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New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

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Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#71

Post by kitd »

jacobush wrote: post #45
kitd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true in principle, natural organisms tend to be vastly more complex than even the largest corps, and complexity leads to emergent behaviour that you wouldn't see in a hierarchical human organisation.

Hm, you say that like it’s self evident. Don’t corporations do things alone humans couldn’t?

That's not really emergent behaviour. eg the decision making of an organisation is simply the decision making of it's personnel.

Complex organisations can self-organise even though the individual parts have little understanding of their position in the structure.

A better simile would be societies at large, and the changes in things like housing markets or stock markets, driven by individuals who are only guided by their own private interests, not those of the market as a whole.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#72

Post by Helmet »

tome wrote: post #64
mgeorgoulo wrote: post #61

I bet every biology student has struggled with the introductory "what is life" chapter, full of conflicting definitions. It is so difficult to define life because there is nothing to be defined. There are complex stuff and simple stuff. We tend to call things that exhibit a certain degree of complexity "alive", but that's just a word. Can't remember who wrote the perfect definition of Biology: "The study of complex t…

> Can't remember who wrote the perfect definition of Biology: "The study of complex things". There's a great deal of wisdom in that. Human society is complex, but it would not normally be considered biology.

Well, not within some strict confines, but there is academic work that looks at society as a sort of "social organism" that exhibits many of the traits that you might ascribe to "life".

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#73

Post by lawlessone »

jamesrcole wrote: post #44
whatshisface wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Words are only useful insofar as they point to groups of entities that the speaker and listener agree are being pointed to. So, we should ask "what is the most useful definition of life?" It's a short word, so it's valuable real-estate. What should the definition of life be? It's easy to get wrapped up into discussions about words, but don't forget that the things they point to is what's really interesting.

I agree. I think a source of confusion is the following. Everyone has built up, over their lifetime, an implicit mental notion of "life", which is based upon the sorts of characteristics of things they classify as being alive. Many (I'd say most) people think this mental notion is some objective category that exists external to their mind, some thing that has a kind of essence that is shared by all the instances of l…

would it be safer to say everything in on spectrum between alive and not alive?

Even chemicals "evolve"

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/chemical-evolution

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#74

Post by Clanan »

meri_dian wrote: post #15

Here's a controversial view, but any good comments section needs a few of them: Viruses are no more "life" than bacteria are "life" or amoeba are "life" or ants are "life" or mice are "life" or humans are "life"... We're all just chemical machines, nothing more nothing less. Giving the word 'life' some special significance is misleading and confusing. In order to not confuse ourselves we should be talking about funct…

From the philosophical side, one of the reasons we attach such abstractions to "life" is to avoid reducing it to a basic functional definition. i.e. we should not equate ant life with human life. Especially in the sciences, it's an important moral/ethical consideration.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#75

Post by whatshisface »

DelightOne wrote: post #65
omginternets wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sb trying to push sb else to use a definition meets the second part of the sentence. This is post-modernism in thin disguise. Certain categorizations can be more valuable (practical, useful, just, etc) than others, in which case it's reasonable to rally for their use over other, less valueable, categorizations.

I don't know about the post-modernism thingy. To the second part: To one practical is to the other unpractical. To one just is to another unjust. To push certain categories over others just says to me you want them to be in your frame(practical, useful for you I guess?). And to not give an argument on the usefulness is to hide intention. But I'm not too firm on that yet.

Some categories are just completely impractical, for example the category of "all objects except for my dog and its kibble, and excluding those that came in to existence on an even-numbered Gregorian year." Language is an application of signaling theory and there are lots of statements we can make about it. (For example it would be a bad idea to re-define the word "good" to mean that one above.)

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#76

Post by factsaresacred »

tome wrote: post #64
mgeorgoulo wrote: post #61

I bet every biology student has struggled with the introductory "what is life" chapter, full of conflicting definitions. It is so difficult to define life because there is nothing to be defined. There are complex stuff and simple stuff. We tend to call things that exhibit a certain degree of complexity "alive", but that's just a word. Can't remember who wrote the perfect definition of Biology: "The study of complex t…

> Can't remember who wrote the perfect definition of Biology: "The study of complex things". There's a great deal of wisdom in that. Human society is complex, but it would not normally be considered biology.

Formal fallacy.

That biology can be called 'the study of complex things' does not imply that all complex things fall under biology. It's silly to even have to point this out.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#77

Post by nonbel »

skissane wrote: post #66

Trying to define "life" is one of the central questions of the philosophy of biology. And the positions one takes in the philosophy of biology are inevitably going to be influenced by one's metaphysical positions regarding the problem of universals. A nominalist, a Aristotelian realist, a Platonist (etc.), are all going to approach the question "what is life?" differently. Sometimes when people discuss this topic, th…

>"Trying to define "life" is one of the central questions of the philosophy of biology."

If this is true then "philosophy of biology" is a likely a total waste of time. It is obvious that life vs non-life is an artificial categorization that humans use because it is useful to them.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#78

Post by zaarn »

ravenstine wrote: post #6
ohf wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viruses are more like robots. They don't respond to stimuli. They just, do. The definition of "life" comes down to splitting hairs. We don't consider something "alive" if its behavior doesn't change when its environment does.

Don't bacteriophages have to respond to some stimuli in order to attach itself to a host cell and inject genetic material?

Bacteriophages attach to certain receptors, they don't respond to any stimuli.

The entire process of injecting their RNA is simply a chemical reaction to being attached to a receptor.

Basically, they just drift along until they hit a bacteria with the right receptor, then inject their genetic material and the empty hull is either discarded or simply continues to hang onto the cell.

The outer hull of the phage doesn't do a lot.

Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

#79

Post by zaarn »

ozy wrote: post #57
tehwalrus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This definition includes computer viruses. Did you mean to?

Sortof. But with a few caveats. 1) most computer viruses don't randomly vary, and thus don't have a learning effect, miss unlimited heredity. 2) they are not physical life, so the relevance is not the same as their chemical counterparts.

I wonder what would happen if we taught a computer virus to modify itself without restriction.

Of course, most of those viruses would probably just be rendered inert, printing a lot of segfaults into the kernel console.

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