Why Scientists Think Completely Unclassifiable and Undiscovered Life Forms Exist 221
An anonymous reader writes: In a new paper published in Science, researchers at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute note that "there are reasons to believe that current approaches [to discovering life] may indeed miss taxa, particularly if they are very different from those that have so far been characterized." They believe life forms exist that don't fall into the established eukaryota, archaea, or bacteria kingdoms. They argue that there may be life out there that doesn't use the four DNA and RNA bases that we're used to; there may be life out there that has evolved completely separately from everything that we have ever known to exist; there may be life that lives in places we haven't even looked.
Have we discovered all there is to discover? (Score:5, Insightful)
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To think that we have discovered all there is to know regarding life forms would mean that we already know all there is to know in this field.
So maybe we need to use different methods than the ones we have been using. Makes sense to me.
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Indeed. We have enough trouble finding certain DNA-based life forms. Plenty of life forms we only know about because we leaned how to copy DNA, and started grinding up samples and amplifying the DNA. Many of those refuse to grow in petri dishes and don't cause diseases, and would no doubt be unknown to this day if they didn't contain DNA.
I think there's a fairly low chance that Earth has life that doesn't use DNA/RNA but if there is and it minds its own business, it could be decades or more before we discov
Re:Have we discovered all there is to discover? (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. We have enough trouble finding certain DNA-based life forms. Plenty of life forms we only know about because we leaned how to copy DNA, and started grinding up samples and amplifying the DNA. Many of those refuse to grow in petri dishes and don't cause diseases, and would no doubt be unknown to this day if they didn't contain DNA.
I think there's a fairly low chance that Earth has life that doesn't use DNA/RNA but if there is and it minds its own business, it could be decades or more before we discover them.
Consider things that grow much, much more slowly. They're already finding chemolithoautotrophs living in rock 4 km beneath the surface of the earth, that reproduce over the course of years, rather than in twenty minutes like the bacteria we're used to working with. If there were organisms that didn't have DNA, but did have some sort of body that could maintain chemical gradients, allowing it some sort of metabolism, and reproduced on the scale of centuries, we'd have trouble ever noticing it was there because we haven't made the tools to find it, for lack of knowing what we're looking for.
Re:Have we discovered all there is to discover? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are Prions a form of life? If not, why not?
They don't use DNA, they use proteins.
OTOH all known Prions are either symbiotes or parasites.
Whether we recognize any particular non-DNA using entity as a form of life is going to depend strongly on what definition we use for life.
Re:Have we discovered all there is to discover? (Score:5, Insightful)
And just to pick a nit a bit:
"Unclassifiable" is pure nonsense. Unfamiliar, sure. Foundationally different than all terran life, sure. Unclassifiable, no. Even if it just starts a conversation that leads to a decision to add a larger category than 'kingdom,' once recognized, it can be classified.
Re:Have we discovered all there is to discover? (Score:5, Informative)
What they mean by the term is "not fitting existing classifications" of course.
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It should have been phrased better, but I think they mean something not fitting into current classification systems. The response to which will be to improve the classification.
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Even if it just starts a conversation that leads to a decision to add a larger category than 'kingdom,'
We already have that. The current popular top level is the domain, with the domains being bacteria, archaea and eukariotes.
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The best phrase I've heard for this is "don't eat the menu". Indeed.
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Not quite. They're suggesting that there's a good chance that there's an entirely different domain (or more) of life other than eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea. That's a pretty radical proposition, but not entirely out of bounds, because many of our more modern techniques for detecting life forms check for molecules that may not exist in a fourth (or fifth or sixth) domain of life.
If it turns out to be the case that there are only three domains of cellular life (leaving viruses out of the discussion for
Re:Have we discovered all there is to discover? (Score:4, Informative)
Not quite. They're suggesting that there's a good chance that there's an entirely different domain (or more) of life other than eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea. That's a pretty radical proposition, ...
Um, not really. A bit of quick googling verified within a minute my memory that the "discovery" of the archaea only dates back to the 1970s. Before that, the few that were known were (mis)classified as bacteria. Then a few researchers looked into their details, and showed that they weren't bacteria at all. Biologists basically watched the discussions, and eventually recognized that those researchers were right, and since then we've had 3 "kingdoms" of Earthly life forms.
It's the idea that those 3 root classifications are all there is that's really radical. The default conjecture should really be that, if we discovered such a major root clade so recently, there are probably more waiting to be discovered. Assuming otherwise mostly just shows a lack of knowledge of the recent history of biological discovery.
In particular, someone else has already mentioned the fact that the various deep-drilling projects have found living things kilometers deep in the rocks, no matter where they've drilled. The folks working with this data have estimated that there's more biomass below the surface water+soil layer than there is above it. It's likely that the critters living their slow, warm lives down there are radically different from anything up here on the planet's thin skin. Learning about them is going to take time. (And we can hope that the rapid expansion of "fracking" won't cause a mass extinction due to the massive habitat destruction down there before we have a chance to study them. ;-)
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A couple of points here.
