Re: Dr. Gilbert Ling, "The Physical Basis of Life"

I need to do some more reading of Ling's ideas before I can claim even a rudimentary understanding of what his body of work stands for. But my intuitive reaction thus far is that he is trying to understand and/or define the organization of a living cell via the mechanics of a living cell. This is where my disquiet is coming from. I think he's got so many basic ideas right that it would be tragic if he were to categorically state something that turns out to be beside the point....

I don't know if he's read any of my father's work, but I don't see echoes of it in what he's done in his career. That's not a good sign, because he knew George Karreman, who was a colleague/friend of my father's and they seemed to travel in some of the same circles. He got his PhD at U of Chicago, albeit ten+ years before my father was there to work on his. There should have been some overlap...

Judith

----- Original Message -----

From: Tim Gwinn

To: ***

Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 1:45 PM

Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Dr. Gilbert Ling, "The Physical Basis of Life"

I have never heard of Ling before. His "association-induction hypothesis" sounds interesting, at least at first glance. There is a quick synopsis of it on his website at:

http://www.gilbertling.org/lp6c.htm

Even if his hypothesis is correct and it supplants the "membrane-pump theory", it is not clear to me that this hypothesis would tell us the key discriminator of life vs. non-life or, for that matter, that cancer, AIDS, etc will succumb to cures due to insights related to this hypothesis as his website's main page insinuates.

One consequence of his theory I do find interesting is that 'association' and 'induction' both specify constraint relationships between molecules of water, protein, etc. inside the cell. (As opposed to these molecules simply floating around in solution inside the cell.) This brought to mind Rosen's discussion of a maximally, or totally, constrained system (1986, "Causal Structures in Brains and Machines", Int. J. Gen. Sys. 12:107-126, or AS 427-428). In such a system, a maximal number of nonholonomic constraints create a system where "...the impressed forces of conventional analytic mechanics disappear completely; their only role is to get the system moving. Once moving, the motion is completely described by the constraints; i.e., by a system of first-order differential equations." [1986, p. 108] In such a system, the velocities are determined by the configuration alone. Rosen later notes that this is the only kind of mechanical system which can accomplish the experimental result that Morowitz pointed out years earlier: that a bacterial cell could be carefully frozen to absolute zero (where all dynamics (all momenta) are removed) and then re-thawed (with no real control over the specific imparted momenta) and the cell could continue to grow. So, I wonder if the constraints represented by "association-induction" take part in making a cell a totally constrained system.

I also wonder how, if at all, his theory impacts the notion of reaction-diffusion in a cell.

Regards,

Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:***On Behalf Of Judith Rosen
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 8:49 AM
To: ***
Subject: Dr. Gilbert Ling, "The Physical Basis of Life"

Does anyone on the list know the work of Dr. Gilbert Ling? I got a newsletter from I-SIS.org.uk, which is Dr. Mae-Wan Ho's organization, about some new book she is recommending by Dr. Gilbert Ling. In the description of Ling, I saw a lot of similarity in how my father's work and career had gone, although Ling has had a lot more direct trouble. I did some research on Ling and he has a website where he talks about how the peer-review system of publication is actively detrimental to science and innovation (which was why my father was creating BioTheory).

However, what lies at the center of all of his professional woes seems to be the issue of his theory of cell membrane activity versus the "sodium pump" theory that has been widely accepted by the scientific and medical communities. More than this, if I'm interpreting him correctly, there is Ling's assertion that life at the cellular level is the root of all life. He says we need to understand what's really going on if we want to learn about life in general. He's an experimental scientist, not a theorist, although his work is decidedly verging into the theoretical realm of foundations and I'm troubled by what I see as the conclusions he's driving towards. Partly I'm troubled because I think he's correctly diagnosed that there is something very wrong with how physics approaches biological systems, but I think he has latched onto very limited replacements.

Is anyone familiar with Ling's body of work?

Judith