From Malcolm Lamming
In Paul Davies’s article on the emergence of life, the positions of the reductionists – who claim life can be predicted from the laws of atomic physics – and of those who support “strong emergence” – who believe additional laws emerge at various levels of complexity – were I thought very well described, and I do not know which is right, maybe neither (5 March, p 34). However, the rest of the piece struck me as extremely woolly thinking.
To give just one example, the availability of a computer to do the 100-amino-acids divining is an engineering problem, not a physics or fundamental reality problem. The revelation at the end of the article, that a quantum computer with 400 particles could have calculated the qualities of the 100-amino-acid molecule, made that clear. Why make the assumption that the nature of the universe is a function of the current state of the computer industry on Earth?
By the way, I really liked the fish sculpture graphics.
Littlehampton, West Sussex, UK
