Far From Equilibrium
Game · what life is: the dish, the clock, the ladder
▶ Play this chapter The script
Every line as it is spoken in the film, in order.
Dr. Bob used to say you can't talk about illness until you know what life is. So before we get to what this system does, here's what life is.
A thin layer of oil in a dish, heated from below. At first the heat just creeps up through it. Turn it up a little more, and the oil sorts itself into hexagons, warm rising in some places and cool sinking in others.
Nobody arranged that. Billions of molecules started moving together because moving together carries the heat away faster.
Dr. Bob would say,
Dr. Bob Melamede, in his own words · Cannabis Hemp Conference & Expo, 2017“Collections of molecules, like us, will get smarter as long as we can make the universe stupider quicker.”
Now a chemical mix that should turn one even color and stay that way. Instead, rings of blue spread out, fade, and come back for as long as the chemicals keep reacting.
When Boris Belousov sent this to a journal, the editors turned it down as impossible. The physics they had in mind was written for things settling down.
You are also a chemical mix. Your heartbeat, your breathing, your sleep and waking all keep time.
Too little flow and nothing happens, and too much tears the pattern apart. Life lives in the band between.
Dr. Bob took this one rule and climbed with it. Energy flowing through chemicals in an early ocean organized them, and some of those mixes got good enough to copy themselves. In his view, that was the start of life.
Let's visualize what that means. Energy always wants to spread out, and patterns help it move. Swirl a bottle of water as you pour it, and it empties faster. But a whirlpool dies the moment the flow stops. A pattern that copies itself doesn't wait to be rebuilt. It makes more of itself, and every copy moves more energy along. In 2009, scientists watched RNA molecules copy each other in a test tube, and the fastest copiers took over. Dr. Bob's conclusion: give a planet enough sunlight and enough time, and life isn't a long shot. It's what the energy builds to get where it's going.
Cells that shared the work became bodies. Bodies became families, then towns, then markets. Each one holds its shape only while something flows through it.
The planet does it too. Sunlight arrives hot and leaves as cooler heat into the dark.
He called this a dynamic fractal. The same pattern shows up at every size, but each round changes the world the next round has to live in. Early microbes filled the air with oxygen, and everything after them had to learn to breathe it.
Here's the lock from the beginning back now. Anything that lives on flow has the same problem: the world keeps changing, so it has to keep updating.
In mice, the CB1 lock helps with that. Move the hidden platform, and normal mice find the new spot. Mice without CB1 keep going back to the old one.
Dr. Bob Melamede, in his own words · homeostasis talk, 2018“The mice lacking cannabinoid receptors only go to the old place. They cannot relearn.”
In Bob's picture, a cell that can't let go is stuck in its past. Which raises a question: what happens when it isn't one cell that has to let go, but your whole body, after a fight?
Sources
Every claim in this chapter with its grade: E established · M emerging (one or two studies, or animals only) · F framework.
- EBénard H. Les tourbillons cellulaires dans une nappe liquide. Rev Gén Sci Pures Appl 1900;11:1261–71, 1309–28. (the hexagonal cells; in thin layers open to the air, surface tension does much of the driving: Pearson, J Fluid Mech 1958)
- EPrigogine I. Time, structure, and fluctuations. Science 1978;201:777–85. (his 1977 Nobel lecture: far from equilibrium, energy flow can create and keep order, the dissipative structures) link
- FBob Melamede, PhD. Talk at the Cannabis Hemp Conference & Expo, 2017 (recording; the quotes at part 2, 4:28, 6:52 and 10:10, and part 3, 11:33). His framework.
- EWinfree AT. The prehistory of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillator. J Chem Educ 1984;61:661–3. (Belousov’s paper turned down as impossible, 1951) link
- EGlass L. Synchronization and rhythmic processes in physiology. Nature 2001;410:277–84. link
- EDanø S, Sørensen PG, Hynne F. Sustained oscillations in living cells. Nature 1999;402:320–2. (NADH, an energy carrier, rising and falling in waves inside yeast cells) link
- FRobert (Bob) Melamede, PhD. Backward-looking and forward-looking: a far-from-equilibrium reading of the endocannabinoid system. His framework, not scientific consensus.
- FEngland JL. Statistical physics of self-replication. J Chem Phys 2013;139:121923. (a lower bound on the heat a self-replicator must produce: copying is always paid for by flowing energy) link
- ELincoln TA, Joyce GF. Self-sustained replication of an RNA enzyme. Science 2009;323:1229–32. (two RNA enzymes catalyze each other's synthesis; in competing populations, recombinant replicators arose and came to dominate) link
- MMaynard Smith J, Szathmáry E. The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford University Press, 1995. (cells cooperating into bodies; carrying it on to towns and markets is this chapter’s extension)
- ETrenberth KE, Fasullo JT, Kiehl J. Earth’s global energy budget. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 2009;90:311–23. (sunlight in, infrared heat out to space) link
- MVarvel SA, Lichtman AH. Evaluation of CB1 receptor knockout mice in the Morris water maze. J Pharmacol Exp Ther 2002;301:915–24. link
- FBob Melamede, PhD. Cannabinoids: homeostasis regulators, from cells to society. Talk, 2018 (recording; the quotes at 2:17, 8:21 and 10:29). His framework (the mouse finding he describes is Varvel & Lichtman 2002).
- ELyons TW, Reinhard CT, Planavsky NJ. The rise of oxygen in Earth’s early ocean and atmosphere. Nature 2014;506:307–15. (The Great Oxidation Event about 2.4 billion years ago, after photosynthesizing microbes.) link