Biologist (Almost) Creates Artificial Life 539
Aditya Malik writes "Wired has an interesting story up about how a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building 'protocells' from artificial molecules which are very close to satisfying the conditions for being 'alive.' 'Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.' This obviously raises some questions about creationism, not to mention some scary bio-research-gone-wild scenarios."
Re:Self Replicating? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? You don't imagine that something as fragile and immature as this could actually compete outside the lab do you?
Hell, take an existing microbe and remove the genes that regulate its pH level and it will kill itself in a few generations.
It wasn't you who sent the death threats to the LHC physicists was it?
Re:Questions about Creationism? (Score:3, Insightful)
Get your own dirt! (Score:4, Insightful)
This reminds me of a joke:
One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.
The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this, let's say we have a man making contest." To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!"
But God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam."
The scientist said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.
God just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"
Re:What questions exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the scientist did the (almost) creating here, what questions would this raise? Now if the (almost) alive protocells had popped into existence by random chance and from a void of nothingness, that would raise some uncomfortable questions.
Because it would show that life can be created from basic non-living components using simple chemical reactions, and that it didn't require some magical "zap" from heaven to do it? Yes, in this case it would be a scientist doing it intentionally, rather than it occurring by chance in the primordial soup, but it shows that in principle it is possible. At that point you would have a pretty solid theory of abiogenesis if you can show that earth had in the distant past these basic components and sufficient energy to cause the necessary reactions, and then just like with evolution you have millions of years and trillions of molecules to handle the "chance" part.
To all worried about "grey goo"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Recall that bacteria have had around 4 billion years to turn Earth into a nanopocalyptic wasteland. Sure, they're everywhere, but they aren't dismantling everything else for parts. If this were a real risk, it would already have happened.
'Almost alive' is fairly generous (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What questions exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
The trick with uranium dating is that when zircon crystals form, uranium is trapped but lead is excluded. So you know that all of the lead was created AFTER the crystal formed.
This is cross-checked against other forms of dating, too.
The disappointing thing is that your science teacher was spreading doubt on the subject when the answers were out there to be found. When a vast number of scientists say it's true, "I don't think it's right" is not a valid answer unless you've got a PhD. He may not have been spreading religion, but he was spreading doubt about a well-founded science, as if the scientists themselves were ignorant of it. They are not, and it's extremely bad form to imply that they are.
Re:Self Replicating? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's no telling what effect anything can have on an ecosystem until it's released into the wild. If it's completely unlike any currently existing life, then the life forms on a similar scale to it probably wouldn't understand it sufficiently to know how to interact with it (i.e, simple questions that don't require a great deal of sentience like 'is it predator or prey?' or 'is it a viable food source?'). I'm not a biologist, so maybe I'm not making a lick of sense, but how do you cram something totally new into the food web? Previous conservation efforts by humans (such as introducing the cane toad to Australia to eat the cane grubs) have proved disastrous, at best, because of unforeseen consequences.
Back to my original point, it's just short sighted to claim that it can't possibly compete outside a lab when anything could happen. To answer your question, it wasn't me who sent death threats to the LHC :P. My grasp of physics is much better than my limited knowledge of biology.
(P.S, about your sig, Creationists believe everything was created for them. They don't have to create anything themselves :P.)
Re:Says nothing about creationism (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Intelligent design (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Self Replicating? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh dear. It's a fat lipid with some RNA in it, not a magic eight ball. It's trivial to see exactly what would happen if this stuff was released into the environment: extinction, and likely in seconds. To work on this stuff they have to build huge clean rooms for precisely this reason.
My grasp of physics is much better than my limited knowledge of biology.
And yet you feel the need to open your mouth and proclaim doom.
Re:What questions exactly? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it would show that life can be created from basic non-living components using simple chemical reactions, and that it didn't require some magical "zap" from heaven to do it?
I don't foresee this causing any problems because (to my knowledge) the bible says "God created life," not "Only God can create life."
Of course, I've been wrong before.
