Space: Negative Selection, Physical Constraint, and Symmetry

Scientific Paper
Title	Space: Negative Selection, Physical Constraint, and Symmetry
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Marvin Eli Kirsh
Keywords	time and mirroring, symmetry, biological selection, witnessibility of the reflection, abstraction and scientific method
Published	2010
Journal	General Science Journal
No. of pages	13

Read the full paper here

Abstract

A descriptive role is suggested for uracil as a temporal divide in the immediate aspects of metabolism verses long term maintained genetic transmission. In particular, details of the mechanism of excision repair of uracil from DNA based on differential parameters of spatial distortion of the planar uracil molecule within the DNA helix verses RNA, when viewed in analogy to a proposed model for space involving the substitution of the act of mirroring for the element of time in processes and a descending complexity of structure with time of evolution, suggest the possibility that negative selection against decreased lifetime is the singular motive force of natural selection. The geometry of the Mobius strip, as it has a plane of mirroring symmetry, a twist able to account for torque in nature, an inversion of inside and out seen in biological structures, and an endless surface that can be accommodated to an atemporal account of physical processes is employed in a holistic model to elaborate a negative selection opposing death as zero volume or the logical existence of physical constraint to volumes that is represented as the ubiquitous inability of witnessing objects of any type to witness simultaneously both a self reflection and the reflection of self reflection. A role for uracil and its' physical structure, in a model in which both are evolved from the mirroring of events of the witnessing of energies, is elaborated in which temporal aspects such as those entailed in existing models of natural evolution are considered inappropriate in perspectives that are oriented positively towards a successful comprehension of processes; focus is placed instead upon the geometry and arrangement of physical spaces.

Overview

This is a short, densely written speculative essay by Marvin Eli Kirsh, an anthropologist at California State University Los Angeles who publishes across biology, physics and philosophy of science. Its subject is not a physical experiment but a proposed way of describing processes: Kirsh asks what follows if the element of time is replaced, in our account of natural processes, by the act of mirroring — so that structures are read as the residue of reflection events rather than as stages of a temporal sequence.

Two concrete anchors hold the argument in place. The first is the molecular biology of uracil: uracil occurs naturally in RNA, but in DNA it can be accommodated only in a significantly distorted physical arrangement, and it is exactly that strain which allows uracil-DNA glycosylase both to recognise it and to power its excision (Parikh 2000; Hopfner 2000). Discrimination here works "not by absolute shape but by a contrast of shapes to the shape of spaces it occupies." The second anchor is the geometry of the Möbius strip, chosen because it has a plane of mirroring symmetry, a half-twist that can stand for torque in nature, a continuity of inside with outside of the kind biological structures display, and an endless surface suited to an atemporal account.

From these Kirsh draws his central and deliberately counter-intuitive thesis: that nature possesses no mechanism for positive selection at all. "Nature selects by criteria of what it does not like rather than what it likes." Negative selection against death — death being modelled as zero volume, or as the closed space — is proposed as "the singular motive force of natural selection." The essay differs from a conventional evolutionary account in refusing the temporal frame of birth-toward-death entirely, and from a conventional physical one in taking witnessibility rather than measurement as the operative constraint on what exists.

The argument

The unwitnessable third person

The formal core of the paper is a constraint stated in terms of mirrors. In a mirror one can see oneself; a second mirror can be placed so as to see the first; but the initial witness cannot simultaneously witness itself and the second mirror reflecting the first — cannot view the self in both reflections at once. Kirsh calls this configuration the "third person witness": a stationary reflection of a real living form, absent altogether from observation, "both lifeless and selected against as unfitting."

This impossibility is what he means by physical constraint. It is proposed as the single obstruction that "births the particulars of history, volume, and time." He puts the consequence for physics bluntly: "if space is described physically as space-time, it is only space or time." A reflection and the reflection of that reflection "bear no commonality to be mutually present to the same situation," so although one might conclude the world is necessarily constructed of mirrors, the configuration can be reflected upon only — it cannot be brought to life with mirrors.

