Category Archives: Science

‘The Libido Crash’ By Katherine Rowland

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( For ADULTS only and not for the shy ones, but I am sure you are still going to read it)

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IN the drawer of her bedside table, Julie maintains an archive of lust. Here are the naked Polaroids she slipped in between her husband’s business papers, explicit notes once left on mirrors, Anaïs Nin, a riding crop. Come evening, Julie used to watch her husband’s movements from across the room, eager for the moment when dinner was done, the kids were asleep and all other intrusions to pleasure had been dismissed. When strangers asked if they were newlyweds, Julie loved responding that they had been married for years, and believed that they were inured to the frazzled disinterest that had settled over the bedrooms of her friends. ‘You always hear how attraction fades with time – the honeymoon period comes to an end. But I always thought that was other people’s misfortune,’ she says.

So when her longing began to dull, Julie struggled to discern what was going on. She blamed the stress of work, the second child, her busy and travel-heavy schedule, the effect of changing seasons, until she had run down the available excuses, and still found she would rather go for a jog on Sunday mornings than linger in bed.

These days, Julie says it feels ‘like suffocating’ to endure her husband’s affections. ‘I’m supposed to get home from working all day, play with the kids, cook dinner, talk about entertaining things, and then crawl into bed and rather than sleep perform some sexual highwire act. How is that possible? That sounds like hell, honestly.’

Julie still loves her husband. What’s more, her life – from the dog, to the kids, to the mortgaged house – is built around their partnership. She doesn’t want to end her marriage, but in the absence of desire she feels like a ‘miserable fraud’.

‘I never imagined I would ever be in the self-help section in the book store,’ she says, but now her bedside table heaves with such titles asSex Again (2012) by Jill Blakeway: ‘Despite what you see on movies and TV, Americans have less sex than people in any other country’;Rekindling Desire (2014) by Barry and Emily McCarthy: ‘Is sex more work than play in your marriage? Do you schedule it in like a dentist appointment?’; Wanting Sex Again (2012) by Laurie Watson: ‘If you feel like sex just isn’t worth the effort, you’re not alone’; and No More Headaches (2009) by Juli Slattery.

‘It’s just so depressing,’ she says. ‘There’s this expectation to be hot all the time – even for a 40-year-old woman – and then this reality where you’re bored and tired and don’t want to do it.’

Survey upon survey confirms Julie’s impressions, delivering up the conclusion that for many women sex tends toward numbed complacency rather than a hunger to be sated. The generalised loss of sexual interest, known in medical terms as hypoactive sexual desire, is the most common sexual complaint among women of all ages. To believe some of the numbers – 16 per cent of British women experience a lack of sexual desire; 43 per cent of American women are affected by female sexual dysfunction; 10 to 50 per cent of women globally report having too little desire – is to confront the idea that we are in the midst of a veritable crisis of libido.

Today a boisterous debate exists over whether this is merely a product of high – perhaps over-reaching – expectations. Never has the public sphere been so saturated in women’s sexual potential. Billboards, magazines, television all proclaim that healthy women are readily climactic, amorously creative and hungry for sex. What might strike us as liberating, a welcome change from earlier visions of apron-clad passivity, can also become an unnerving source of pressure. ‘Women are coming forward talking about wanting their desire back to the way it was, or better than it was,’ says Cynthia Graham, a psychologist at the University of Southampton and the editor of The Journal of Sex Research. ‘But they are often encouraged to aim for unrealistic expectations and to believe their desire should be unchanging regardless of age or life circumstances.’

Others contend that we are, indeed, in the midst of a creeping epidemic. Once assumed to be an organic feature of women, low desire is increasingly seen as a major impediment to quality of life, and one deserving of medical attention. Moreover, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy in 2010 found ‘a higher percentage of women with low sexual desire feel frustrated, concerned, unhappy, disappointed, hopeless, troubled, ashamed, and bitter, compared with women with normal desire’.

To make matters worse, according to Anita Clayton, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, most women don’t delve into the causes of their waning desire, but settle instead for a sexless norm. She writes inSatisfaction (2007):

You erode your capacity for intimacy and eventually become estranged from both your sensual self and your partner. The erosion is so gradual, you don’t realise it’s happening until the damage is done and you’re shivering at the bottom of a chasm, alone and untouched, wondering how you got there.