Re:What questions exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
The disappointing thing is that your science teacher was spreading doubt on the subject when the answers were out there to be found. When a vast number of scientists say it's true, "I don't think it's right" is not a valid answer unless you've got a PhD. He may not have been spreading religion, but he was spreading doubt about a well-founded science, as if the scientists themselves were ignorant of it. They are not, and it's extremely bad form to imply that they are.
I'm a scientifically-minded skeptic, but I gotta say I disagree with you 100% here. I think that the essence of science is doubt, skepticism, and inquiry. These theories are not so fragile that we have to protect them with a shield of awe. If the science is well-founded, then it should be able to clear these hurdles easily. It should be able to withstand the most withering lines of inquiry -- And it does.
If you teach kids to blindly accept what "the authorities" tell you, whether those authorities are the Bible, or well-respected grey-bearded scientists, then you will get adults who accept whatever the authorities tell them -- in other words, people who can't be scientists, because they don't know how to think for themselves, and therefore can't use the scientific method.
When we teach science, we shouldn't say "Believe this because a bunch of scientists believe in it!". Instead, we should teach them to ask questions, develop a hypothesis, and think about ways to prove or disprove it. When they're old enough, they should be doing experiements. Think, ask questions, make observations, and do experiments to test your theories. That is science, not the consensus of elites.
Re:Interesting work (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand the question. Can you be more verbose?
The Bible doesn't say anything against people creating life. People create robots, and robots can create robots.
Re:Interesting work (Score:3, Insightful)
Out of interest, how do you rationalise something other than God creating life?
People and animals create new life [wikipedia.org] every day. Since in the usual course of events God isn't sole creator but rather shares a co-creatorship with the parents, there is no a priori reason to suppose the same co-creatorship could not exist in other situations.
Disclaimer 1: There are a whole slew of controversies surrounding this topic. I have purposely avoided those in order to give you a straightforward answer without getting bogged down in ancillary topics that would generate more heat than light.
Disclaimer 2: I would probably disagree with the GP on a number of theological issues (e.g. divinely inspired vs infallible or whether it extends to translations, copies or only the original text), so I don't presume to speak for the GP or the GP's religion, denomination or theological school. I can only offer my reasonably well educated but possibly flawed understanding of one school of orthodox teaching from at least one Christian denomination that I am familiar with.
Re:Interesting work (Score:2, Insightful)
Biologists creating artificial life are entirely tangential to creationism. After all, it's the *biologists* who created that artificial lifeform. It didn't appear spontaneously.
Re:Get your own dirt! (Score:5, Insightful)
God just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"
I find jokes like this interesting, because they demonstrate quite neatly humanity's obsession with modesty. Humans have relatively little power to alter their surroundings. We have hands and fingers that can manipulate small objects, but nothing much beyond that. We're a creature who's first resume could be summed up with "Skills: Can throw rocks" and "Hobbies: Enthusiastic hooting". We live short lives and die horribly easily. Compared to the vast energies of quasars, or the intricacies of quantum particles, we are powerless and clumsy creatures; small sacks of meat with little more natural skills than the ability to pick up small stones.
But in a blink of the cosmic eye, our species has constructed, well, this. Technology of unfathomable intricacy, abilities far beyond the dreams of our forebears. When you consider what we started out with, and where we are now, and how much work goes into everything we take for granted, it's too much for a single mind to comprehend. But rather than reflect on our amazing achievements, we exhibit an enviable modesty, making jokes comparing these achievements to a hypothetical perfect being. We ever hold in our minds how far we have to go, almost never considering how far we have come.
It's akin to leaving a child on a beach, and coming back an hour later to find he's accepting a Nobel Prize for the particle accelerator he build out of sand and seaweed. You might be amazed, but the child would merely shrug depreciatingly, and say something like "Well, it's not as good as the one at CERN."
Conversely, our concept of God is a entity that is inherently incapable of performing impressive actions. He might make impressive things, or be impressive to behold, but because his power is, by definition, unlimited, there can be no effort, or possibility of failure involved in his manipulations of the Universe. God creating a human being is no more impressive than a human picking a pebble off a beach; both are inherent skills that require no effort or risk of failure. But for a human being to create life, for a being of our meager abilities to succeed in reproducing, even in part, the awesome forces of nature and the cosmos... now that's impressive.
