confidence level: I am a physicist, not a biologist, so don’t take this the account of a domain level expert. But this is really basic stuff, and is very easy to verify. Recently I encountered a scientific claim about biology, made by Eliezer Yudkowsky. I searched around for the source of the claim, and found that he has been repeating versions of the claim for over a decade and a half, including in “the sequences” and his TED talk. In recent years, this claim has primarily been used as an argument for why an AGI attack would be extremely deadly. I believe this claim is factually incorrect.

This is my article on one of the dumbest and most obviously false claims Yudkowsky has ever made, about biology not using covalent bonds.

  • titotal@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Thanks, I love these answers! I’ll drop a DM on matrix for further questions.

    This rather economic recycling allows a living cell to absorb damage that would be catastrophic when you just assume that everything works forever just as you imagined. I don’t have a guess how much more energy would be expended in reassembly of diamondoids, @titotal@awful.systems might have an estimate, but i guess it’s some 1-2 orders of magnitude more

    The DMS researchers were estimating something on the order of 5 eV for mechanically dropping a single pair of Carbon atoms onto the surface of diamond. I’m not sure how to directly compare this to the biological case.

    • skillissuerEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      so we’re looking at something in the order of 2x more energy for pair of carbons than for putting single aminoacid in protein, and aminoacids are much larger. (some 4.2x70kJ/mol per ATP -> AMP + 2Pi), and that’s including everything around protein synthesis except aminoacid synthesis, compared to just deposition of carbons (that’s without picking them up?), and it’s when you have clean prepared surface, in real life this also takes some considerable energy