Fearful of this end, Julie sought medical help, taking a long and dispiriting tour of conflicting advice (‘Your experiences place you in a near majority of women, but your disinterest in sex isn’t normal’), ineffectual treatments (men’s testosterone cream, antidepressants, marital counselling) and dashed hopes (‘Each time I tried out a new therapy, I told myself it was going to get better’).

Julie is hardly alone. Instead, she counts among a consumer population of millions that pharmaceutical firms are now trying to capture in their efforts to fix the problem of desire. But what exactly are they trying to treat? A physical ailment? A relationship problem? An inevitable decline? Could low desire be a correlate of age, a result of professional stress, a clear outlier on the sexual-health spectrum or a culturally induced state of mind?

For drug makers, these questions pose more than a philosophical quandary. It is only by proving that low desire and its favoured tool of measurement – libido – are diagnosable, medical problems that new drugs can be approved.

The task has been herculean, and fraught with confusion. ‘Some of the statistics that get circulated are based on very badly designed studies,’ says Katherine Angel, a researcher on the history and philosophy of science and former fellow at the Wellcome Trust in London. As a result, it’s possible to interpret ‘the presence of fluctuating levels of sexual desire as indications of a medical problem, rather than natural fluctuation over time’.

That hasn’t stopped big pharma from entering the fray. In the case of women’s libido, the industry has spent years in hot pursuit of the condition and its chemical cure, a female analog to the blockbuster drug Viagra. Yet the more scientists try to hone in on the nature of desire, and the more they try to bottle or amplify it, the more elusive it becomes.

The idea that women could suffer from low desire and benefit from medical intervention reflects a major social shift. Looking back 150 years, it would be hard to conceive that doctors would be concerned with too little desire. The Victorian era is notorious for its desexualised treatment of women. Upheld as moral counterweights to men, women were thought to be sexually passive, untroubled by lust.

Yet another Victorian idea, the notion that love must constitute the centre of marriage, has amplified anxiety over lost desire today. Breaking with a long tradition of unions brokered chiefly for economic and social advantage, the Victorians privileged romantic affection between husband and wife. In the 20th century, this idea expanded to encompass sensual intimacy, and reciprocal pleasure was seen as the key to strong marriages – and the greater good.

The turn toward sensual reciprocity made partnerships more democratic, and couples were meant to provide each other with sexual, spiritual, emotional and social fulfillment. But these gains introduced new stressors, says the family historian Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College in Washington State. ‘New expectations were piled on to marriage – many of which were good,’ she says, ‘but they occurred in tandem with new pressures, sex among them, as well as diminished expectations for social life outside of marriage.’

In an infamous cartoon in The New Yorker in 2001, one woman confides to a friend over drinks: ‘I was on hormone replacement for two years before I realised what I really needed was Steve replacement.’ Medicine has been reluctant to engage the question of just how much monogamy and long-term togetherness affect sexual function and desire, and the ‘Steve’ problem remains an issue that is tacitly acknowledged and yet under-discussed. To return to Julie’s growing pile of self-help titles, the books all promise to return, revive, restorewithout really getting down to the brass tacks of why desire extinguished in the first place. As Julie notes, the honeymoon grinds to an end, but the issues leading there are complex. In short supply is attention to the way mind and body react to social structures such as popular media, faith and marriage.

click link below for full article;

https://aeon.co/essays/can-women-s-lost-libido-be-fixed-with-mere-drugs

posted by f. sheikh

How The Western Diet Derailed Our Evolution

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For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands.

A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber.

Scientists suspect our intestinal community of microbes, the human microbiota, calibrates our immune and metabolic function, and that its corruption or depletion can increase the risk of chronic diseases, ranging from asthma to obesity. One might think that if we coevolved with our microbes, they’d be more or less the same in healthy humans everywhere. But that’s not what the scientists observed.

