[HN Gopher] The Grayness of the Origin of Life ___________________________________________________________________ The Grayness of the Origin of Life Author : Breadmaker Score : 35 points Date : 2021-07-23 20:00 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.mdpi.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.mdpi.com) | NotSwift wrote: | A nice article. It seems likely that we will never really know | how life started. | | It is still very interesting to research this subject, because it | might help us to learn more about the possibility of life on | other planets. | ExpiredLink wrote: | From a scientific point of view we can - not just will - never | know the origin of life. Of course, popular science frames it | differently. | mypalmike wrote: | What makes it fundamentally impossible to know the origin of | life? It seems we are likely to develop and refine | experiments and theories that approximate the initial | conditions and processes by which life took hold. Some of the | details of how it happened are certainly lost to time, but it | seems there's a lot of room for exploration towards a fairly | valid model. | Koshkin wrote: | > _we will never really know how life started_ | | A big bang of another sort. | AprilArcus wrote: | I think in our lifetimes, we'll know enough about the | preconditions for abiogenesis to perform experiments | replicating portions of the process in vitro. | aazaa wrote: | > A more inclusive representation is to recognize a spectrum | between the non-living and the living--a "grayness" resulting | from the protracted evolutionary process that gave rise to life. | | The meaning of "grayness" would appear to have something to do | with the fuzzy line between life and non-life. | | There is a footnote to the article "The Seven Pillars of Life": | | https://www.pps.net/cms/lib/OR01913224/Centricity/Domain/333... | | But it doesn't mention grayness at all. | | This gets cleared up a little a few paragraphs in: | | > The ability to clearly distinguish between abiotic and biotic | systems is considered by many a prerequisite for effective | astrobiology studies. However, since no natural demarcation truly | exists, there is a profound difficulty in advancing the field if | we rely on a strict dichotomy. ... | antattack wrote: | Motor proteins look alive: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 | Koshkin wrote: | As do these: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsLJdpjSJcM&t=15s | AprilArcus wrote: | I love this animation because it's beautiful, but I hate that | it gives the impression of deliberate one-foot-in-front-of-the- | other movement. In reality, when the "foot" of the motor | protein is unbound, it is oscillating to and fro in a state of | brownian motion until it happens to snap into place at the next | (or, infrequently but inevitably, the previous) subunit. At | this scale, quantum effects such as tunneling come into play, | and it would be cool to visualize the organized thermodynamic | chaos of the cell rather than the mechanical operation of a | homunculus. | macawfish wrote: | I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday | distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human | categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far | as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part | of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of | transformation and recapitulation... even if something | temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager little | narrow timeframe of experience, it's not. | | Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are | meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in | human experience. | slibhb wrote: | > Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are | meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in | human experience. | | In that case, describing the distinction as "arbitrary" seems | wrong. | shrimpx wrote: | Why not go further and say the entirety of "our reality" is a | human hallucination, as our senses are limited and our brains | peculiar in how they process their inputs. That the "real | reality" is an imperceptible-to-us dance of fields (even that | is only as far as our theories take us). | [deleted] | jollybean wrote: | That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because | lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even | 'subjective'. | | That a materialist perspective gives us some nice hard rules | for understanding certain things, it also by definition | struggles to help us understand the nature of other things, | i.e. 'most important bit' which is 'life' itself, so maybe we | should be thinking about that problem a little bit differently. | 'Emergence' seems to be a least one idea, among many. | guerrilla wrote: | > That's a good thought - but worth considering that just | because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' | or even 'subjective'. | | Interesting and plausible, but you didn't give an argument or | any example for that. | jollybean wrote: | For most things in the real life that we categorize, the | rules that distinguish those categories can be vague. It | doesn't mean those categories are not valid, or a function | of 'human perception'. | | We have difficulty with biological distinction, but we can | still confidently categorize something as being a 'Horse' | and 'Not A Horse' ... even if sometimes it's a little bit | ambiguous, aka 'Kind of a Horse'. | | Edit: and as for 'other ways of thinking' it very quickly | goes into metaphysics so it's hard to talk about because we | don't spend much time in that realm. 'Emergence' and | 'Biocentrism' are interesting ideas (fields?) that sit | within more or less regular bounds of science and so | they're just examples of what I'm referring to. | TaupeRanger wrote: | I think it's simpler than you're allowing. Death in animals is | the absence of consciousness with no possibility of recovery. | In plants and maybe-but-probably-not-sentient life, it's more | complicated. | gus_massa wrote: | We all agree when we should say that a cow is dead, but what | about sponges? You can pass a sponge through a sieve, and the | isolated cells will recombine | https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse- | sponge-... (Is there a better link?) Can a single cell of a | sponge create a "new" sponge? Or it's just the "old" sponge? | Should you wait until the last cell is dead until we can | claim it's dead? | | Back to cows... | | You can remove the heart of a cow and keep the heart alive in | a proper device, and keep the rest of the cow alive with an | artificial heart. (I don't know if someone has tried this | with cows, but this should be possible with the same | technology for hearts transplants in humans.) | | Are both parts alive? What happens if I unplug one of them? | Is the heart-less-cow is the real cow? I think we all agree | about this last question, but from the cellular level it's | just an arbitrary classification, in spite it's useful for | us. | mysterydip wrote: | My favorite example of this is the planarian. You can cut | its head in half and it will generate two new halves. Same | with the tail. Or cut the whole thing into pieces, and each | piece will regenerate the whole body. | [deleted] | xor99 wrote: | So interesting! Some similar work on this area: | | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23258-x | | https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020AGUFMP001...01C/abstra... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-07-23 23:00 UTC)