First, we've now sequenced the DNA of so many microorganisms that it would be very, very hard for a new domain of life that uses the same sort of DNA structures to exist. The only likely way for a new form of life to exist is for it to be of a kind that isn't picked up in our DNA tests. That's what is proposed in this article.
Given that, and given that all life (and viruses) found so far speak the same basic DNA language, it's really not unreasonable at all that the domains we've a
Duh. (Score:2)
Because dragons are really cool.
GOD? (Score:2)
is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was under the impression that news was about you know, new things. This is just an article highlighting that money has up until now been targetted toward things we are pretty sure exist. you know, novel creatures not using radically different genetic bases. This is just some dudes going, "yup, there might be more out there than we thought" which is you know, the basic premise of all the sciences.
Come back to me when they actually find something that uses a sixth nucleotide.
Incidentally, where might this new life have hidden, that we haven't searched already. We've got extremophiles in the middle of godforsaken rocks already... there aren't that many new places that i imagine we
A. haven't looked already
B. aren't already colonized by the cousins we know.
Generally speaking, the new life would need to be able to outcompete, in certain circumstances, the stuff we know or it wouldn't survive too well the 2 billion years that bacteria have dominated the planet.
i'd think the only viable thing would be viruses, maybe, and us not fully understanding them. but then i'd imagine if an different nucleotide were somehow incorporated into a virus we'd already found, it'd also be present enough to show up as an unknown nucleotide. Might not know what it was, but we'd most likely have an idea that it were there.
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I was under the impression that news was about you know, new things.
If that's your criteria for science news then you're going to get low quality science news because new science is typically wrong in some way.
This is just an article highlighting that money has up until now been targetted toward things we are pretty sure exist. you know, novel creatures not using radically different genetic bases. This is just some dudes going, "yup, there might be more out there than we thought" which is you know, the basic premise of all the sciences.
Come back to me when they actually find something that uses a sixth nucleotide.
Incidentally, where might this new life have hidden, that we haven't searched already. We've got extremophiles in the middle of godforsaken rocks already... there aren't that many new places that i imagine we
A. haven't looked already
B. aren't already colonized by the cousins we know.
Generally speaking, the new life would need to be able to outcompete, in certain circumstances, the stuff we know or it wouldn't survive too well the 2 billion years that bacteria have dominated the planet.
i'd think the only viable thing would be viruses, maybe, and us not fully understanding them. but then i'd imagine if an different nucleotide were somehow incorporated into a virus we'd already found, it'd also be present enough to show up as an unknown nucleotide. Might not know what it was, but we'd most likely have an idea that it were there.
It's more than that.
For one they do cite evidence in the form of viruses with what seems to be very old DNA that isn't present in current known lifeforms. They figgured the viruses got those codes a very long time ago and had merely preserved them but they're now exploring the possibility those lifeforms are still around somewhere.
It also mentions they're beginning th
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:) was being a bit snippy.
my point being, they're not reporting a new discovery of any kind. they're announcing the start of a new line of inquiry... which, you know is exactly the thing that you do when you're not satisfied with the old line of inquiry.
the title and summary are specifically highlighting that scientists think other life forms exist that may be more novel than we previously thought.
my question would be... did this thought just occur to you? that maybe we don't know everything about the way
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:) was being a bit snippy.
I share the same tendency :)
my point being, they're not reporting a new discovery of any kind. they're announcing the start of a new line of inquiry... which, you know is exactly the thing that you do when you're not satisfied with the old line of inquiry.
the title and summary are specifically highlighting that scientists think other life forms exist that may be more novel than we previously thought.
my question would be... did this thought just occur to you? that maybe we don't know everything about the way life can be expressed? it's news that some people have suddenly decided to stumble upon a realization that most people have already had?
my first thought when reading the article was "no duh"
For me the bulk of the article talking about the problem of detecting novel forms of life on earth was setup, ie you're reading a science story here's the background. The actual payload was the bit about the new methods they're developing now. I do agree they could have highlighted the new advancements a bit better as that part was a bit vague.
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well the new methods were kind of behind a paywall. It they weren't i'd have to reevaluate their newsworthiness.
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That's a pretty narcissistic and arrogant world view which does little to advance the current state of knowledge. When we stop daring to think ambitiously and asking improbable questions about the world around us, we settle into a valley of complacency from which we loose the momentum of curiosity that has driven science and technological innovation. Imagine Einstein never bothered to write that letter which lead to the Manhattan project. Or if DARPA thought the packet switching ARPANET was a waste of ti
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scoop*
I wasn't complaining that they were looking for it. I was complaining that it was worth reporting on. Looking in the unlooked at corners is standard practice. As far as i know.
The deep waters are inhabited by our cousins, as are the boundaries of space. Inside rocks, inside boiling sea vents. The very idea that some things outcompete others is one of our basic immunological defenses.
That we haven't seen something already, on the bacterial stage at least. Seems to indicate that our current scheme
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oh, you know what i mean.
A, G, C, T/U
epigenetic modification is an entirely different kettle of fish.