Open space, closed space and death

From the same premise Kirsh derives his account of selection. If the closed space is death, and if all that can logically exist is either open or closed space, then only open space exists, and "nature is that which seeks the open though it possesses only a mechanism to avoid the closed." Positive selection, in events temporally removed from the negative selection that excises uracil from DNA, is simply "not describable."

He notes in passing that relativity posits open space as that which supports life and closed spaces as coexisting regions unable to support it, in the special and general theories respectively; his own preference is for the speculation that "closed space both precludes and precedes open space," and that the phrase has coherent meaning only as a closing of space — a threat of premature death, fitting a world always in a state of becoming.

The Möbius model for uracil

The model proper is set out as a numbered series of postulates.

Time and space are the consequence of a path of energy. Travel of a full course of space, represented by the inversion of the Möbius strip, would entail the simultaneous witness of both a reflection of the energy path and its own reflection on the same coordinate of space — that is, death. Avoidance of this outcome produces "a breaking of velocity and the birth of a mass (i.e. uracil)," which acts as a physical divide or buffer preventing neutralization of the energy. The new mass is physical memory, carrying the parameters of its path from its original state as energy.
Three entities arise in a shared interval along the centre axis of the Möbius: DNA, the difference state between the point of inception of the energy transit and the near intersection of simultaneous witness; RNA, the difference state between the ground or end state and that same near intersection; and uracil, a death-preventing buffer of the same species as the long DNA and short RNA, whose birth "reflects a physical course of the near intersection with death" and which therefore shares features with both.
The centre line of the Möbius strip acts as the mirroring divide from which the symmetry of the uracil molecule is rendered, with replicating interlocked twisted DNA loops (absent or low in uracil) and shorter uracil-bearing chains (RNA) distinguished by their relative lengths along that centre line.
The smallest and most symmetric species is the most vulnerable and hence the most sequestered. Kirsh cites his own earlier experimental work reporting the absence of deoxyuridine and 5-hydroxymethyluridine in the DNA of three mouse tissues across ages (Kirsh 1986) as the "measured and not found" case. He connects this to the reported constancy of mutation rates (Drake 1991, 2006; Dolgin 2009): an inherent rate of change quenched by production of a stable intermediate and reduced essentially to correspond to lengths of polymers.
The process runs in reverse to a particle accelerator: rather than energy released by collision, "an invisible energy is captured into many species and intermediates and structures."
The counting of species is treated as evidence. Three atoms to each symmetrical half of uracil; three species RNA, DNA and uracil; four bases; codons as sets of three — against the fact that a witness occurrence can contain only two species at any instant. Kirsh takes this to indicate that one or two additional species beyond those entailed in the mutual witness event are produced in each near-death interval, "the third and fourth entities in each case must represent a negative selection from death." The image offered is of a train slowing to avoid a collision: a braking of fast-moving energy yielding the greatest diversity of bound structure rather than death. Metabolically active memory as strings of nucleotides is the product — genetic propagation as "physical pieces of path."
Birth, not death, is the terminus. The life process "does not proceed from the birth of life ... to a result of death, but a resulting unwitnessible birth from a near collision with a near witness of death of the self." It is witnessibility that produces death and is selected against; unwitnessibility that produces birth. Birth is postulated to undergo no natural selection pressure at all and to rely on the greatest conservation of open space, of diversity.
Space is witness-relative and non-additive. The spaces inside cells and inside the atom are open in the same sense that the vastness of the sky is perceived as infinite from the Earth's surface. A total volume of space is the sum of all volumes borne witness to, relative to the Earth and its population; such totals "are not amenable to witness dependent evaluation," being relative and non-additive to whole values made either from rulers or from theory that derives distance from constant values — "i.e. a constant velocity of light."