“It was the most different human microbiota composition we’d ever seen,” Sonnenburg told me. To his mind it carried a profound message: The Western microbiome, the community of microbes scientists thought of as “normal” and “healthy,” the one they used as a baseline against which to compare “diseased” microbiomes, might be considerably different than the community that prevailed during most of human evolution.

And so Sonnenburg wondered: If the Burkina Faso microbiome represented a kind of ancestral state for humans—the Neolithic in particular, or subsistence farming—and if the transition between that state and modern Florence represented a voyage from an agriculturalist’s existence to 21st-century urban living, then where along the way had the Florentines lost all those microbes?

Earlier this year I visited Sonnenburg at Stanford University, where he has a lab. By then he thought he had part of the answer. He showed me, on his computer, the results of a multigenerational experiment dreamed up by his wife, Erica, also a microbiologist.

When the Burkina Faso study was published, in 2010, the question of what specific microbes improved human health remained maddeningly elusive, but evidence was beginning to suggest that diversity itself was important. So despite their relative material poverty, these villagers seemed wealthy in a way that science was just beginning to appreciate.

Where did that diversity come from? Humans can’t digest soluble fiber, so we enlist microbes to dismantle it for us, sopping up their metabolites. The Burkina Faso microbiota produced about twice as much of these fermentation by-products, called short-chain fatty acids, as the Florentine. That gave a strong indication that fiber, the raw material solely fermented by microbes, was somehow boosting microbial diversity in the Africans.

Indeed, when Sonnenburg fed mice plenty of fiber, microbes that specialized in breaking it down bloomed, and the ecosystem became more diverse overall. When he fed mice a fiber-poor, sugary, Western-like diet, diversity plummeted. (Fiber-starved mice were also meaner and more difficult to handle.) But the losses weren’t permanent. Even after weeks on this junk food-like diet, an animal’s microbial diversity would mostly recover if it began consuming fiber again.

This was good news for Americans—our microbial communities might re-diversify if we just ate more whole grains and veggies. But it didn’t support the Sonnenburgs’ suspicion that the Western diet had triggered microbial extinctions. Yet then they saw what happened when pregnant mice went on the no-fiber diet: temporary depletions became permanent losses.

When we pass through the birth canal, we are slathered in our mother’s microbes, a kind of starter culture for our own community. In this case, though, pups born to mice on American-type diets—no fiber, lots of sugar—failed to acquire the full endowment of their mothers’ microbes. Entire groups of bacteria were lost during transmission. When Sonnenburg put these second-generation mice on a fiber-rich diet, their microbes failed to recover. The mice couldn’t regrow what they’d never inherited. And when these second-generation animals went on a fiberless diet in turn, their offspring inherited even fewer microbes. The microbial die-outs compounded across generations. Click link below to read full article.

http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-the-western-diet-has-derailed-our-evolution

Posted by f. sheikh

“Jeremy England, The Man Who May One-Up Darwin” By Meghan Walsh

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( It is interesting read after lecture by Babar Sahib on the same subject. It has some divine dimensions also. F. Sheikh)

“Every 30 years or so we experience these gigantic steps forward. …And this might be it.

                            Carl Franck, a Cornell physics professor”

The 101 version of his big idea is this: Under the right conditions, a random group of atoms will self-organize, unbidden, to more effectively use energy. Over time and with just the right amount of, say, sunlight, a cluster of atoms could come remarkably close to what we call life. In fact, here’s a thought: Some things we consider inanimate actually may already be “alive.” It all depends on how we define life, something England’s work might prompt us to reconsider. “People think of the origin of life as being a rare process,” says Vijay Pande, a Stanford chemistry professor. “Jeremy’s proposal makes life a consequence of physical laws, not something random.”

In the most basic terms, Darwinism and the idea of natural selection tell us that well-adapted organisms evolve in order to survive and better reproduce in their environment. England doesn’t dispute this reasoning, but he argues that it’s too vague. For instance, he says, blue whales and phytoplankton thrive in the same environmental conditions — the ocean — but they do so by vastly different means. That’s because that while they’re both made of the same basic building blocks, strings of DNA are arranged differently in each organism.

