Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

nationalgeographic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 143 posts

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

#51

Post by breck »

kadoban wrote: post #46
breck wrote: post #39

Has anyone seen a visual tree of life that starts before life on earth? Or in other words, say at some point we discover aliens in a distance galaxy. Would we be cousins? Are there visualizations that show what that kind of family tree would look like? I am a neophyte in this area but I'm sure there's a lot of good research out there.

Without seeing what's out there I don't think any such trees would make sense to draw. There's too many possible ones, and the branches would just be "?". We could be cousins of several sorts, convergently evolved to have some similarities, be completely unrelated in any way to other life, or any of several combinations of those. And that's just the broad strokes, trees would be the details. It's worth noting also th…

It’s true, in a way the tree of life runs in the opposite direction.

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

#52

Post by matz1 »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #40
matz1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are they? Some primates have better working memory than we do, for example. Of course we would never confuse another species for a human, but I also think we would not confuse a domestic house cat for anything else despite them coming in many shapes, sizes and colors, so I assume you mean something more profound than just that we look visually different.

>Of course we would never confuse another species for a human

Yes, this is what I mean. There is seemingly no organism/species that I would confuse whether to classify it as human or not human but I'm pretty sure there are species/organism albeit is rare that I would be in hard time categorizing it as cat or not cat.

Another example is human male and human female, albeit is rare but there is some human population that I would have a hard time deciding which category to put.

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

#53

Post by jddj »

m12k wrote: post #14
rtatay wrote: post #4

If someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.

What do you think the ethical consequences will be? Genuinely curious, because I don't really see what they would be, or why there would be any. At least not compared to something like e.g. creating an actual artificial intelligence, and then needing to decide if it has rights, and what kind and so on. Creating a novel type of microorganism out of non-living components doesn't really seem to come with the same kind o…

It depends. For me it would be incredibly interesting.

If we take that life plausibly "started" as as one single-celled individual who then "reproduced" through cell division (let's call him Luca), then he's effectively never died - in the same way that we consider ourselves to have not died despite regularly cycling tissues and cells.

All life as we know it, if viewed like that, is one organism whose chain of cell division has never been broken as he's grown over billions of years. Variation between those cells (kingdoms, species, plant / animal etc) become like skin, hair and brain / liver cells within the human body.

It would be like taking a runner grass or banana tree and trying to draw a line around true individuals.

If we created life outside of that unbroken chain of cell division, we would have created something which is definitely "other than Luca" and that feels philosophically significant.

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

#55

Post by bufferoverflow »

sterlind wrote: post #34
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).

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.

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

#57

Post by goodthenandnow »

tjchear wrote: post #26
dudeman13 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't think so [...] and therefore I reject it outright That's not a problem. There can be insane theological and ethical consequences for everyone else.

I don't think there will be any consequences of importance, for a different, simple reason: people generally resist changing their worldview and will do mental gymnastics to preserve it.

Exactly.

Not really the same thing, but if alien life was found on Europe or Enceladus, religions would resist to change their theologies.

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

#58

Post by Igelau »

adrian_b wrote: post #23
angst_ridden wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got a minority opinion calling crystals "alive," although it does jibe with one definition of life that I heard: "any self-sustaining system that reduces internal entropy."

While obviously crystals are not alive, they satisfy more careless definitions of life that were sometimes encountered, i.e., when put in a "nutritive" solution, they are able to grow and reproduce themselves.

> obviously crystals are not alive

Very few things are obvious. Is this?

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

#59

Post by uoaei »

posterboy wrote: post #38
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…

> and have a boundary from the environment This is not self evident. Maybe this is the news? I am not sure, what are you saying?

Not the person you're replying to, but: That the processes inside the boundary and those outside the boundary only interact through relatively narrow-bandwidth channels across that boundary, and that it maintains the high level of internal organization, the boundary, and the input/output channels through self-sustaining internal processes.

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

#60

Post by jacquesm »

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.

In fact, for quite a few fish they do, ditto amphibians and insects too.

Mammals are the exception here, there the environment for replication is an integral part of the body of the parent. But in all those other cases, including, technically, marsupials it isn't.

Post reply on HN