Fascinating article - thanks for posting it.
I don't see that it particularly 'support' any belief in god, however.
I think I can see how it could be taken that way - especially this rather slanted sentence And it will mean a return to the pre-darwinian conception that underlying all the diversity of the life is a finite set of natural forms that will recur over and over again anywhere in the cosmos where there is carbon-based life. .
However, it's surely not that revelatory that molecular structures will only form in certain shapes, according to the electronic stability of each? Meanwhile, if there are 4000 possible folds and the known proteins 'only' use ~1000 of them, this seems a fair proportion: especially as some will inevitably be more stable, or take less energy to reach, and so will be favoured; while given the common origin of life on our planet, it's to be expected that the same folds would be used and re-used.
Given the size of molecules, I don't think they'll have that much influence on physical shape beyond the microscopic, however. This is IMO still going to be primarily determined by suitability to environment. They may surely limit how the most suitable shape is constructed... but they don't say what that shape will be.
And I think we could say the same about life (carbon-based or otherwise) anywhere: for example, I'd expect anything which swims fast in a dense liquid medium as a way of life to develop a streamlined form, just as cuttlefish, fish, newts, ichthyosaurs, penguins and dolphins all have. |