Now take England’s simulation of an opera singer who holds a crystal glass and sings at a certain pitch. Instead of shattering, England predicts that over time, the atoms will rearrange themselves to better absorb the energy the singer’s voice projects, essentially protecting the glass’s livelihood. So how’s a glass distinct from, say, a plankton-type organism that rearranges it self over several generations? Does that make glass a living organism?

These are pretty things to ponder. Unfortunately, England’s work hasn’t yet provided any answers, leaving the professor in a kind of speculative state as he doggedly tries to put numbers to it all. “He hasn’t put enough cards on the table yet,” Franck says. “He’ll need to make more testable predictions.” So it remains to be seen where England will land in the end. Other scientists have made similar claims about energy dissipation in the context of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, but none has found a definitive means for applying this science to the origin of life.

So what does God have to do with all this? In his quest for answers, England, of course, finds himself at the center of the classic struggle between science and spirituality. While Christianity and Darwinism are generally opposed, Judaism doesn’t take issue with the science of life. The Rabbinical Council of America even takes the stance that “evolutionary theory, properly understood, is not incompatible with belief in a Divine Creator.”

For his part, England believes science can give us explanations and predictions, but it can never tell us what we should do with that information. That’s where, he says, the religious teachings come in. Indeed, the man who’s one-upping Darwin has spent the past 10 years painstakingly combing through the Torah,interpreting it word by word much the way he ponders the meaning of life. His conclusion? Common translations are lacking. Take the term “creation.” England suggests we understand it not as the literal making of the Earth but rather as giving Earth a name. All throughout the Bible, he says, there are examples of terms that could be interpreted differently from what we’ve come to accept as standard.

That even applies to some of the good book’s most famous players, like Joseph, the ancient biblical interpreter of dreams, who rose to become the most powerful man in Egypt after the pharaoh. Maybe, England suggests, he wasn’t a fortune-teller. Maybe he was a scientist.

http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/the-man-who-may-one-up-darwin/39217?utm_source=W1&utm_medium=pp&utm_campaign=pp

 

‘Animation Of Matter’ By Babar Mustafa

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(Below is the article presented at the TFUSA meeting by Babar Mustafa. Babar Sahib has done a wonderful job of turning a complex and difficult subject into a simple and understandable reading. It explains how simple chemical reactions transform into complex biological structures and come alive. F. Sheikh)

Animation of Matter

How life originated, is one of the most fundamental questions and has preoccupied humanity throughout its existence. Every culture and religion has a creation myth. The true story began to unfold in a period of less than a hundred years around 1850s to 1950s, with the emergence of three great ideas in biology. Cell theory, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and the discovery of the structure of DNA, combine neatly to describe how life works. But they also bring us to the brink of cracking the big question itself: How life began.

It is only very recently, with our solid understanding of the genes, proteins and mechanics of these living chemical processes, that we can seriously question how they came to be in the first place. Modern biology has revealed that intricate networks of chemical reactions drive reproduction, inheritance, sensation, movement, thought, and all of the things that life does. None of this happens for free: energy is required to fuel these actions. The bottom line is that without energy, you are dead. It is here, in the microscopic and indeed atomic world of the cell, that we are finding the clues to understand these processes – the ones that keep you, your cells, and every cell alive, as they have for billions of years.

The invention of optical lens by a Dutch Linen merchant to check the density of fibers, followed by the work of dozens of men and hundreds of years of investigation into the stuff that life is made of, can be summarized in two line:

1). All life is made of cells.

2). Cells only arise by the division of other cells.

Before this discovery, life was considered to arise spontaneously, and this view, like a zombie still shambled along, lurching up again and again. The man who finally killed “spontaneous generation” dead was Louis Pasteur, in 1860 in France, when he showed with his experiments that without contamination microorganisms could not develop.  The implications of this theory were profound. It covers all life, a simple but comprehensive description of the innumerable inhabitants of the living earth. Diversity of life on earth is embedded in the magnificent range of different types of cells.

At about the same time, Charles Darwin in England was slowly and meticulously putting together an overwhelmingly compelling case that described how creatures evolve. Evolution, the idea that species are not unchangeable, was already being contemplated as a concept in the 19th century but the process by which they changed (natural selection), was unknown.

