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Mitochondria Are Alive

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Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#151

Post by ricksunny »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #78

Mitochondria are why I’m a Rare Earther. In Earth’s history, mitochondrial endosymbiosis occurred once. Without that you don’t have the energy budget for complex life. Moreover, there may be a narrow window where it can happen: modern microbiology has defences and selection pressures that it make inhospitable to the hobbling chimeræ the first mitochondrial cells would have been. Until mitochondria, the emergence of l…

Robin Hanson #HardSteps

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0lKliaFllPA&t=910s (timeatamped)

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#152

Post by JumpCrisscross »

hshshshshsh wrote: post #146
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #78

Mitochondria are why I’m a Rare Earther. In Earth’s history, mitochondrial endosymbiosis occurred once. Without that you don’t have the energy budget for complex life. Moreover, there may be a narrow window where it can happen: modern microbiology has defences and selection pressures that it make inhospitable to the hobbling chimeræ the first mitochondrial cells would have been. Until mitochondria, the emergence of l…

If reality can emerge out of nowhere I don't see it unlikely for life to emerge in some other planet.

> If reality can emerge out of nowhere I don't see it unlikely for life to emerge in some other planet

If everything however unlikely is likely because creation is unfathomable, sure.

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#153

Post by jessriedel »

This article managed to hit two classic science journalism cliches in just the first few paragraphs.

(1) “Someone hypothesizing a very dramatic theory with weak evidence was considered wrong by most colleagues but later vindicated when strong evidence emerged”. (No mention of thousands of other dramatic hypotheses that turned out wrong.)

(2) “You may have heard in unsophisticated popularization that [philosophical claim ultimately hinging on semantic distinction] was false, but really it’s true [assuming my preferred semantics]”.

Aren't we all tired of this yet? Aren’t science journalists embarrassed by this stuff?

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#154

Post by hshshshshsh »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #152
hshshshshsh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If reality can emerge out of nowhere I don't see it unlikely for life to emerge in some other planet.

> If reality can emerge out of nowhere I don't see it unlikely for life to emerge in some other planet If everything however unlikely is likely because creation is unfathomable, sure.

Not everything. Life in particular. Because without life (a conscious observer) reality cannot exist. So it should be a property of reality for life to emerge.

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#155

Post by [deleted] »

jessriedel wrote: post #153

This article managed to hit two classic science journalism cliches in just the first few paragraphs. (1) “Someone hypothesizing a very dramatic theory with weak evidence was considered wrong by most colleagues but later vindicated when strong evidence emerged”. (No mention of thousands of other dramatic hypotheses that turned out wrong.) (2) “You may have heard in unsophisticated popularization that [philosophical cl…

[deleted]

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#156

Post by thrw42A8N »

hshshshshsh wrote: post #154
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If reality can emerge out of nowhere I don't see it unlikely for life to emerge in some other planet If everything however unlikely is likely because creation is unfathomable, sure.

Not everything. Life in particular. Because without life (a conscious observer) reality cannot exist. So it should be a property of reality for life to emerge.

That sounds like a catch-22

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#157

Post by Aloisius »

latchkey wrote: post #140
rsync wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is ~1M bacteria in a single drop of seawater. Now multiply that by (the ocean) and multiply the interactions by X billion years. It seems impossible for a symbiosis like this not to have happened . No matter how low the odds are, the counts of those potential interactions bring this outcome to a certainty.

Each grain of sand on earth represents 1 billion planets in the universe. https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1af4prs/if_you_w...

There are 100 million times more bacteria in the ocean than there are stars in the universe.

Which really should tell people how rare the development of mitochondria was if it has only happened once here.

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#158

Post by VMG »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #78

Mitochondria are why I’m a Rare Earther. In Earth’s history, mitochondrial endosymbiosis occurred once. Without that you don’t have the energy budget for complex life. Moreover, there may be a narrow window where it can happen: modern microbiology has defences and selection pressures that it make inhospitable to the hobbling chimeræ the first mitochondrial cells would have been. Until mitochondria, the emergence of l…

How do we know it only happened once? Maybe it happened multiple times but only one version survived while the others were outcompeted?

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#159

Post by 9dev »

hshshshshsh wrote: post #154
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If reality can emerge out of nowhere I don't see it unlikely for life to emerge in some other planet If everything however unlikely is likely because creation is unfathomable, sure.

Not everything. Life in particular. Because without life (a conscious observer) reality cannot exist. So it should be a property of reality for life to emerge.

Isn't that kind of mixing up the chain of causation? Without a winner, a lottery cannot exist (or at least, at p=0, it's nonsensical). That doesn't automatically imply there are a lot of winners, however.

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#160

Post by robwwilliams »

Wonerful! This article is a mind-meld of Humberto Maturana’s work on autopoiesis with almost any of Nick Lane’s deep discussions of bioenergetics e.g., the wonderful book “ Power, Sex and Suicide: Mitochonria and the Meaning of Life” or his equally strong book “Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death” that is focused on the Kreb’s cycle. He brings biochemistry and bioenergetics alive in a way that will impact your thinking.

Maturana and Valera gave a brilliant definition of “living” in Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living” (1980). But their writing style will make this a tough read. Terry Winograd write a useful summary if Maturana’s philosophy in his computer science classic “Computers and Cognition”.

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