jimmydasaint

Hi guys, I am jimmydasaint (taken from the film 'Things to do in Denver When You're Dead').

I am the most boring man alive on Earth. I have a PhD in Biology and am a teacher in a tough-ish school in North London. On most days , I just spend the whole day talking to myself, because no-one listens and then bore my friends at the weekends. I know I must be boring because people start to yawn within 5 minutes of speaking to me (including pupils) and then have been known to fall asleep. As along as this works on the pupils, I don't mind. However, I do try to make lessons etc...interesting. Have you fallen asleep yet?

My interests are Molecular Genetics and Quantum Physics but really my knowledge is 10 miles wide and one inch deep (i.e. shallow knowledge of a lot)

You are asleep now, I am sure!

I think compelling evidence for the existence of prokaryotes before eukaryotes in endosymbiosis comes from the sheer similarity of mitochondrial and rickettsial DNA as well as other bacterial features. Moreover, this is going on today in real life -

" In two groups, the eukaryotic nature of the endosymbiont can be seen by its retention of a vestige of a nucleus (called its nucleomorph).

A group of unicellular, motile algae called cryptomonads appear to be the evolutionary outcome of a nonphotosynthetic eukaryotic flagellate (i.e., a protozoan) engulfing a red alga by endocytosis.

Another tiny group of unicellular algae, called chlorarachniophytes, appear to be the outcome of a flagellated protozoan having engulfed a green alga."

These are functional living organisms.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/E/Endosymbiosis.html

I assumed this discussion would lead to Penrose and Hameroff's quantum consciousness at some point, and it did. If I understand it correctly, decoherence can occur at room or body temperatures. Moreover, the sheer number of tubulin subunits (tubulin proteins make up microtubules) may behave like switches in a quantum computer. Meaning considerable computational power. The old argument has to be recycled at this point because Penrose postulated that Artificial Intelligence algorithms would not be able to approach his tiling problem. So far , he seems to be correct. You would expect quantum effects in electron 'shunting' mechanisms such as bacteriochlorophyll and this has been shown to be the case as well with the electron 'choosing' the most energy efficient pathway. Wierd stuff huh?