41–50 of 79 posts
I'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…
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What makes it fundamentally impossible to know the origin of life? It seems we are likely to develop and refine experiments and theories that approximate the initial conditions and processes by which life took hold. Some of the details of how it happened are certainly lost to time, but it seems there's a lot of room for exploration towards a fairly valid model.
We can know an origin of some life, but never the origin of our own life. It's simply not testable, and without tests it's not science.
You can't ever test anything in the past, so by your logic nothing in the past can be considered scientific. By your logic, plate tectonics can't explain the past movement of continents.
Which is, of course, wrong.
We can absolutely test aspects of a theory, verify its general validity, see that it best correlates with past evidence, and therefore infer past causes. Nothing of that is unscientific -- to the contrary, that's precisely how science works.
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Is there a consequence of your thinking? I don’t think it’s arbitrary. There’s a clear distinction between say a rock and a cell, even if you view the rock on geological timescales and the cell on biological timescales. I don’t think it’s arbitrary or even surprising that humans view things from our own vantage point in reality.
There's a negative consequence - If the line between life and non-life is blurry, that means there isn't a clear place for souls to fit in. If life can be completely explained as an emergent property of individual non-living parts, (ultimately, atoms aren't alive, even though they make up living things) then we can't tell whether souls exist in our universe or not. This isn't a big deal for science, but it's a moral…
A 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.
I think in our lifetimes, we'll know enough about the preconditions for abiogenesis to perform experiments replicating portions of the process in vitro.
I'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…
Not necessarily, some animals have the same perception. Some carnivores don't eat dead animals, others primarily eat carrion and they interreact differently with inanimate objects.
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We all agree when we should say that a cow is dead, but what about sponges? You can pass a sponge through a sieve, and the isolated cells will recombine https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse-sponge-... (Is there a better link?) Can a single cell of a sponge create a "new" sponge? Or it's just the "old" sponge? Should you wait until the last cell is dead until we can claim it's dead? Back to cows... You…
You can think of insect hives (bees, ants, etc) as a single organism that happens to not be physically contiguous. The individual insects in a hive are typically 75% identical genetically.
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Why not go further and say the entirety of "our reality" is a human hallucination, as our senses are limited and our brains peculiar in how they process their inputs. That the "real reality" is an imperceptible-to-us dance of fields (even that is only as far as our theories take us).
At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite after my "Not finding souls is a victory for atheism" comment: What does that add? Do we have better models if we say we're all hallucinating the same seemingly-kind-of-objective reality? What if I'm the only human, you're all p-zombies, BUT all dogs are conscious?
Motor proteins look alive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8
I love this animation because it's beautiful, but I hate that it gives the impression of deliberate one-foot-in-front-of-the-other movement. In reality, when the "foot" of the motor protein is unbound, it is oscillating to and fro in a state of brownian motion until it happens to snap into place at the next (or, infrequently but inevitably, the previous) subunit. At this scale, quantum effects such as tunneling come…
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You can think of insect hives (bees, ants, etc) as a single organism that happens to not be physically contiguous. The individual insects in a hive are typically 75% identical genetically.
And some might say “but the hive itself doesn’t have consciousness, or an ‘experience’”. Which is impossible for you to know, unless you are (or have been) a hive.
It is popular to admire the selfless ants or bees who willingly give their lives for their society.
But if you think of them as cells of an organism, that happens in every living being.
When you see a hive sacrificing itself, we can talk :)
I find it fascinating that abiotic chemical/physical cycles are considered an integral part of early life (e.g. if your nutrient transport is environmental osmosis/tides/whatever, you're still alive but the larger environment is an integral part of your biochemistry). From that perspective the freshwater cycle is still a major component of biochemistry (bulk ion transport) on Earth, despite arguably being a physical…
I suspect it's the opposite; first there was life and then it evolved to use sunlight.
How did life arise on earth right after the rocks stopped being red hot? The only reasonable theory in my opinion is that the original life forms were inside the rocks on some jetsam that wasn't totally molten and if you go back further, lived off a little heat and water underground, quite possibly on a "rogue planet".
One reason this seems obvious to me is that there must be orders of magnitude more planets without stars than with. Just like there are more asteroids than planets, more dim red stars than sun-like stars, etc.
The other reason is that I think it helps a great deal with the Fermi paradox. If life just zapped into existence on Earth, 4.5 billion years ago, then it could've happened at any time, anywhere else, over the prior (almost) 10 billion years or so.
But if it took most of that time, since the Big Bang, to develop what we think of as the most primitive life, in the much larger arena of rubble or rogue planets in deep space, then it looks more like we are the earliest life that could develop, and that's why we wouldn't have been overrun by space invaders.
Looking the exponential development of life, even if you choose somewhat arbitrary milestones, it's basically a self-similar curve; each "step" takes a fraction of the previous one. Going backwards, each step should take the corresponding multiple. The great oxidation event was about 2.5 billion years ago. The first life we know about was about twice that. It seems to me a near perfect fit, timing wise, for the origin of that life to be about twice that ago, rather than suddenly arise from nothing in a few million years.
What it comes down to is I think creationists who are skeptical of abiogenesis really have a good point, about how the simplest life is unbelievably complex, in spite of not having a viable theory to explain it. But I think the answer is staring us in the face.
And of course panspermia isn't new or my idea particularly, but what bugs me is instead of saying there needs to be more evidence, it should be the default assumption. Our environment is just not representative of most of the universe even if you ignore non-baryonic dark matter.