ABC transporters are billion-year-old Maxwell Demons

nature.com

22 points·thedday··8 comments

Am I too dumb or is this title/abstract click bait?

A Maxwell Demon would break physics as we know it.

You should read the introduction to the paper. Its very readable and addresses this directly.

Basically the idea is that the demon is actually doing work, but the work is processing the information required to know when to open or close the door. Here the information processing is entirely a function of the state of the protein (the ABC transporter), which detects the molecule it transports by binding to it.

It’s actually a really beautiful idea. Living systems are information processors at a molecular level. That information is is entwined together across quadrillions of copies of tens of thousands of different proteins, building up an organism made of trillions of cells, which itself has higher level dedicated information processing nerve and brain cells

It is clickbait. ABC transporters are not Maxwell (sic) Demons but billion-year-old electrochemical-mechanical one-way valves. Would you click on that?

All a Maxwell's Demon is is a one-way valve.

It's a selective one-way valve, that's why you need a demon there to check each molecule.

I've always seen this thought experiment as implying that the key to decreasing entropy is a quantum of consciousness, whatever that may be.

Interesting! I saw it as illustrating that computation (or some act of "deciding" in the abstract) takes energy and is subject to thermodynamics. But then as consciousness and computation have some kind of relationship, there must be thermodynamic implications of consciousness.

For reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon.

Not a perfect analogy but it's close enough to be useful.

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