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Mitochondria Are Alive

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Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#191

Post by hughesjj »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #177
Aloisius wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It didn't necessarily happen only once; maybe we were left with the most successful instance.

Not even that. There could be better civilizations than us out there that either

1. Died off or regressed

2. Plateaued

3. Is sufficiently far away or stealthy enough for us not to notice them (whether intentionally or not)

I've often thought about the whole communications bubble argument... I don't buy it. I'd imagine, like wifi, other civilizations will maximize their communication bandwidth, which essentially also maximizes entropy which looks like noise to us. Compression, encryption, redundancy, multiplexing over frequency and amplitude and time, directional antennas and signalling... That's what we've done in under 100 years.

I know there's stuff like organic markers etc, but if machines are doing most of the heavy lifting I don't think that would matter. Same with stuff like hydrogen emissions lines. Whatever is abundant will be used for "settled" and "dead" solar systems alike.

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#192

Post by hughesjj »

pleurotus wrote: post #74
twothreeone wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I _think_ what they mean is it's not typically listed as a "life form" in its own right, i.e., there's no Domain under which one would classify Mitochondria - maybe just calling them bacteria would capture the article's intent? So, the modification would be that we are living in symbiosis with mitochondrial bacteria, similar to how we live in symbiosis with our gut bacteria, rather than them being classified as "orga…

That's more a flaw of classification systems though. Because even if they comprise a distinct life form does not mean they need to have a unique species. Consider lichen, which comprise two (or more!) separate "species" which becomes a meaningless distinction when they cannot survive on their own, or even if they could, not in a form recognizable in any wayas they were when they were a part of the symbiotic system

I mean at that point what do we consider multicellular organisms? Did you see what was going on with those frog skin cells and "xenobots"? Also, our gut bacteria kinda makes us a symbiote at a larger scale.

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#193

Post by liyamchitayat »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #165
aardvark179 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chloroplasts also evolved from separate organisms and are now effectively organelles. So this is t a one off event.

And even if those hadn't become organelles, who knows if they (or mitocondrias) could have evolved towards multicellular life on their own? They were already organisms to begin with.

Yes! and there are additional cases, like the nitroplasts that we recently discovered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitroplast

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#194

Post by lynguist »

I agree completely with all the points made in the article and would double down on the critique of the philosophy of biology as a discipline and science itself: namely that is has historically evolved as a mere system of typologies and that this is so settled in and so sacrosanct that biology is such a superstition with human-made categories a couple hundred years ago and not a real science.

We see the exact same things also when discussing what is a species and also completely disregarding the reality of horizontal gene transfers etc in the strict, traditional trees.

The models are quite wrong and even reduced wrong.

There is this one famous article that shows how traditional biology would go and analyze a transistor radio, namely just label its assumed components!

Here is the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31697757

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#195

Post by tim333 »

IAmNotACellist wrote: post #71

The fact that every child on the planet is religiously taught that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell is all the evidence I need that we're upholding a primordial contractual agreement and these are the conditions to which we are beholden. Name a single biological entity that has a better PR department. The only one that comes close is Athlete's Foot, which makes the victim sound cool.

The brain gets good PR. The brain dead are thought unfortunate.

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#196

Post by im3w1l »

liyamchitayat wrote: post #186
outworlder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mitochondria seems to have been an 'accident', yes. That does not mean that other lifeforms in different planets require mitochondria or equivalent organelles. As long as they can perform the necessary chemical reactions (which could be different in a different environments) and extract enough energy, they should be good. How did mitochondria evolve in the first place? Could they have remained as independent organism…

One interesting thing is that many reactions actually have to occur in their own compartment- and since we have not lost the mtDNA, it may suggest that having an additional control center is beneficial.there are some interesting theories about the relations of that to lifespan https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/mitochondria-are-flingin... .

Couldn't it be that we haven't fully lost mtDNA because it's simply a very slow process that has not yet run its course?

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#197

Post by tim333 »

hinkley wrote: post #115
IAmNotACellist wrote: post #71

The fact that every child on the planet is religiously taught that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell is all the evidence I need that we're upholding a primordial contractual agreement and these are the conditions to which we are beholden. Name a single biological entity that has a better PR department. The only one that comes close is Athlete's Foot, which makes the victim sound cool.

The Sun. As far as I’m aware we’ve never worshipped mitochondria. And unless you want to count eating which is technically true but not philosophically so, we don’t sacrifice plants or animals to mitochondria.

Not very biological though.

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#198

Post by aydyn »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #173
tasty_freeze wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to what others have pointed out (chloroplasts), I think this makes another mistake. Although only the mitochondria and chloroplast lineages remain, it is possible it happened other times but those lineages were out-competed, for whatever reasons, and are now extinct.

> it is possible it happened other times but those lineages were out-competed, for whatever reasons, and are now extinct Chlorophyll probably outcompeted retinal [1]. (The stuff in our eyes.) The reduced form of my claim is that mitochondrial life so freakishly outcompetes its competitors as to be in a class of its own. Which still yields a rare Earth, albeit a first among many. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purp…

Does it yield a rare Earth? If we didn't have mitochondria and had something say 20% less efficient, why couldn't multicellular life still exist?

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#199

Post by aydyn »

im3w1l wrote: post #196
liyamchitayat wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One interesting thing is that many reactions actually have to occur in their own compartment- and since we have not lost the mtDNA, it may suggest that having an additional control center is beneficial.there are some interesting theories about the relations of that to lifespan https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/mitochondria-are-flingin... .

Couldn't it be that we haven't fully lost mtDNA because it's simply a very slow process that has not yet run its course?

Given how old mitochondria are it seems more likely that its more efficient to have its own DNA.

DNA isn't just abstract information, it's also where the first step of protein / enzyme construction occurs. DNA location matters.

Re: Mitochondria Are Alive

#200

Post by dragandj »

liyamchitayat wrote: post #185
meneton wrote: post #179

This article is framed as if there is something novel and profound here, but the "aliveness" of mitochondria is simply a matter of how we choose to apply the label "life" - a human linguistic construct that exists independently of the biological phenomena. This is not a new discussion - science has been considering this question for many decades, just as it has with viruses. These all come down to arguments about sem…

Hi! I agree with you, which is why I wrote this- but if you google "are mitochondria alive" gemini says it isn't. And yes, the cells in your heart have an effective and potenitial niche! We seem to have many tools to engineer viruses, but few to engineer mitochondria- perhaps considering them as alive could change that!

"Gemini" says? So what?
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