Cell theory and natural selection are reflections of the same truth: Life is derived, begotten, not created. It’s incrementally and ultimately spectacularly modified, but, in essence, life is the adapted continuation of what came before.

A few thousand miles in east, Austrian holy man was planting a garden that would invigorate biology forevermore. Mendel was a monk but his legacy is of a scientific genius and world changing experimentalist. When Darwin was writing his masterpiece, Mendel had been studying pea plants and breeding them in tens of thousands. Large numbers make good statistics, what Mendel found in impressively large numbers was that, when crossing variants with one and another, the outcome in the offspring were entirely predictable. His experiments also resulted in determining that characteristics were inherited equally, one from each parent but that some of those characteristics were more equal than others. He bred tall plants with short ones and their offspring were always tall, rather than an average of the two heights. What followed was observation beyond that which is visible to the naked eye. New technologies of the twentieth century meant that the scale of biology was reducing from the organism to the cell, to the molecular and atomic level, and with this zooming in came the birth of modern genetics.

In 1953, Cambridge scientists Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the DNA double helix and the base pairing, they concluded the paper with one of science’s great understatement: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated, immediately suggests a copying mechanism for the genetic material”. By the 1960s, scientists knew that life was built of or by proteins, that proteins were built from amino acids, and that DNA was the hereditary matter that coded the proteins.

Descent with modification when traced backwards takes us to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (Luca). How did Luca originate is still the focus of research and the idea that a bolt of lightning and a primordial soup of chemicals kick started life is no longer a satisfactory explanation because now we know a lot more about the cells.

Louise Pasteur demonstrated that life does not emerge spontaneously, but life’s molecules do emerge spontaneously in the right environment. Molecules of life are not life yet itself, any more than a pile of bricks and lumber is a building.  At a minimum life is a metabolism, a network of chemical reactions that harvest energy and combines chemical elements into life’s molecular building blocks. Life also needs the ability to make more of itself – replicate- and pass its accomplishments to future generations. This does not mean that metabolism and replication must have appeared simultaneously.

I will try to share knowledge that brings us closer to a plausible answer to how these basic processes might have originated, may be separately, and finally got captured/organized inside a membrane forming a rudimentary cell.

Metabolism:

Metabolism can get going if its molecules are concentrated. Earlier speculations were like Darwin’s warm ponds, and then tidal pools were considered a variant of those ponds and now the hydrothermal vents on the pacific seafloor near the Galapagos Islands, are the top candidate as the laboratory where it all could start. Its raw materials come straight from Mother Earth herself, through searing hot fissures in the earth’s crust that overflow with nutrients, chemical energy, and the very catalysts that the warm little ponds lack. Hot water from these volcanic vents rises through chimneys abound in energy rich chemicals going through gradually decreasing temperature. Microbes have been found there using these chemicals and building their own organic molecules from energy rich inorganic molecules, as well as from vent’s abundant sources of carbon and other elements. These vents have been there since long before life, since then all ocean water would have passed through them more than ten thousand times, enough to seed the ocean many times over. Hydrothermal vents may well have been the laboratories that created the first metabolisms. This knowledge by itself wouldn’t specify which chemical reactions comprised the first innovation of life’s history. The best candidates are the reactions found in the oldest parts of our own metabolism, those we share not only with other animals but also with plants and microbes, including the hardy ones around the hydrothermal vents. Out of those possibilities, one candidate sticks out: a short cycle of chemical reactions called the citric acid cycle. The citric acid cycle uses ten chemical reactions to transform one molecule of citric acid, the substance that gives lemons their sour taste through several intermediates until it has completed one turn and manufactured another molecule of citric acid. This cycle does not violate any laws of physics. It cleaves the starting citrate molecule into two smaller molecules, from which its reactions build new molecules step by step, using as material the carbon from CO2 and feeding on energy-rich nutrients. Citric acid cycle can not only perform the work of building new molecules but it can also run in opposite direction and charge the chemical batteries that power life – our bodies run it in this way to create chemical energy from the food we eat.

