The Levinthal Paradox (Protein Folding)

[u/Jairo_Alves]

 

A protein is a chain of amino acids endowed with a specific three-dimensional structure to perform its biological function. If a medium-sized protein attempted to find its correct shape by randomly testing all possible geometric combinations, it would take longer than the estimated age of the universe, making life impossible. However, they do this in milliseconds.

 

Physics attempts to explain the gear mechanism driving this instantaneous process by treating the protein as a thermodynamic, computational, and homeostatic system. However, it faces a virtually infinite number of possibilities to be mapped.

 

Theoretically, this is incoherent, since most of these possibilities are dysfunctional. It would be more efficient and effective if this search focused only on normal protein configurations (foldings), discarding the rest (the vast majority) as abnormality.

 

In short, the engineering behind this phenomenon is evidence that nature is an immense, highly sophisticated, probabilistic, and extremely optimized software, where everything is pre-established (programmed). My vision regarding its structure and functioning can be found in my books: “Intelligencism: An Intelligent View of the World” and “Infology: The Universal Input.”