Stochasticity. My new favorite word.
Do you listen to RadioLab? If not, go now, I'll still be here when you get back.
Did you look? Cool, isn't it? I've been listening to the RadioLab Podcast for, I don't know, maybe a year or so now, and I have loved every single one of them. Some tiny fact or observation from each episode makes me think, really hard, about something I've never noticed, or known, before.
This current episode was entitled "Stochasticity," which is even more fun to say than "prodigious" and "troglodyte," if you ask me. It kind of slides off your tongue. It means "randomness," which was the subject of this last episode.
While I found the story of the girls & the balloon whimsical, and the story of the woman with the gambling addiction crushingly sad, something about the story about the E.coli left me simply amazed.
Genes produce proteins, which in turn make up the things that make us Go. Protein production is The Fundamental Process within any living organism. Until recently, we had no concept of how genes produced proteins; we assumed that it was a smooth, highly-polished process. It must be an almost perfect process, right? I mean, it's been taking place for, well, forever, and look at what it has yielded! Every creature, every Thing we could define as "living," houses this process within itself, is sustained by this process. EveryThing.The complexity and diversity of life on this planet is absolutely astounding, and we have always made this assumption that the most basic function that occurs within all living things must be nearly perfectly streamlined in order for anything to survive, let alone even to live in the first place.
Genes everywhere have been snickering behind our backs, because we couldn't have been more wrong.
As it turns out, protein production is a halting, herky-jerky process that barely manages to successfully get the job done. At the most basic level of our being, we are all a disorganized, haphazard mess. So is your spouse, your child, and your great-aunt Harriet.
And yet here I sit, a functioning being, with a heart that beats, lungs that breathe, and a boggling plethora of biochemical processes that continue to chug away within this amazing machine that, at its tiniest, simplest level, is just short of a trainwreck.
How you choose to wrap your head around such information is completely up to you. The shock of learning that this body that you desperately need to properly function is based on some half-assed process may consume you and leave you paranoid. You may hear this news and brush it off with a slight "uh, whatever," because it doesn't really interest you.
Personally, I take solace in it.
If all of existence is dependent on a process this screwed up and undependable, well, then, isn't anything fixable? We all make mistakes, and sometimes they are huge. But if the very thing that makes us Go is a noisy mess, and yet it still manages to produce the mind-blowing complexity and diversity of life on this planet, then anything can work if we just muck through.
(Besides, now you have a great excuse for when you've failed to follow through on something, regardless of the reason: "Hey, get off my back. My proteins don't even get made correctly half the time, so you shouldn't be surprised.")
