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lp22 Horgan's book on science ending

Providing support for the idea that science is coming to an end is the recent book of John Horgan, a science reporter of the popular magazine, "Scientific American": The title of the book reads: "The End of Science: Facing the Limit of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age." (Addison-Wesley).

As mentioned in the homepage, there are two major domains of scientific knowledge, physics describing knowledge of the dead world, physiology describing that of the living. Since living cells are the fundamental units of all life, the basic science describing the living world is not physiology but cell physiology.

To be precise, John Horgan did not say specifically that cell physiology is at its end. However, his claim that SCIENCE-without qualification--- has reached the limit implies that cell physiology is at its end too. As a matter of fact, Horgan did not even mention "cell physiology" at all in his book. Instead, he built his argument on the opinion of a biologist, Gunther Stent by name. Stent claimed that after the elucidation of the double-helical structure of DNA and the deciphering of the genetic code, only three major questions in biology are left to explore: how life began, how a single fertilized egg develops into a multicellular organism and how the central nervous system processes information. Horgan then went on to argue that evolutionary biology and neuroscience have somehow reached the point of diminishing return, affirming his thesis that science as a whole has come to an end or about to do so.

Stent and Horgan seemed to have forgotten that there are no human decoders translating the generic code into protein sequences inside living organisms. It is the living cell itself that must not only decipher the code but also make the protein as dictated by the code. Those functions of the living cell are part and parcel of cell physiology and they are the most challenging and difficult task only beginning to be tackled in work based on the AI Hypothesis.

Similarly, neither Stent nor Horgan seems concerned that processing neural information is not handled by some human bioengineers adept at information processing inside the cells. That too must be handled by the specialized living cells called neurons and that information handling also is part and parcel of the physiology of the living cell. No less obvious is the role of cell physiology in the development of a single fertilized egg cell into a multicellular organism. Unaided by human hands, the fertilized ovum must also rely for its ordered multiplication and division on the functional activities of the living cells themselves and that too is cell physiology.

That a well-informed science reporter like John Horgan should have not even mentioned the word cell physiology in his book dealing with all science shows how bad things have really become. The shenanigans of a few die-hard defenders of the status quo and their subservient Washington bureaucrat allies have engineered the near-total disappearance of the science of cell physiology in the public mind (see also Homepage under "Only Three").