Metabolism

 

Replication:

From dissipative structures and hyper cycles emerged the chain of nucleotide, ribose and phosphate that can both replicate itself and catalyze chemical reactions. This chain is ribonucleic acid, or RNA, the first sentence in the language of nature. Scientists have successfully recreated this life’s first spark in laboratory; they mixed the molecules in water, heated the solution, and then allowed it to evaporate leaving behind a residue of hybrid, half sugar, half nucleobase molecules. To this residue they again added water, heated it, allowed it to evaporate, and then irradiated it. At each stage of the cycle, the resulting molecules were more complex. At the final stage, they added phosphate. “Remarkably, it transformed into the ribonucleotide!” said Sutherland, a chemist at Medical Research Council (UK) laboratory of Molecular Biology.

There is also the famous Miller Experiment; this was a chemical experiment that simulated the conditions thought at the time to be present on the early Earth, and tested the chemical origin of life under those conditions. It was conducted in 1952[3] by Stanley Miller, under the supervision of Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago and later the University of California, San Diego and published the following year. After Miller’s death in 2007, scientists examining sealed vials preserved from the original experiments were able to show that there were actually well over 20 different amino acids produced in Miller’s original experiments. That is considerably more than what Miller originally reported, and more than the 20 that naturally occur in life. There is abundant evidence of major volcanic eruptions 4 billion years ago, which would have released carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen (N2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere. Experiments using these gases in addition to the ones in the original Miller experiment have produced more diverse molecules. More-recent evidence suggests that Earth’s original atmosphere might have had a different composition from the gas used in the Miller experiment. But prebiotic experiments continue to produce racemic mixtures of simple to complex compounds under varying conditions.

 

Membrane;

Most of the mechanism at the microscopic level is a function of positive and negative charge of the matter. The six basic elements that life is composed of are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur, these account for 99% dry weight of every living thing. Virtually all the molecules that we are composed of are carbon based. Carbon atoms being very light and with four valence electrons (i.e. electron in outer most shell available to pair with another available electron) combine rapidly with other five elements mentioned earlier to generate a vast diversity of substances. A hydrocarbon chain linked to a group of phosphorous and oxygen atoms manifest an electrical charge on the end bearing the phosphate group and no charge on the other end. This chemical as a whole attracts water on its charged end and repels it on the non-charged end. Such chemicals, called phospholipids tend to line up side by side with each other – the non-charged ends pointing away from the water while the charged ends point down into water (this is what essentially happens when a droplet of oil enters water instantly forming a film).These and other types of lipids tend spontaneously to form into drops, secluding materials on the inside from those on the outside. They have also been shown to form double layers when waves bring two surfaces together. When this happens the charged ends of the sheet of lipid molecules point towards each other sandwiched between the non-charged ends. In this way the first membranes could have formed – the first semipermeable boundaries between “inside” and “outside”, the first distinction between self and non-self.

Membrane

These fatty molecules self-organize into a tiny bubble, about the same size as a bacterial cell, a hundredth of a millimeter wide. The spontaneous self-organization is not quite that magical as it seems; if you had Cheerios as your breakfast cereal you will have seen fundamental universal forces conspiring to invoke spontaneous organization in your bowl, The oat rings want to float, because their density is lower than that of milk, gravity pushes them down, but the pressure underneath from the column of milk pushes them up. If, after first few mouthfuls, there is enough space at the surface, they will automatically jiggle themselves into a hexagonal pattern because this is the formation that allows the upward force to be distributed evenly.

It is thought that these bobble-headed phospholipid molecules would not have been difficult to find on the early earth, not because we have traces of them, but because they are easy to make with different recipes. As far as ingredients go, there is a simple sufficiency, and they make good contender for the first membrane. But as the origin of life is chemistry transitioning to biology, these prototype membranes needed to acquire complexity from their simple, self-organizing origin and are far off from a modern cell membrane. Modern cell membranes are studded with pumps and channels. Biological mailboxes, that are ion channels, lie embedded in the membrane to receive input signals from around the body and local environment and strong anchors link up neighboring cells to hold tissue together. There are five main ions (an atom or a molecule with unequal number of electrons and protons are called ions – more electrons make it negatively charged and more protons make it positively charged); sodium, potassium, calcium and hydrogen are positively charged, only chloride is negatively charged. Because they are electrically charged the movement of ions (across membrane through ion channels) creates an electric current. The difference between animal electricity and that which supplies our homes are simple – the fundamental properties of electricity were understood by the beginning of the 19th century, it is only in the last 60 years or so that we have begun to understand the origin of bioelectricity and only in the last fifteen years that we have had a glimpse of what the molecules (the ion channels) responsible for the electrical activity of our nerve and muscle cells actually looks like.

