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Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

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

#81

Post by cossatot »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #76
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.

It seems nonsensical in any case to claim something that contains life among its constituent parts is not itself alive. Plenty of organisms have 'dead' tissue as part of their gestalt and no one thinks of them as 'mostly' alive.

Life isn't a constituent part of the Earth. It's a coating.

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

#83

Post by dang »

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…

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#84

Post by tw25508394 »

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.

Single-cell organisms replicate.

Single cells of multi-cellular organisms replicate.

Shoot me in the head and all my cells will eventually stop replicating.

To a cell in my body, is the body a host or an environment? Is the distinction useful?

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

#85

Post by tw25508394 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #70
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.

Ultimately, this is a semantic debate trying to apply human linguistic constructions to physical processes.

Amen! This is about as useful as debating whether Pluto is a planet.

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

#86

Post by kubanczyk »

geomark wrote: post #78
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…

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".

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

#87

Post by est31 »

tw25508394 wrote: post #84
bufferoverflow wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Single-cell organisms replicate. Single cells of multi-cellular organisms replicate. Shoot me in the head and all my cells will eventually stop replicating. To a cell in my body, is the body a host or an environment? Is the distinction useful?

I would say neither. Your body is a colony, like an ant colony or bee colony. In all instances, most individuals can't start a colony of their own but it's limited to a set of queens/gametic cells.

As for shooting into the head, some multicellular life forms can actually heal from that. From planaria you can remove any part of their bodies, it will grow back. Shooting into an ant colony won't do much harm to them either, nor is removing the branch of a tree. It's only a property of animals I'd say who have given up this property (for the most part) in exchange for more complex metabolic systems. (heart, nervous system, etc)

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

#89

Post by Supermancho »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #76
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.

It seems nonsensical in any case to claim something that contains life among its constituent parts is not itself alive. Plenty of organisms have 'dead' tissue as part of their gestalt and no one thinks of them as 'mostly' alive.

> It seems nonsensical in any case to claim something that contains life among its constituent parts is not itself alive.

Parts of yogurt are alive. Yogurt is not alive. I have no problem with this.

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

#90

Post by kubanczyk »

api wrote: post #44
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."

My favorite version of this classifies life as an exotic phase of matter in the sense of other exotic phases like Bose-Einstein condensates, etc. Life is a phase of matter in which the dynamics of information and Turing-complete computation overcome the ordinary dynamics of matter and energy. I am not aware of who originated this idea, but I heard it from Christoph Adami (a researcher in evolutionary information theo…

How is this model useful? It certainly moves away from our domain knowledge and paints a new picture that is considerably more fuzzy than the old one. What do you gain by considering life in such way?

Side note: computation seems like a wrong term, because it's not about counting/calculating/determining any abstract value, is it? A Turing-complete mechanism maybe?

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