Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life • Hacker News Board

Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

#131

Post by bonzini » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 1:20 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #33

dekhn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just wrong (as you say, careless). The criteria is "metabolism", not growth and reproduction. Similarly, viruses are not alive although they can reproduce. Interestingly, there are some highly parasitic organisms with limited ability to metabolize, that is, they have lost their genes and instead depend on their host organism (but I think all those examples still have some level of metabolic capability).

I don't really know what "metabolism" means, abstractly. I am deader than a virus without chloroplasts existing elsewhere. Viruses need a host for the productive bit, I had food for the non-reproductive bit. Viruses don't break down fast enough compared to their abundance to cause extinction, so why fault them for optimizing? People commonly theorize that virus came from rump parasitic cells. I wouldn't be surprised…

There used to be a hypothesis that DNA originated in viruses and that the three branches of life (archea, bacteria and eukaryota) evolved when three different DNA viruses encountered preexisting RNA-based cells. (https://www.pnas.org/content/103/10/3669)

Nowadays however it is more widely believed that eukaryota descend from archea, but anyway it's pretty much a given that viruses are not and have never been alive. And while the opposite has happened, gene transfer usually goes from viruses to cells, endowing them with new abilities, more than the opposite direction.

Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

#132

Post by randallsquared » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 2:13 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #79

randallsquared wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure defining requirements by analogy is a valid process.

I do not understand what you have meant by "analogy". The 3 requirements that I have listed do not contain any analogy, they just give a precise expression of the conventional meaning of the words "genetic material" as applied to a component of the living beings, now known to consist of nucleic acids for the life on Earth. While not all biologists would be able to define precisely what they mean by "genetic material"…

The actual requirements you listed were beyond my point. You said:

> "Genetic material" is memory. Therefore it must have the following properties:

A more precise wording of my understanding of this line would be:

> "Genetic material" is loosely analogous to memory. Therefore, we can derive what properties it has in physical reality by declaring what properties memory must logically have.

This makes it clearer what I was disagreeing with, I hope.

Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

#133

Post by sthnblllII » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 3:23 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #116

sthnblllII wrote: post #36

> many biological molecules can be constructed from just six simple molecules, including water, methane... There is no news here. This is just the same speculation that has been made thousands of times before for decades. Of course we can make big molecules from small ones in a lab. Of course life has to reproduce, metabolize and have a boundary from the environment. Pointing this out is not "the key to the origins o…

The NG doesn't pretend that it's news? And of course that this is the key to the origins of life - how could we possibly make progress on this question without understanding this first? And someone had to be the first to point this out. Which Tibor Gánti did in 1971 & 1974.

Understanding what? The basic functions of a cell have been understood since much longer ago than 1971.

>Some consider this model a significant contribution to origin of life as it provides a philosophy of evolutionary units.[4]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoton

Read the wiki. Its just describing what a cell is and putting the word "abstract" in front of everything. It makes no prediction, it produced no results. Evidently not everyone considers it a significant contribution.

Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

#134

Post by pmayrgundter » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

webmaven wrote: post #109

Ericson2314 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know what "metabolism" means, abstractly. I am deader than a virus without chloroplasts existing elsewhere. Viruses need a host for the productive bit, I had food for the non-reproductive bit. Viruses don't break down fast enough compared to their abundance to cause extinction, so why fault them for optimizing? People commonly theorize that virus came from rump parasitic cells. I wouldn't be surprised…

> People commonly theorize that virus came from rump parasitic cells. I have an alternate theory, that I've never seen articulated elsewhere: Viruses might be inter-microbial biochemical warfare gone wild; Among primitive and not-particularly robust cells, one competitive strategy might be to package toxins or other disruptive molecules into capsids that cleverly get past the 'enemy' cell membrane, perhaps aimed simp…

Neato!

Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

#135

Post by Razengan » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #113

Razengan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "any self-sustaining system that reduces internal entropy." Planet Earth would/should definitely count as alive, especially if it "reproduces" via us terraforming other planets to become like Earth.

By this argument houses would also count as alive because they “reproduce” via humans building more houses. (When you feel compelled to “air quote” a key term in your argument, that’s a clue you probably don’t have a good argument.)

You know that kind of reduction isn't the same thing.

Earth+Life is a different entity than Earth on its own, or any other planet.

Earth allows and protects life, and life in turn influences Earth. That kind of symbiosis on such a scale is in a class of its own, with no other equivalent or analogy that we know of. It deserves a special classification.

Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

#136

Post by Ericson2314 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #21

Ericson2314 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. Primitive proto-life has little moral value, just as vegans eat plants, hypothetical super-vegans only eat blue-green bacteria, and hypothetical hyper-vegans have a 500 year deadline to be electrically powered. I don't believe in a hard barrier between life and non life, so any discrete moral function would be non-computable, and therefore I reject it outright.

I don't believe in hard barrier between life and non life but interestingly the barrier between human and non human animal are seemingly very discrete.

That's why we should go clone some neanderthals.

Ideally we should clone enough to see if we can connect us and bonobos in a species complex (no hard boundaries of infertility).

I'm salivating over all the ethical choas that this would cause.

Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

#137

Post by Ericson2314 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

kubanczyk wrote: post #86

geomark wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metabolism has two parts: Catabolism breaks down complex molecules into smaller building block molecules - think proteins -> amino acids. Then anabolism uses those building blocks to build up larger molecules for growth and maintenance. Crystals don't do the catabolism part.

Nah, this seems more like an implementation detail than an actual core of life's "functionality".

While I don't think it's a good definition for life, I do think it's a good definition for metabolism.

That simply means "metabolism" isn't the concept to generalize further, and I'm OK with that.

Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

#138

Post by Ericson2314 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

bufferoverflow wrote: post #55

sterlind wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viruses need a host environment to replicate. Fish need water and plant life or other fish to replicate. Algae needs nutrients to replicate. Every lifeform can only exist in some host environment. Viruses simply happen to have biological host environments, right?

You're equivocating environments and hosts. Hosts do the replication for the viruses. Environments do NOT do the replication for the fish.

We are all just environments for ribosomes.

Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

#139

Post by gdy » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 12:12 AM UTC

posterboy wrote: post #68

pnut wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the radical diversity in the spectrum of human cognitive capabilities, I'm not so sure it's a discrete transition from non-human to human. What is a human?

Along with gender, being human is a socially defined concept. It might even be defined by social criteria, quite literally. Yet, Homo economicos is not the only social animal and not the only one with a social conscious either. Actually, I think you want to talk about humanity as a whole, as an organism to draw a clear distinction, because the level of controlled organization is unparalleled. In that sense I can agre…

"Along with gender, being human is a socially defined concept"

This is priceless))

Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

#140

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #73

marcosdumay wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's likely that the first life like our kind was only composed of genetic material. RNA and DNA are prone to replicating themselves (with many errors and not efficiently) in a wide variety of situations. It's way more likely that evolution selected those molecules for efficiency than that some complex life appeared without some transferable data storage.

No they are not able to replicate themselves, in any circumstances. Obviously, any RNA or DNA molecule can serve as a template for the polymerization of another nucleic acid molecule. However the polymerization cannot proceed spontaneously. The nucleotides polymerize by condensation, i.e. by releasing water. It should be obvious that such a reaction cannot be spontaneous when the molecules are already surrounded by w…

You seem to want life to appear in a likely condition, without some external power source.

Whatever condition there was, it could as well be some extremely rare one, and I really can't imagine how some molecules could start to reproduce without their environment being constantly changed by some external energy flux.

Besides, I'm no expert, but I don't think there were huge amounts of pure water running around on the early Earth. There were so much more stuff to use those hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and Earth's water wasn't all here since the beginning.