Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> wrote: Their reaction is understandable. >> > > Yes, of course. But it is really in the same class as the rejection of > experimental evidence indicating cold fusion.
I do not think so. Biology is very different from chemistry or physics. There are many rare physical effects that can only be triggered on earth with great difficulty, such as inside a Tokamak or an accelerator. These effects can never play a role in biology. Biology has a more limited repertoire of reactions and materials. It can only make use of benign reactions and readily available, non-toxic materials. No species on earth can be dependent on elements such as gold, because it is not readily available, or arsenic. There are some ocean plants that concentrate iodine from extremely low concentration sea water, but they can do this because sea water is constantly moving with the tides, so new water is constantly presented to the plants. Plants or animals on land could never do this. > First, anything that can happen in biology tends to be widely exploited by >> many different species. Even phenomena that do not seem possible in biology >> sometimes turn out to be possible, and when they do, we have no trouble >> finding examples of them. >> > > You could say that any fusion reaction in palladium loaded with deuterium > would have been noticed before. > That is incorrect. Only a handful of people in history ever looked at palladium loaded with deuterium. Mizuno and maybe a dozen others. The material never arises in nature in amounts large enough to be detected. It is artificial, like conditions inside an accelerator. Whereas any biological process that can occur at all tends to occur everywhere, constantly. There are practically no unique or one-of-a-kind reactions or events that occur in only one species. The only thing that comes to mind is high intelligence and high technology in homo sapiens. > We don't know how many species can manage nuclear reactions (if any). Most > organisms would find the radiation intolerable. The only kind of cold fusion reaction that could occur in organisms would be the reactions that produce no measurable effect other than heat, no matter how closely you look, no matter how sensitive the instrument. People have been looking for radiation, neutrons, particles or what-have-you for 21 years. With some reactions, there is no trace of them, so I conclude they are not there and will never be found. I assume there must be a continuum between plasma fusion reactions that always produce dangerous emissions, and cold fusion reactions that never produce them. If biological cold fusion exists, obviously it would have to be the benign side of the scale. A cell that produced a dangerous reaction would kill itself off and cause extinction. Only the benign reactions would survive. > That's why deinococcus radiodurans was a good place to look. It can handle > radiation designed to kill everything else, totally. It has multiply > redundant copies of its DNA. Ask yourself, Jed, why it wastes so much energy > on that redundancy. Obviously because it lives in heavy water. That's a lot less dangerous than producing the radiation inside the cell! I cannot imagine that any form of cold fusion that produces radiation can happen in biology. > I'm not suggesting that cold fusion is *necessary,* nor even that it would > be probable. I'm merely suggesting that, if cold fusion is real, and > particular if it is based on something like cluster fusion, it would not be > terribly surprising if proteins can pull it off. Without knowing anything about how cells might or might not produce an NAE, I think we can probably rule it out based on old-fashioned evolutionary principles. If cellular cold fusion were possible, it would be a tremendously valuable adaption. It would greatly enhance the chances of survival for many reasons, such as the ability to generate heat (reducing the need for food), and the ability to make elements in short supply. A species with the latter ability would not suffer from diseases such as pellagra or iodine deficiency. The DNA for that mechanism would have been passed to many different species, and it would have changed and adapted to many other uses. The adaption would probably arise independently in different species, the way vision and flight have. So it would not be a rare phenomenon, difficult to observe. It would be everywhere you look, with such intensity you could not miss it. I find it hard to imagine that chickens could evolve the ability to transmute material into calcium, but other birds and species related to them would not have any ability to do other transmutations and cold fusion energy releases. The ability would confer so many advantages on the animals, the DNA would have spread far and wide by now. It does not resemble the specialized and limited ability to produce visible light in a lightning bug, which would not confer advantages to other species. Bat sonar is another example of a specialized ability would not be valuable for most species. (Both are only useful to animals active in the evening with low light.) - Jed