In summary, that joke makes God look like the asshole parents who try and win races against their 5 year old children. It's not a flattering image.
Re:What questions exactly? (Score:4, Insightful)
Skepticism is good and necessary, but it must be followed up by research. Saying that you don't know the answer is valid. Implying that scientists don't know, when they DO know and you don't, is not.
You can encourage the kids to go double-check the answers, and then expand on them. I'm just concerned that his statement was taken as "Those scientists make a lot of statements that they can't back up," and that's wrong.
Re:grey goo? (Score:3, Insightful)
We are they gray goo.
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=40.743095,-74.045105&spn=0.869827,1.235962&t=k&z=10
Re:Interesting work (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you answer where god came from then I don't think you have answered anything.
If the question is "Where did we come from?" and the 'truth' really is "God created us", then he has answered the question. You're moving the goalpost in this case.
It's like a creationist asking a scientist, "Where did we come from?" "The Big Bang." "OK, where did the Big Bang come from? If you can't answer that, then you're just moving the problem around, and you haven't actually answered anything."
Or more simply, if you're asking where cars come from, an appropriate answer is Detroit. You don't have to say where Detroit came from, or how steel gets made. The question has been answered. If you want an answer, good or bad, about ultimate origins, make sure you ask that question.
Re:What questions exactly? (Score:1, Insightful)
Who cares what the bible says? The bible is a book. Or do you believe everything you read?
Re:What questions exactly? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anywho, one of the questions was something like "Suppose a scientist creates life from scratch in a test tube. Is that evidence of abiogenesis, or creationism?" One answer, that most scientifically minded people choose, is that the scientist isn't doing anything that couldn't have happened in nature without the scientist, so therefore it's evidence of abiogenesis. Other people, those more creation minded, say that an intelligent being, in this case a scientist, created life from raw materials, so therefore, its evidence that life is created by intelligence.
Science dictates you take the simpler answer - the one that doesn't require a certain set of environmental conditions that can exist naturally *and* a man in a white coat to actually provide them (a rather massive, additional variable in the equation).
People of a certain bent might see evidence for Creationism, but that simply means they are not following the principles of science, in that instance. Further, a teacher who doesn't highlight this flawed reasoning, either a) doesn't understand what they're teaching, or b) is pushing an agenda.
Re:Interesting work (Score:4, Insightful)
It's only the biologists if they didn't reproduce it using means that feasibly would occur under historical circumstances.
If I pick up a rock, let go and it falls then I've found substantial evidence of the feasibility of spontaneous falling when an object is unsupported.
This instance of life isn't interesting to ambiogenesis but to rule out artificial life as tangential to creationism is an innaccurate blanket statement.
Re:Self Replicating? (Score:2, Insightful)
Your argument is the equivalent to:
Anything can happen -> you can be wrong
Not a very strong argument IMO.
Re:What questions exactly? (Score:2, Insightful)
Because it would show that life can be created from basic non-living components using simple chemical reactions, and that it didn't require some magical "zap" from heaven to do it?
So the lightning bolt often mentioned as the trigger for biogenesis/evolution/ didn't come from heaven?
Yes, in this case it would be a scientist doing it intentionally, rather than it occurring by chance in the primordial soup, but it shows that in principle it is possible.
It shows exactly what it is, that a *human* can initiate life from non-living material. Nothing more.
At that point you would have a pretty solid theory of abiogenesis if you can show that earth had in the distant past these basic components and sufficient energy to cause the necessary reactions, and then just like with evolution you have millions of years and trillions of molecules to handle the "chance" part.
I'm still waiting for that chance to occur again. If it happened once then there is no reason why it couldn't happen again and yet there is no proof that in the millions of years since it supposedly occurred once that it ever occurred again to make 2 completely separate evolutionary trees. So how to prove it even happened the first time in that manner (without invoking the anthropic principle of circular logic)? We are guessing at events that we were not around to witness to prove 100% correct but are taught as being gospel nonetheless. The smoking gun is still missing: that the conditions alone, without any intervention from a higher power, can spark life while a scientist (providing the intervention) in a lab still only *almost* can.
