[godelski]

Run a game of life for a billion years and tell me if your answer is the same. You can accelerate that so I'll wait.

Does the time matter? A ruleset doesn't change with time.

If you're still unconvinced, get a degree in physics. I'm not sure how you could get through that and still not believe that complexity rises from simplicity and how you end up getting drops in that complexity, which we call emergence, before becoming more complex than before.

[slashdave]

And now you compare biology to the game of life...

[godelski]

I want you to read what you wrote again...

But you really do seem to be trying hard to miss the point entirely. Life has actually nothing to do with what I said did it. And I can assure you, by nature of being one, that physicists are certain that nature follows simple rules, even if we don't know them.

We are also absolutely confident in that complexity rises out of simplicity. Go look at anything like fractals, chaos theory, perturbation theory, or you should have run into at least bifurcation diagrams in your differential equations course. If you haven't taken diff eq, then well.... perhaps the problem is that your confidence in your result is stronger than your expertise. If not, well... make a real argument because I'm not going to hold your hand through this any longer.

[slashdave]

Except I have a PhD in physics...

The thing is, Biology is anything besides simple.

[godelski]

For fucks sake man, all the physics problems we end up doing start from a relatively simple description of a system, which turns into a huge mess and pages of writing trying to solve it, and you end up with another relatively simple description.

I just don't understand how someone could even get through an undergraduate degree in physics without seeing this complexity in E&M. You got 4 rules that describe everything. Each rule can be written on a short line and only contain a handful of symbols. In other words: those rules are simple. Yet that doesn't mean they're very useful in that form, but you can derive the rest from them. That is exactly what I'm talking about with the game of life.

How the fuck did you get through differential equations without seeing how complexity arises from simplicity, let alone Jackson or Goldstein!?

Idk man, either you're lying or being disingenuous. You're the only one who said biology is simple. No one even implied that! If you're not lying about your degree you're willfully misinterpreting the comments. Why? For what purpose?

[slashdave]

I had to break it to you, but you cannot predict protein folding directly from first principles. Nor can any deep-learning model.

You can use molecular dynamics. Maybe, if you are lucky and have the computational resources to do so.

You might want to relate molecular dynamics to "simple rules", but you would be delusional. Molecular dynamics typically use classical forcefields parameterized on data and some quantum simulations. It is not based on first principles.

Proteins fold in patterns generated over millennium of natural selection. It is not simple.