A cultural corollary

Postulate 7 carries an unusual applied claim. Kirsh proposes that the modern rise in the rate of autoimmune disease is caused by artificially applied selection pressures — pressures arising from the reflexive habit of ordering processes as a progression from birth towards death. Artificially selecting against death that is already at a maximum beneficial rate produces, on his account, a system-wide shift towards greater witnessibility, hence shorter lifetimes and quicker deaths. He ties this to inductive reasoning used to establish "the unverifiable, unwitnessible existence of conceived entities such as the constituents of atoms," which are then employed in mechanical contrivances "with which to breach naturally established proximities and divides." His formulation: "Acts of witness are being invented for the purpose of energy yield as the self is becoming blind to itself." He contrasts an Aristotelian orientation, aligning personal traits with a normalized statistical scale, with a Socratic one aligning truth and action.

Conclusion

The paper closes by restating volume and space as "a fact of the obstruction of the ground seeking path of energy, to produce energy possessing form." All natural biological processes are then to be viewed as the consequence of negative selection, in the absence of positive selection, to avoid the waste of energy — with the structure of DNA and RNA relatable to a model of mirror symmetry guarding "a natural and invisible energy bearing divide that is a prerequisite for the existence of life," and life processes indistinguishable in mechanism from all other processes, arising as "the atemporal mirroring of reflected energy to produce the proximal inheritance of physical form."

Kirsh is explicit that this is not meant as a picture: "The purpose of this demonstration is not to establish a visualizable grand universal geometry ... but to demonstrate a perspective from which processes may be viewed in order to acquire understanding of their nature."

Assessment

What is distinctive here is the attempt to make a single constraint — the impossibility of simultaneously witnessing one's reflection and the reflection of that reflection — do work in both biology and physics at once, and to derive from it a strictly negative theory of selection. The observation on which it rests is a real one: uracil is recognised in DNA by conformational strain rather than by shape alone, and Kirsh's reading of that as discrimination by "a contrast of shapes to the shape of spaces" is a fair characterisation of the biochemistry he cites. His insistence that only negative criteria are ever directly demonstrable in nature is a recognisable and defensible methodological position, closer to a falsificationist stance than the essay's idiom suggests. He also has direct laboratory standing on one specific point, having published the mouse-tissue uracil-derivative measurements he invokes. And the interest in taking space, not time, as the primary descriptive category connects the piece to the rest of his output on this wiki.

The difficulties are serious and mostly of one kind: the paper's central moves are asserted by analogy rather than derived, and it is rarely clear what would count as evidence against them.

The Möbius strip is chosen because it has properties that resemble features Kirsh wants to explain — a mirror plane, a twist, an inside-out continuity — but no mechanism links the geometry to the chemistry. The identification of DNA with "the difference state between the point of inception of the energy transit and a near intersection of simultaneous witness," and of uracil with the buffer born at that near intersection, is a labelling of molecules with positions on a figure; nothing in it predicts uracil's actual structure, its pairing behaviour, or the excision rate, and nothing in it could be measured to be wrong. The numerological step is weaker still: that uracil has three atoms per symmetric half, that there are three nucleic acid species and four bases, and that codons have three positions, is offered as convergent support for a scheme in which two witnesses generate a third and fourth entity — but these counts have well-understood chemical and information-theoretic explanations, and the paper does not engage them.

The invocation of the constant velocity of light and of relativity's open and closed spaces is likewise metaphorical rather than technical; nothing in special or general relativity is engaged at the level of its equations, and readers looking for a physical alternative to relativity will not find one derived here. The constancy of mutation rates is real and is cited correctly, but the model's connection to it — "an inherent rate of change is reduced essentially to correspond to lengths of polymers" — is a restatement rather than a prediction.

The autoimmune-disease corollary is the point at which the essay makes a testable empirical claim, and it is the least supported: no epidemiological data are presented, no alternative explanations are considered, and the causal chain runs through "witnessibility," which has no operational definition anywhere in the paper.

Finally, a reader should be warned about the prose. Sentences frequently run to two hundred words with multiple embedded clauses and non-standard punctuation, and key terms — "witnessibility," "near death encounter interval," "difference state" — are used before they are characterised and are never defined precisely. Kirsh's own framing invites a charitable reading, since he presents the work as a perspective for viewing processes rather than a fixed model; taken that way it is a philosophical essay in the tradition of natural philosophy rather than a scientific paper making checkable predictions, and it is best assessed on that footing.