The Grayness of the Origin of Life
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life
#2So interesting! Some similar work on this area:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23258-x
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020AGUFMP001...01C/abstra...
Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life
#3A nice article. It seems likely that we will never really know how life started.
It is still very interesting to research this subject, because it might help us to learn more about the possibility of life on other planets.
Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life
#4> A more inclusive representation is to recognize a spectrum between the non-living and the living—a “grayness” resulting from the protracted evolutionary process that gave rise to life.
The meaning of "grayness" would appear to have something to do with the fuzzy line between life and non-life.
There is a footnote to the article "The Seven Pillars of Life":
https://www.pps.net/cms/lib/OR01913224/Centricity/Domain/333...
But it doesn't mention grayness at all.
This gets cleared up a little a few paragraphs in:
> The ability to clearly distinguish between abiotic and biotic systems is considered by many a prerequisite for effective astrobiology studies. However, since no natural demarcation truly exists, there is a profound difficulty in advancing the field if we rely on a strict dichotomy. ...
Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life
#5I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of transformation and recapitulation... even if something temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager little narrow timeframe of experience, it's not.
Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in human experience.
Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life
#6A nice article. It seems likely that we will never really know how life started. It is still very interesting to research this subject, because it might help us to learn more about the possibility of life on other planets.
From a scientific point of view we can - not just will - never know the origin of life.
Of course, popular science frames it differently.
Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life
#7I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of transformation and recapitulation... even if something temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager litt…
That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even 'subjective'.
That a materialist perspective gives us some nice hard rules for understanding certain things, it also by definition struggles to help us understand the nature of other things, i.e. 'most important bit' which is 'life' itself, so maybe we should be thinking about that problem a little bit differently. 'Emergence' seems to be a least one idea, among many.
Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life
#8Motor proteins look alive:
Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life
#9I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of transformation and recapitulation... even if something temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager litt…
That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even 'subjective'. That a materialist perspective gives us some nice hard rules for understanding certain things, it also by definition struggles to help us understand the nature of other things, i.e. 'most important bit' which is 'life' itself, so maybe we should be thinking about that problem a li…
> That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even 'subjective'.
Interesting and plausible, but you didn't give an argument or any example for that.
Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life
#10I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of transformation and recapitulation... even if something temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager litt…
I think it's simpler than you're allowing. Death in animals is the absence of consciousness with no possibility of recovery. In plants and maybe-but-probably-not-sentient life, it's more complicated.