61–70 of 412 posts
> If one considers bacteria as living entities — and all biologists seem to — then it is impossible to explain why mitochondria are not. There seems to be a strange, half-hubris, half-pride vein that runs through Humanity that would see us as lesser for being hosts to benevolent bacteria, despite us very obviously being unable to survive without benevolent bacteria.
I read the article waiting for an answer to the question "in what operational sense does this matter?" but it never arrived. The question posed is whether we consider mitochondria to be "alive". It's just a word, who cares. What do we do differently given this assumption?
> If one considers bacteria as living entities — and all biologists seem to — then it is impossible to explain why mitochondria are not. There seems to be a strange, half-hubris, half-pride vein that runs through Humanity that would see us as lesser for being hosts to benevolent bacteria, despite us very obviously being unable to survive without benevolent bacteria.
I read the article waiting for an answer to the question "in what operational sense does this matter?" but it never arrived. The question posed is whether we consider mitochondria to be "alive". It's just a word, who cares. What do we do differently given this assumption?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it just attacks the wholeness of ‘self’ and starts to reveal the true complexity of nature.
We didn't evolve to understand "self", and indeed most animals do not. There was no evolutionary pressure to do so. We're having to discover it piece by piece.
this is the first ive heard of mitochondria replicating separately and distinctly from the host cell, how fascinating! Are we saying that mitochondria have their own life cycle inside of a cell? living/dying/replicating in the span of the "life" of a single host cell? When a host cell reproduces, how does the mitochondria get produced in the new cell to get things started? Cant wait to research this later.
The two halves of the divided cells will usually both have mitochondria. Not always, though; sometimes cell division leaves one cell without any mitochrondria. That usually results in a non-viable cell, but sometimes the cell can survive with limited capacity. Some species that used to have mitochondria have apparently been through this process and have evolved to survive in their absence; Giardia duodenalis for exam…
So what now? We give them rights?
As a layman I'm kind of baffled by the enduring pop-sci interest in mitochondria. To me the far more interesting organelle is the ribosome. This elegant self-replicating machine that is highly conserved across lifeforms is fascinating and much closer to the origin of life than mitochondria. How did ribosomes evolve? Are the ribosomes that we see in modern organisms the first design that did evolve? Why are they highl…
But it's possbile they are descendants of some self-replicating self-catalyzed RNA chain (RNA world)
As a layman I'm kind of baffled by the enduring pop-sci interest in mitochondria. To me the far more interesting organelle is the ribosome. This elegant self-replicating machine that is highly conserved across lifeforms is fascinating and much closer to the origin of life than mitochondria. How did ribosomes evolve? Are the ribosomes that we see in modern organisms the first design that did evolve? Why are they highl…