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Your references are all computer animations, smoothed and simplified. I'll quote liberally from https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/02/03/buffeted-by-t
by eesmith 4y ago
Your references are all computer animations, smoothed and simplified. I'll quote liberally from https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/02/03/buffeted-by-the-winds-of-chanc/ https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/02/03/buffeted-... on an animation of "Inner Life of a Cell" by Harvard Biovisions:
> Here’s the central problem: molecules don’t behave that way. What is portrayed is wonderfully precise movement; it looks like the molecules are all directed, purposeful, and smooth. Take for instance the behavior of kinesin, that stalk-like molecule seen marching in a stately way down a tubule, with two “feet” in alternating step, towing a large vesicle. That’s not how it moves! We have experiments in which kinesin is tagged — it’s towing a fluorescent sphere — and far from a steady march, what it does is take one step forward, two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one back, one forward … it jitters. On average it progresses in one direction, but moment by moment it’s a shivery little dance. Similarly, the movie shows the monomers of tubulin zooming in to assemble a microtubule. No! What it should show is a wobbly cloud of monomers bouncing about, and when one bumps into an appropriate place in the polymer, then it locks down. I made this same criticism in my review of Mark Haw’s excellent book, Middle World, which does get it right. For purposes of drama and minimizing complexity and confusion, though, the animators of that video have stripped out one of the most essential properties of systems at that scale: noise, variability, and the stochastic nature of chemical interactions.
> That’s particularly unfortunate, because it is the seeming purposefulness of the activity of the cell that has made that clip so popular with creationists. It fits with their naive notions of directed activity at every level of the cell, and of their denial of the central role of chance in chemistry and biology.