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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LLCF who wrote (11551)	12/25/2010 3:28:48 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

I see two problems - not dealbreakers, but definitely areas of concern - with the claims of biophotonics. 1) The emissions are ultraweak and thus in danger of being caused by an unidentified systematic error. If the science were airtight, I'd expect to find the pubs in Nature and PNAS. 2) Assuming the emissions are as claimed, their signaling role appears hard to isolate. Very low photon signals can be falsified or copied by extraneous events. How does the cell know that an incoming photon or small number of photons is an actual signal? If cells do use photons in a way analogous to hormones, a receptor should be identifiable ... a molecule that efficiently collects the photons and transduces them into a conventional molecular signal ... a second messenger molecule, or activation/inhibition of a voltage gate. It is reasonable to postulate that a weak signal requires a sensitive and efficient receptor. Efficiency requires high absorbance for the wavelength used, and sensitivity means stored potential for signal amplification. So my big question is ... where are the dark mousetrap molecules? (Rhodopsin serves that purpose in human eyes and in some bacteria.) It is far easier for me to believe that the photons are being emitted as a sort of random quantum waste, phosphorescence or luminescence from unlikely but not entirely forbidden orbital-state transitions in molecules with some pigment properties, which includes nucleic acids and most proteins. I am not saying "it cannot be so". But it has a sort of cold-fusion feel to me, or perhaps akin to homeopathy. I dismiss homeopathy as a sort of molecular astrology - claims of large effects mediated by tiny inputs whose principal virtue is complexity. As astrophysicists might say - Merry X-Mass!