. I am not tracing much in the way of story elements. I’m not even fully fleshing out the key arguments, but making more of a map so that I or others can more quickly revisit key parts, or get a quick refresher on the entire book’s flow and content. For those who have not read the book, I hope it serves as encouragement to do so.

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Scramble and Cling

Posted on 2025-05-27 by tmurphy

Ivan Aivazovsky: La Nona Onda (from Wikimedia Commons)

The mental image is easy to form: it’s just after first light on a morning in 1800 and your wooden ship has sunk after a surprise attack by canon fire. Random bits of wood and spars bob here and there on the waves, and you’ve managed to scramble atop the largest one. The next thing you notice is a horde of rats desperately treading water and aiming for your floating safety—as if vacuuming them from the surface of the sea. Within minutes your haven is teeming with clinging rats. Aside from the rapidly-receding gunboat, the horizon is clear of any other escape from immersion. It’s just you and the rats.

Why bother to describe this scene? It will serve a dual purpose. First, it vaguely mirrors a false impression many have of modernity as the only safe way to live in a perilous world. Second, it serves as an instructive contrast to actual encounters between modernity and tribal people. Both highlight the severe misimpression we have been handed of life outside modernity.

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Eye of Newt

Posted on 2025-05-20 by tmurphy

Witches just love to toss “eye of newt” into their bubbling cauldrons, but the docile critters did nothing do deserve such a sinister association. For me, newts have opened a window of appreciation into the broader community of life.

I find solace in asking a newt what it thinks of our politics, our technology, our schemes. The act of asking such questions out loud in the presence of a newt is as silly as it sounds, but only because the subject matter is silly. Conversing with a newt is just basic politeness. The newt is a genius in that it doesn’t waste a single moment caught up in such trivialities. The newt is fully engaged in Life, which is incomprehensibly more amazing, rich, complex, and bad-ass than anything humans have ever—or could ever—create.

In this post, I will explore what a newt’s-eye view can tell us about ourselves and our obsessions.

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Off the Marx–Hitler Spectrum

Posted on 2025-05-13 by tmurphy

The colors blue and red are used in the U.S. to represent political left and right, which at the extremes might be said to run from communism to fascism., Yet even that’s a tiny slice of the whole. (Image by Philip Ronan, Gringer; Wikimedia Commons)

We are accustomed to a left–right political spectrum. But said spectrum is only a tiny corner of the whole space of possibilities, even though practically everyone you know is wedged into it. Similarly, we use the word “light” to implicitly mean the narrow range of radiant energy that’s visible to human eyes, despite its being only a thin sliver of the full electromagnetic spectrum. All modern political schools share and support the context of an aberrant, exploitative modernity, making them real “birds of a feather.”

One window into political leanings is to elucidate an honest assessment of what one cherishes the most. But be careful about taking at face-value what people say they care most about. Sometimes they might even fool themselves. Below is a list whose scope (number of beneficiaries) increases as one moves down, and which might imperfectly map onto political leanings.

Self/Ego
Power
Corporations
Market economy
Small businesses
Families
Welfare of all people

That’s usually where it stops, in terms of scope. Some might also care for the environment, but only insofar as people have access to clean air, water, food, and don’t suffer health maladies from pollution. The first item on the list doesn’t map cleanly onto left–right (no shortage of self-centered leftists!), but belonged on a list of what people care most about. One form that self-prioritization can take is personal salvation in a religious context.

Megalomaniacs, dictators, oligarchs, and authoritarians populate the top of the scale. Fascists also lean toward that upper end, as do—I would say—many MAGA Republicans in the U.S. Traditional Republicans occupy more of the middle range, while Democrats tilt toward the lower end. Marxists might be said to be all the way down. Yet, the demarcations are not clean, allowing funky mixtures. The overwhelming majority of political parties, for instance, work to support a vibrant market economy.

Ralph Nader ran for president of the U.S. in 2000, far enough to the left of George W. Bush and Al Gore that he characterized the two as “Tweedledum and Tweedledee”—implying a nearly inseparable twinness to the two. From far enough away, that’s what it looks like. A radical leftist or rightist will see all establishment politicians as muddled enablers of a dysfunctional system.

Where do I fall on this spectrum—or am I even on it? I’m going to make you wait for a short bit.

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