Let's make DNAduino and start doing this kind of thing at home. Best science project. I wonder what the current state of the art of homemade bioexperimentation is.
Spiegelman's Monster
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.
Presumably because it can't act? There are two relevant paradigms to consider: - Diamonds move through the earth (since the earth itself is not static), grow, and split. This means they move and reproduce. Are they alive? - Prions are proteins that reproduce directly, by bumping into other proteins and forming them into prions. Are they alive? The general run of thought that I'm familiar with is that bacteria are una…
>viruses are ambiguously alive.
Interesting you say that. I was always taught that viruses fell into the "not alive" category.
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#13The Wikipedia page doesn't do the best job at conveying the idea of the experiment, in my opinion. We've long been searching and wondering about the origin of life (aka abiogenesis). The famous Miller-Urey experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment ) demonstrated that conditions similar to early Earth (plus lightning) spontaneously creates important organic compounds that are necessary…
why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.
Well the article says its not even self replicating. It requires humans to do much of the work of providing specific machinery and materials that it needs to make copies of itself.
But it also doesn't do much. That's a nebulous, hard to pin down statement. But I mean it doesn't have all the complex machinery and behaviors of living cells. It's static and kind of just floats around. Until things happen to bump into it and stick.
It's not fundamentally different than a virus. Which are also self replicating, but I don't think they are considered "living".
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.
Presumably because it can't act? There are two relevant paradigms to consider: - Diamonds move through the earth (since the earth itself is not static), grow, and split. This means they move and reproduce. Are they alive? - Prions are proteins that reproduce directly, by bumping into other proteins and forming them into prions. Are they alive? The general run of thought that I'm familiar with is that bacteria are una…
Anyway,the question of "where is the line when life begins" is subjective and scientifically boring. It's only interesting philosophically to people who don't understand the concept of spectrum/gamut/continuum. The interesting question is where specimens fall along the spectrum of completely inert to complex life.
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#15The Wikipedia page doesn't do the best job at conveying the idea of the experiment, in my opinion. We've long been searching and wondering about the origin of life (aka abiogenesis). The famous Miller-Urey experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment ) demonstrated that conditions similar to early Earth (plus lightning) spontaneously creates important organic compounds that are necessary…
why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.
I haven't read anything about this besides the Wiki but I would say the RNA monster's not alive because it only reproduces when a scientist adds the right enzyme to the test tube. It can't actually reproduce itself. Viruses on the other hand contain genes in their rna for proteins (both enzymes and the structural proteins that make up their shells) and so they can reproduce by hijacking some cell's protein synthesis pathways.
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.
Well the article says its not even self replicating. It requires humans to do much of the work of providing specific machinery and materials that it needs to make copies of itself. But it also doesn't do much. That's a nebulous, hard to pin down statement. But I mean it doesn't have all the complex machinery and behaviors of living cells. It's static and kind of just floats around. Until things happen to bump into it…
Heh, we must have been posting at the same time. Good point that the RNA monster doesn't do much; even some bacteria can "smell" chemicals and move along a gradient, a "behavior" that makes us think of them as alive. I wonder if you could get behavior like that with just rna
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#17The Wikipedia page doesn't do the best job at conveying the idea of the experiment, in my opinion. We've long been searching and wondering about the origin of life (aka abiogenesis). The famous Miller-Urey experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment ) demonstrated that conditions similar to early Earth (plus lightning) spontaneously creates important organic compounds that are necessary…
why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.
It's a _very_ particular environment, because it includes RNA replicase, which is a complex protein.
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#18The Wikipedia page doesn't do the best job at conveying the idea of the experiment, in my opinion. We've long been searching and wondering about the origin of life (aka abiogenesis). The famous Miller-Urey experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment ) demonstrated that conditions similar to early Earth (plus lightning) spontaneously creates important organic compounds that are necessary…
why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.
"Living" is one of those things that is hard to pin down an exact definition for because there are so many edge cases.
Is life on earth everything that processes sunlight, directly or indirectly? Well solar panels do and microbes subsisting on energy released from deep sea vents don't. Is sexual reproduction the defining characteristic of life? Plenty of examples to the contrary of life forms reproducing in other ways.
It's actually really hard to find a precise definition that doesn't have an exception.
As for the Spielgelman's Monster, if this were to be described as living, that would mean man had created "life" from non-living matter, that would be rather big news.
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#19Interesting that it's the informational equivalent of 109 bytes, which is around the same order of magnitude as some of the earliest computer viruses that did nothing but replicate.
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably because it can't act? There are two relevant paradigms to consider: - Diamonds move through the earth (since the earth itself is not static), grow, and split. This means they move and reproduce. Are they alive? - Prions are proteins that reproduce directly, by bumping into other proteins and forming them into prions. Are they alive? The general run of thought that I'm familiar with is that bacteria are una…
>viruses are ambiguously alive. Interesting you say that. I was always taught that viruses fell into the "not alive" category.
Viruses are mechanically simple enough that the conceptual toolkit of chemistry is enough to understand them. But the conceptual toolkit of biology, while not necessary, can still be fruitfully applied to them. (Biological understanding is also necessary for explaining why viruses might do what they do.)
There is no "not alive" category; that is the long-discredited philosophy of vitalism. It's purely a question of how you choose to do your analysis.
But I'll leave you with a selection from the wikipedia article "Virus":
Opinions differ on whether viruses are a form of life, or organic structures that interact with living organisms. They have been described as "organisms at the edge of life", since they resemble organisms in that they possess genes, evolve by natural selection, and reproduce by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly. Although they have genes, they do not have a cellular structure, which is often seen as the basic unit of life. Viruses do not have their own metabolism, and require a host cell to make new products. They therefore cannot naturally reproduce outside a host cell – although bacterial species such as rickettsia and chlamydia are considered living organisms despite the same limitation. Accepted forms of life use cell division to reproduce, whereas viruses spontaneously assemble within cells. They differ from autonomous growth of crystals as they inherit genetic mutations while being subject to natural selection.