The Astonishing Efficiency of a Simple Cell

Efficiency of a "Simple" Cell surpasses our best supercomputers by several orders of magnitude. A 2010 article titled "Cell-inspired electronics" states "A single cell in the human body is approximately 10,000 times more energy-efficient than any nanoscale digital transistor, the fundamental building block of electronic chips. In one second, a cell performs about 10 million energy-consuming chemical reactions, which altogether require about one picowatt (one millionth millionth of a watt) of power." Part of the way such amazing energy efficiency is accomplished in the cell is with what is termed reversible computation. In 1961 Rolf Landuaer, via Landuaer's principle, showed that energy is not consumed during computation but is only consumed during the erasure of a bit of information from a computer. Later in 1973 Charles Bennett, at IBM Research, showed in a paper titled "Logical Reversibility of Computation" that a universal Turing machine could be made both logically and thermodynamically reversible performing useful computations at useful speed, while dissipating considerably less than kT of energy per logical step. In the same 1973 paper Bennett stated "The biosynthesis of messenger RNA is discussed as a physical example of reversible computation." In a 2017 paper titled "The astonishing efficiency of life" it is stated that "one of the most basic biological computations common across life is translation: processing information from a genome and writing that into proteins., To discover just how efficient translation is, the researchers started with Landauer's Bound. This is a principle of thermodynamics establishing the minimum amount of energy that any physical process needs to perform a computation. "What we found is that biological translation is roughly 20 times less efficient than the absolute lower physical bound,", "And that's about 100,000 times more efficient than a computer." And in the abstract of the 2017 paper itself, which is titled "The thermodynamic efficiency of computations made in cells across the range of life", it is stated, "Here we show that the computational efficiency of translation, defined as free energy expended per amino acid operation, outperforms the best supercomputers by several orders of magnitude, and is only about an order of magnitude worse than the Landauer bound." This stunning level of energy efficiency, which is many orders of magnitude better than what our best engineers have achieved, plays out at the macroscopic level too. In a article titled "The Human Brain Is 'Beyond Belief'" it is stated, "Stanford scientist who is helping develop computer brains for robots calculated that a computer processor functioning with the computational capacity of the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate properly. This is comparable to the output of a small hydroelectric power plant. As amazing as it may seem, the human brain requires only about 10 watts to function." One final note, to naively believe, as Darwinists do, that unguided Darwinian processes can achieve a level of efficiency that our best engineers can only hope and dream of achieving should be the very definition of gullible that we find in dictionaries.