Molecular Meetic

I can recognize my wife's voice at the other end of a busy fruit market, and she doesn't even have to shout that loud. If that fails, I can phone her on her mobile. Now if you don't have a wife, you can try Meetic. Meetic is a way to find your match - hopefully your exact fit - over the heads of not just a crowd, but over oceans, mountain ranges and through the haze and concrete of uncounted housing estates. 

But how do biological molecules, who are finding their matches and mating at speeds measured in kilohertz, find each other? We are told, - without any proof at all - it's random Brownian motion in the aqueous medium, helped along by body temperature. A nucleotide is caught by the right ribosome just in time to be added to a lengthening chain of DNA. That's so neat: was it just lined up and waiting? Or does it have to jostle past all the other stuff suspended in the bio soup, like that lady waving a bunch of bananas trying to get to where she can pay for them?

This question should be one of the biggest conundrums in science, and I'll tell you why in a second.    What algorithms would be needed to quantify the forces attracting two complementary 3D configurations through the molecular jostle? Can an enzyme's attraction to its substrate be simply calculated by totalling energy values for the covalent bonds, hydrogen bonds, van der Waals forces, electrostatic forces of the final union and dividing that by the square of the distance? How do we factor in the jostle? Or does that lady zip through the crowd like Cat Woman?

Or can molecules sniff each other out over distances, and regardless of relative orientation?

OK, I'm on to sniffing, and before you think of that as just an olfactory metaphor, you need to ask yourself, what do you know about the sense of smell?

Among the questions science cannot answer, the elephant in the room is consciousness. I don't mean the waking/sleeping kind, but the subjective experience of the mind. And science's inability to explain consciousness is not due to a lack of progress, but to its reductive experimental method. While scientists put off answering the question of consciousness sine die, perhaps in the vague hope that some new discovery will pop up, Tantrik yogis have been studying it for centuries, using a completely different method. Namely by training their consciousness and expanding its awareness. Like a musical instrument: if you want to know more about it, start practicing. Their answer - that everything is all part of a single consciousness - sounds flip, and is easy to dismiss as just another example of religion being a failed science. The parallels between the Shiva/Shakti dance and the wave/particle ambiguity are just coincidence, and what do those yogis know about real things?   

But here's the thing. How could quantum biophysicists study the possibility of Molecular Meetic? If a way can be found to calculate expected values of molecular pairing rates in biosynthetic and enzymatic reactions using the random Brownian motion model, and compare these with actual values, they might be forced to revisit Rupert Sheldrake's question: how do we know a stone has no consciousness? 

I'll leave that with the specialists,  but now I'm off to crack open that bottle of Connemara single malt that's been sending me its complex molecular signals through the kitchen wall as I write.