[ExI] will as essence

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 24/06/07, The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Empirical evidence for this is shown by the Protein
> Folding problem. Briefly this is a very old puzzle in
> biochemistry as to how newly translated proteins are
> able to fold so efficiently into their functional
> forms. Several decades ago a noted biochemist
> (Ramachandran?) demonstrated that the number of
> possible configurations for the bond angles in any
> moderate sized protein were so astronomically high
> that even trying hundreds of configurations per
> second, it would still take a protein molecule on
> average billions of years to find the correct
> configuration.

You are probably referring to Levinthal's Paradox, from 1968:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal_paradox
http://www.sdsc.edu/~nair/levinthal.html

It's not really a paradox because obviously proteins do fold into a
stable configuration in a particular environment, representing a
trough in electrostatic potential energy between the atoms. This
configuration should be deducible from the protein sequence, but
nature is not under any obligation to make it easy for us to compute
it.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou