This is a common view amongst people who have never studied philosophy. Everyone is engaged in philosophy, including scientists themselves, and mostly poorly. Scientists in considering what data signifies life are themselves taking as given some concept 'life' - ie. their first step is philosophical (as ever). You may say whatever a decision a scientist makes on concepts such as these is obviously the best - but then…
Comes across as pedantic and somewhat bitter, possibly after having read Neil deGrasse Tyson's comments on philosophy.
This is a common view amongst people who have never studied philosophy. Everyone is engaged in philosophy, including scientists themselves, and mostly poorly. Scientists in considering what data signifies life are themselves taking as given some concept 'life' - ie. their first step is philosophical (as ever). You may say whatever a decision a scientist makes on concepts such as these is obviously the best - but then…
Comes across as pedantic and somewhat bitter, possibly after having read Neil deGrasse Tyson's comments on philosophy.
Imagine engineers drawing landscapes and calling art dead. This is what we have with the naive popularises of science today.
I would not be so harsh on biologists, but I do agree that we waste far too much time arguing over garbage like this. As I used to tell my students taxonomy is just a tool to help humans make some sense of all the complexity in living systems, but it is not real.
I think that if the taxonomy is based on evolutionary paths, it's somewhat more "real" compared to the "looks alike" sense. The evolutionary paths could potentially give some insights, while grouping similar but genetically unrelated species is just a confusion in that sense. On the other hand - classifying things based on their genome does not really help us understand the biomes.
I was of course stretching things a bit to make the point that taxonomy is a human classification system that life ignores :)
This is particularly the case with microbes where because of rampant horizontal gene transfer we don’t have clean evolutionary paths.
> This is a common view amongst people who have never studied philosophy I really should take offence here with this statement ;). >You may say whatever a decision a scientist makes on concepts such as these is obviously the best - but then history would show you totally incorrect. That wasn't what I meant at all. I meant it is normal for scientific evidence to be part of answer for philosophical question, and there…
> "is there anything fundamentally difference between life and non-life objects" is answered by scientific advancement No it isnt. Science has only made one candidate for the meaning of "fundamental" trivial (in particular, that the physical substance of living things is the same substance of non-living things)- there are many other senses in which living things and non-livings things are fundamentally different. For…
Hm. Not agreeing here. Either one is derived from / defined by the other somehow, so they are two words for one thing. Or there is supposed to be some property of life not mentioned that is necessary for moral agency. In which case a perfect simulation of a living thing, not alive in itself but identical in all knowable ways by definition, would have to have moral agency?
I thought the definition of life was a matter philosophical, not scientific, debate. How does one "find evidence" to support an open philosophical argument?
If you ignore the title, the article is interesting. They identified 66 "types" of proteins that are unique to virus and are not presents in bacteria, archea or eukaryotes (animals, plant, fungi, ...). They use 66 "types" of proteins to classify some of the virus, make a phylogenic tree, and see evolution in the tree. This evolution is independent of the evolution of the cells. So they propose that this new phylogeni…
I guess they did this study because the usual way of classifying life forms, dna analysis, doesn't work for viruses. But how can we know that older life forms didn't have these proteins? Complex cells can have lines that die out without extincting the order. Viruses may be too simple for that; so they retain all the older parts?