LIMITATIONS
There were limitations to the modelling technology of 40 years ago when Sasi was doing his work – to say nothing of the limitations experienced by Crick and Watson 70 years ago. Modern simulations will be far better able to compute the huge number of component forces operating across base pairs and between adjacent base pairs, all with associated ring pucker shifts associated with waves of electron cloud movements.
The other thing the model building study must accommodate is the water. On this site in the Discussion of Sasi’s Work page 1 para 9 the reference to the human skeleton was noted as a deliberately unsatisfactory analogy that needed fleshing out. The water molecules are the living flesh without which analysis of DNA movement will be as imprecise as using a naked skeleton alone would be for analysing human movement. The highly polarised water molecules must play a huge part in the molecular dynamics of DNA.
However, far more important than the continuing reliance by theW-C DNA establishment on the results of the technology of 70 years ago in determining DNA structure it is the limitations in the minds of the science community amounting to almost willful obtuseness that is the major obstacle to change. This mindset is effectively allowing the limited 70 year old results to filter and block reasoned critiques and the well researched alternative findings produced by more advanced technology.
Author: But what about the anomalies?
Distinguished Emeritus: There are none that I know of.
GROUP THINK: a human universal
The reality of individual and collective human psychology is that once people accept a particular conceptual framework or paradigm they will ‘arrange’ for all evidence to support it. It’s so well understood it has a name and a body of research. It’s called Confirmation Bias. There’s a very good article on this by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds.
The article features the work of the anthropologists Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier. As you’ll see it is just the way human beings evolved to be. Our ancestors, Homo habilis, 2.31m to 1.65m years ago, hominid creatures roughly equivalent to modern bonobos except with bigger brains and much bigger brains relative to body size began occasionally venturing out from their favoured river/estuarine forest niche into the adjacent open grassland, increasingly successfully for longer lengths of time with their weak set of individual defences by deploying clever technology and with close collaboration.
The stone tools they had been using to open shellfish were carried by increasingly large groups and used as projectiles and cutting tools. Sticks were deployed as spears and clubs. Accurate throwing spearing and hitting remain highly prized and rewarded sports skills – along with running fast, not to outrun the predator but the other hominids:). Groups of armed hominids were able to go where no single H.habilis would otherwise dare. Following the Dunbar Principle the larger these groups became, the larger the brains became, driven by internal biological reproductive competition, a brain size arms race.
None of this would ever have begun or been sustained unless there was a strong commitment to a collective and hence a guarantee of the spoils being shared between closely related individuals. The initial formation of groups were facultative, biologically driven outcomes obeying biological/genetic laws.
Eventually as the hominins progressed through H.erectus (2.0m to as recent as 110,000 years ago) and on to H.sapiens from 230,000 years ago the brain size arms race delivered culture, cultural laws and the ‘idea’ of groups. This cultural concept, a much more flexible and politically adaptable cultural system of law, riven with contradictions and power plays is what leads us down the road to Confirmation Bias.
The concept of loyalty to the peer group, a soccer team, a nation (or to a petulant and demanding former President) is fundamental to human commitment and endeavour. The lionising of truly individualised, maverick thinking and the acceptance of game changing initiatives within established fields of human activity like science or business or even sport is more apparent than real. This is how our collaborative social and belief systems evolved and work.
Our speech and language and our symbols are cultural constructs whose meanings are subjectively agreed. Those meanings are at once casual and profound, mundane and highly political. We float in a subjective sea of agreed meaning that gives us our stability and sense of place.
In this discussion of the resistance to critiquing of the W-C we are talking about communal sub group faith and orthodoxy being stronger than belief in the broader, supposedly more substantive canons/rules of science.
We are in a place where well argued and evidenced alternatives are being ignored/ridiculed, where senior establishment figures are reduced to arguing for ‘banger DNA’, denying there are any anomalies and claiming that left side drive cars can’t make right turns. This is the point where the grip of noli tangere stability and collective loyalty has turned the field from science into a religion. The W-C has become a totem.
As Wu points out in his essay regarding discussions in the mid to late 1960’s: ‘Since all biologists “believe” the DNA double helix structure as god given, any mentioning of its alternatives cannot be published in “mainstream” biological journals, with very few exceptions. One of my colleagues has been studying the mechanism of DNA replication. I asked him about the problem of unwinding and rewinding. He replied, “That is not my problem. Go ask the enzymologists.” In short, nearly all biologists think DNA is super-natural.’
It is a feature of most major religions to have an absurd belief at their centre. This is the essential tenet of faith, the marker of the believer’s commitment. Unless the article of faith is absurd, if it was logically testable it would have no religious power, no binding magical force. By rejecting the logical arguments for alternatives the W-C true believer is declaring their high standing in the priesthood.
THE PRACTICAL REALITIES
At another level let’s look at it from the perspective of an ‘insider’.
Renowned guy: Well you know more about DNA than most science graduates because you’ve been able to focus on it.
So most molecular biology/biochemistry graduates won’t even have heard of the alternatives, still less examined them. They will have been rushed through DNA structure as a ‘given’ by teaching academics. Those teachers like Distinguished Emeritus will tell them there aren’t any anomalies or in the very unlikely event students press the question teachers will direct them to frankly absurd papers like Crick and Klug’s or worse the Stettler et al paper.
Then when they graduate they will either go into accounting, law, teaching, industry or academia. In the professions they’ll have busy lives; the work itself, relationships, student debt/mortgage, and children. Assuming a tiny minority of them have questions about W-C and want to investigate, how likely are they to take their overstretched time to indulge something that everyone in the field they have ever respected says is nonsense?
Renowned guy: But Sasi and his team are charlatans.
Which flatly contradicts
Distinguished Emeritus: Well, yes Sasi was very well qualified and his work was sound which is why he was published.