The evolution of simple cells from membrane bound matter had taken billions of years. Most scientists think that lipids combined with proteins to make translucent packages of lifelike matter before the beginning of life itself. No life without a membrane of some kind is known.

Probably not once but several times, amino acids, nucleotides, simple sugars, phosphates and their derivatives, formed and complexified, with the energy from the sun within the protection of a lipid bubble, absorbing ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) and other carbon nitrogen compounds from the outside as “food”. Fairly complex structures have formed spontaneously from lipid mixtures in the laboratories. Bubbles of lipid split in two at first simply from the strain of surface tension, each half carrying on its internal activity. The proto-cells simply broke down and disappeared, while others formed in some other tidal pool, each with a slightly different “modus operandi”.

Many dissipative structures, long chains of different chemical reactions could have evolved, reacted and broken down for millions of years before the elegant double helix of our ultimate ancestor (Luca) formed and replicated with high fidelity. Indeed living forms based on totally different types of replicating molecules may have arisen and developed for a while before disappearing altogether. But because they are the common denominator of all life today, it is clear that at some point lipid membranes containing RNA and DNA began to flourish. The numbers of these tiny bacterial spheres increased and diminished in a process of ebb and flow. At some point before 3,500 million years ago the evolutionary tide reached the level of life as we know it – that of the membrane bounded, 5000 protein, RNA-messaged, DNA-governed cell. The Earth’s microcosm, the age of bacteria, had begun. It took one billion years for prokaryotic cell to emerge because of nature’s hit and trial (not one miraculous hit) or natural selection and then two and a half billion years for the Eukaryotic cell to evolve. How cells formed and how they work is nothing magical, if we can understand these processes which we do now to a great extent, we can understand how matter became animated – no spirits or ghosts entering or leaving bodies, it is the atomic nature of ourselves.Membrane 2

What makes it hard to believe that we are basically matter animated is our emotional feelings of happiness, sadness, fear, anger and our capacity to the reasoned argument. It may seem uncomfortable to consider that your thoughts and feelings are determined simply by clouds of chemicals washing through your brain and by the changing patterns of electrical activity they produce. Yet with a moment’s thought you will recognize that this is indeed the case, for drugs, hormones and diseases that alter the levels of neurotransmitters in our brain affect us deeply, transforming our emotions and our behavior. A small amount of alcohol for example may usher in a more outgoing personality, cause us to behave irrationally, or sink us into melancholy. Dopamine, one of the most crucial neurotransmitter in the brain is intimately involved in desire and addiction. Pleasurable experiences such as sex, love and food trigger the release of dopamine in the brain’s reward center which increases nerve cell electrical activity, reinforcing our sensation of pleasure and craving to have more.

Without a doubt we humans are the top product of billions of years of evolution but knowing our humble beginnings and knowing how connected all life, including us is, will keep us humble. I would like to end with a quote from Curt Stager’s book titled “Your Atomic Self”, “Every atom in your body exists only because hydrogen appeared in the universe billions of years ago, anything that has to do with water, from the green tissue of a leaf to the moist bag of cells that is your body, is here because hydrogen atoms ride oxygen atoms all over the world and tremble just so in the warmth of a hydrogen fueled sun. Hydrogen given enough time does indeed become people. How utterly amazing it is how miraculous you are, and wonderful to be able to recognize and appreciate it too.

Tree of Life

Note: Information quoted above taken from following books;

Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan

Creation by Adam Rutherford

Your Atomic Self by Curt Stager

Spark of Life by Francis Ashcroft

Arrival of the Fittest by Andreas Wagner