Spiegelman's Monster

Post by adrianN » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 8:34 AM UTC

mfav wrote: post #6

brashrat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.

The monster itself is just a strand of RNA. The definition of living by most biologists wouldn't include a strand of genetic material. Fire replicates in particular environments, as do viruses. But we don't typically classify either as living. I think the point you're getting at is that the distinction between living and non-living is a bit arbitrary and meaningless. I agree.

Post by cezart » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 8:49 AM UTC

mfav wrote: post #4

The Wikipedia page doesn't do the best job at conveying the idea of the experiment, in my opinion. We've long been searching and wondering about the origin of life (aka abiogenesis). The famous Miller-Urey experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment ) demonstrated that conditions similar to early Earth (plus lightning) spontaneously creates important organic compounds that are necessary…

Post by bbrizzi » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 9:40 AM UTC

nenreme wrote: post #22

userbinator wrote: post #19

Interesting that it's the informational equivalent of 109 bytes, which is around the same order of magnitude as some of the earliest computer viruses that did nothing but replicate.

1 nucleotide = 2 bits, 218 nucleotides = 436 bits = 54.5 bytes

Post by adrianN » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 11:17 AM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #24

adrianN wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fire and viruses have an important difference though, when fire replicates, its children don't inherit anything. A better example would be crystals as their structure influences crystals they seed.

Neither fire nor crystals mutate. That's the thing. A crystals arrangement of its microscopic structure will always be the same, as will the oxidation reaction in fire. A virus undergoes darwinian evolution and will adapt to its environment

Post by teod » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 12:50 PM UTC

cjhveal wrote: post #10

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #2

Let's make DNAduino and start doing this kind of thing at home. Best science project. I wonder what the current state of the art of homemade bioexperimentation is.

For those who are interested in this space, I'd strongly recommend first looking at options outside of your home. If you're in the bay area, here's a hacker/maker space for biology: http://biocurious.org/ If you're not, you could investigate joining an iGEM team. It's an annual synthetic biology competition, where competitors engineer biological "machines" and are encouraged to factor their work into standard, reusab…