That contradiction notwithstanding you are still left with:
Author: So why wasn’t his work repeated and verified/refuted?
Distinguished Emeritus: There was no point. We’re all happy with the W-C model. There are so many examples in the Protein Data Bank which are bound to W-C DNA’s and so much work is done successfully on the premise that it’s W-C that there is no need to question it.
By now it should go without saying but it needs to be said anyway that the Protein Data Bank materials are all artifacts, ‘dead’ DNA. Again Ken Biegeleisen’s 8 minute video is a ‘must see’ on this – https://notahelix.net/notahelix_intro.mp4 .
And that small minority of graduates who stay in the field – those who go into industry and academia? We’ve established that they are unlikely even to have heard of the alternatives. As juniors they will be pursuing industrial or academic tasks which will often involve manipulating DNA. They are shown what to do and it works – there is no need to question it. They are like car drivers, getting the car from A to B is the important thing, the key task. They are not car mechanics or design engineers. They drive/work effectively without ever needing to know or bothering to question how pistons work.
In industry the scope for self motivated work is minimal – and who has the time, energy or resources – lab time etc – to indulge personal, outside work tasks?
In academia, despite the hyped sales pitch, semantics in key fields are at least passively aggressively and occasionally simply aggressively discouraged – see Wu’s letter, Xu’s critique and Mark Curtis’s experience on Sean’s website. As a junior you are expected to endorse and enhance the reputation of your boss/head of department/the University. You simply must play the game, remain loyal to the team. If you don’t you risk your reputation and without it you will not get the advancement on which your relationships, student debt/mortgage etc depend.
Then as you become a senior academic who has spent years playing the game you are still more beholden to that same regime, the priesthood. It is simply impossible to know whether Renowned Guy and Distinguished Emeritus have spent so long in it that they actually believe in the sanctity of W-C or are speaking politically, declaring their status. Which is to say they may not believe in W-C but know that since they understand the mountainous obstacles to progress they are simply better off not acknowledging the prospect of an alternative for the sake of easy lives for themselves and the establishment collective.
They are like business investors being presented with a novel innovation. They run the risk of failure and any new innovation has to get past the problem of first mover hesitancy, typically with a ‘killer application’. This would be like the spreadsheet which appealed so strongly to business that it transformed computers from fringe/nerd hobby devices into business machines.
Unless or until the alternative DNA models offer something that is overwhelmingly attractive no one much is going to risk breaking ranks.
The seductive comfort and effectiveness of the collective cannot be overstated. Unlike George Orwell’s ‘1984’ in which ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’ the establishment W-C consensus in the face of anomalies requires no Big Brother or Room 101 and is willingly accepted for the sake of relative ease of life.
It’s a religious orthodoxy. However, like all major religions which sell themselves on brotherhood and love, it will, if crossed by ‘heretics’ or ‘non-believers’, rapidly reveal sharp elbows, teeth, and knives, Big Brother and Room 101, as Tai Te Wu testifies.
SASI BREAKS OUT
Quite remarkably, despite all of this Sasi was able to break out and get the critical work done. As we saw he couldn’t get any molecular biology or biochemistry post doc students to work with him. Even after he had gone outside the field to the physicists Gupta and Pattabiraman the two of them were ribbed by their post doc peers at Bangalore for committing career suicide for working on alternative DNA.
So there are massive conceptual, ideological, hierarchical and practical/financial barriers to asking what are essentially very basic questions about the W-C model and the orthodoxy surrounding it. Sasi was able to maintain his critical scientific faculties and was prepared to express them/stand by them.
This is partly testimony to his professionalism. Talking to him recently he told a story of how as a visiting scientist at NIH under David Davies (not the editor of Nature) in 1963/4 he had done some work which a decade later another scientist was unable to replicate despite following Sasi’s annotated procedures. Davies asked him to come and effectively prove it hadn’t been a fluke. Sasi returned and delivered the identical results in a week. Sasi was an extraordinarily methodical and careful scientist.
But the other part of the question remains. What was it that drove him to question W-C when so many others wouldn’t? This is to the extent that despite approving NIH funding for the work in Bangalore Davies asked Sasi why on earth he was challenging the W-C.
The biggest reason is probably that Sasi was 20 when the double helix emerged. This means he experienced the debates and the development of the field as a knowledgeable adult. He retained the required objectivity and was not overawed by the model’s iconic status.
However the short version which emerged from a recent conversation with him is that he was affronted by the sloppiness of the arguments supporting the W-C and the sheer lack of scientific evidence for the assertions of right handedness. There is the same sense of outrage in Tai Te Wu, Ken Biegeleisen and You Cheng Xu’s work and writings. Mark Curtis has had many rebuffs and is as he says ‘…dismayed and incredulous at the lack of respect for Euclidean geometry and some fundamental principals. The inherent confirmational bias that comes as consequence of Nobel prizes and established thinking makes one despair!‘
The author, to an extent, has the benefit of both anthropological training and the pure amateur detachment of someone with no professional skin in the game. The strongest emotion is astonishment that such an important area of science is being hijacked by such unscientific behaviour. While there is a definite sense of outrage it is leavened by the training/perspective and he finds himself so often simply mystified at the absurdity of it all.
The whole point is that science rules and procedures were expressly established as a way of negating this well understood human psychological/perceptual problem and preventing orthodoxy and subjectivity from wrecking science. It is only when the work of Sasi, Xu, Wu, Biegeleisen, Hoogsteen and the others is repeated and validated or refuted that anything can progress. This progression would include assessment of the work of Curtis and the author’s ASDT.
This is one of the most important molecules known to science for goodness sake. Who knows how much more science is being missed because this area is so crap. It’s a massive and embarrassing failure of scientific professionalism.