Re:Get your own dirt! (Score:2, Insightful)
In summary, that joke makes God look like the asshole parents who try and win races against their 5 year old children. It's not a flattering image.
Well, yeah, if you take the punchline out of the context of the rest of the joke. If you read it in full, then you'll hit this line: "One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God."
It's more like the kid has just given the parent the finger and said that he doesn't need him anymore, then tried to drive off in his Dad's car - great show of independance.
The point of the joke, as I see it, is that wrangling over evolution is really avoiding the question. If you want to argue over beginnings, argue over the real beginnings - how was matter, time, energy, etc formed? Until you can answer that, you can't really posit a universe without God (or without some other external force that made reality happen).
There is nothing "unnatural" about science (Score:5, Insightful)
"Having not been made by natural evolutionary forces..."
A dude in a lab is just as much a force of evolution and nature as a comet fueling a primorial soup or whatever you think triggered life on Earth. You don't GET to go outside the system. There is no unnatural .
When the researcher adds the next improvement to these globs of goo that allows them to survive better they will have evolved inside the system of nature which includes the petri dish they may someday live in.
And if it comes to pass that one day they evolve into a symbiotic arm for amputees or a blob that eats chicago, that will be natural as well.
Re:Interesting work (Score:2, Insightful)
...Unless you answer where god came from ...
God just IS, He was not created. No scientific OBSERVATION or experiment has ever contradicted the majestic opening sentence of the Bible:
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
In this one majestic opening verse, we find the three basic aspects of the reality we find ourselves in. There is the beginning -- time, then there are the heavens -- space, and then there is the earth -- matter-energy. The Bible is the only time tested document we possess that tells us about an eternal, uncaused being, called Elohim, in the original Hebrew that part of the Bible was written in.
ALL other religions and world views always place their version of God within our time-space-matter-energy universe, or as as part of it. ONLY in the Bible does the real, eternal self-existent God reveal Himself as One outside of and entirely independent of the Universe and its content.
Re:Interesting work (Score:3, Insightful)
This is very different from someone asking a creationist "where did we come from?" and he says "adam, eve, 7 days and nights, all from god." When asked where god came from he says "er, always been here, I guess"
god is often just used as a big logical dumping ground for everything that can't be explained. This is unfortunate, because it keeps (some of) us from working on the hard problems.
Created life vs evolved life? (Score:4, Insightful)
Evolved life wins.
We have had billions of years of self replicating machine eating each other for survival. What on earth do you think that they'll do to an organism which doesn't have that background?
"I have pretty much no knowledge about dinosaurs" (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Such a snotty subject line. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when were high school students 'free thinking'? At least the ones reading wikipedia are actively searching out information rather than only learning it because they have to. Yeah, I just watched Good Will Hunting for the first time last week ;) While the story is pretty exaggerated it has some truth. I didn't learn anything at university that I didn't already know, or couldn't have just learned by reading a textbook. Seriously. I was in fact much more interested in learning before I went to university, but part of that was just personal circumstances. I spent a lot of time during high school doing coding in my spare time, but since I had to start doing it for coursework/my job I just want to relax in my spare time..
If by a wikipedia whore you mean someone who will only have a cursory glance at the subject and not look into it in any further detail, then I agree though.
For something as nebulous as the definition of 'life' though, you could start in worse places than wikipedia for seeing a few different opinions. I'm seeing a lot of yahoo question and answer sessions whenever I google for info these days, and some of the answers are atrociously wrong, though presented in such a way as to try and sound like the person knows what they're talking about.
Re:No, sorry (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Such a snotty subject line. (Score:1, Insightful)
Thats unfortunate; I didn't learn anything I didn't know already when i was taking classes in high school. College is where things got interesting and challenging. Coding in class has made coding outside of class a lot more exciting.
College provides such a thorough explanation of subjects. Reading a wikipedia article on linear algebra or the antebellum south or ionic chemistry is nothing to the absolute immersion demanded by college courses in the same subject. Forcing yourself to read a textbook because of an intimidating exam is also a great way to learn;unlike will hunting most people will not fully grasp something they study only casual esp. at such a young age.