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i specified find, because i did read a bit of the article too.
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Spock was probably right (Score:4)
"It is not life as we know or understand it. Yet it is obviously alive, it exists"
--Spock, "Operation -- Annihilate!"
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Devil in the Dark is the more appropriate episode.
Spock: "Within range of our sensors, there is no life other than the accountable human residents of this colony beneath the surface. Eh, at least, no life as we know it. "
Probably. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd hardly be surprised if there were many forms of life that co-existed in the RNA world days, and eventually they just lost out to RNA and then DNA because maybe it is more efficient at replication.
There are thousands of stable molecules, some we have even made, that can support a similar system of structure like DNA and can be made fairly easily with low energies.
We know even DNA can replace a phosphor base with a more energetic arsenic and still function, more or less.
Most likely there were more energetic forms of life that could survive back in the hotter early days that died off as Earth cooled.
Maybe we will find that some planets that are really hot do in fact have some form of life, give at least some liquid is present that can be used for transfer and energy. (like water)
Hell, we may even find them as we dig deeper in to Earth and find caverns even deeper than the ones we have found so far with ancient life in them.
Let's just hope we don't find no temples.
What there likely isn't, though, is nuclear creatures living on the surface of stars.
I told you so. Leprechauns exist (Score:2)
And the zombies. Never forget the zombies.
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And the zombies. Never forget the zombies.
Is undead the same as alive?
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That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die
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Well, mostly dead is the same as slightly alive...
"Generalized Life" (Score:5, Insightful)
Massive generalization has been good to the sciences.
In physics, we have used invariance principles to expand our definitions to the most general possible. This was the argument behind General Relativity, for example: Einstein wanted equations of motion that would be invariant under any smooth second-order transformation whatsoever, and when he put that constraint, and only that constraint on, he found the most general form of the equations of motion were uniquely determined (up to a constant of integration, which is the Cosmological Constant).
Biologists have generally shied away from this kind of approach to their field, but there is an argument to be made that there is an equally general definition of "life" as "anything that participates in a process of evolution by imperfectly heritable traits that result in differential reproductive success". It need not be tied to any particular concrete mechanisms like DNA and RNA.
This idea may turn out to be silly (which is why I wrote a novel about it rather than a scientific paper: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-... [amazon.com]) but well into the 1800's there was no general view of "energy" that unified all the disparate forms, to the extent that the fact that light had energy that was in any way related to mechanical energy was not really appreciated. The kind of unified view of energy we have today would have seemed bizarrely speculative at that time, in the same way that the notion of a unified, generalized view of life is purely speculative today, but it turned out to be amazingly useful, so it's worth considering the possibility in biology today (anti-science people will likely attack it as a waste of money, using computer technology that would not exist without a similar "waste" on ridiculous fantasies like quantum theory and "obviously useless" research into the basic physics of semi-conductors in the past.)
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There are a lot of things that fit that rather abstract description that I don't consider life, but which I do consider evolving. Stars for example. More recent generations of stars have evolved to consist of more heavy elements than did the earlier generations. (Granted parentage is a bit difficult to specify, as the parent is generally long dead before the descendant is born. And, of course, the Hydorgen involved is primordial, but then so are the elements of any life form, what matters is the organiz
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Yes, this! The way I like to phrase it is that "life is self-productive machinery", where "productivity" is defined as a property of mechanical work such that that work decreases the entropy of the system it acts upon. Life is then any physical system that transforms some kind of energy flow through it (i.e. is a machine, does work) in a way that causes its internal entropy to decrease (necessarily at the expense of increasing the entropy of the environment). The operating conditions of such a machine are t
Why Hasn't Anyone Thought Of This Before (Score:2)
This is revolutionary. An amazingly original idea, perhaps some life form that is silicon based instead of carbon based, with no DNA, hiding at the bottom of a mine shaft or something. A Devil in the dark if you will.
I just wonder why no one has ever though of this before now.
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It has been thought of. The issue here is "How do you look for something as general as 'life'?"
Consider the various probes we have launched to Mars that are looking for signs of life currently or formerly existing. When we say that, though, we're looking for signs of life kind of like what we know on Earth. Which is great. But if we don't find any, it's tough to say definitively that life doesn't exist on Mars because what if it's a different form of life that we don't understand?
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looking for signs of life that we don't really understand is a wild goose chase. We know that life as we know it... you know works, we can't check for every type of "maybe" that exists.
If there ever was a nebulous article... (Score:4, Informative)
The original article [sciencemag.org] is pure speculation. Can life exist that is so different from the stuff we know, so that we can't detect it with current molecular biology techniques?
Sure why not. What the article fails to mention is that we can find life in other ways. Even if we can't sequence the DNA in many cases we can culture microorganisms from environmental samples. We can also use microscopy to directly examine environmental samples. In fact both the microbial cultures and microscope have been done on large scale over many years. Not once have we seen an organism that does not conform to our current understanding of life on earth. Life can also be identified by the changes in the environment it create. Again nothing we have seen so far has suggested that there is a life form so unusual that we can't detect it with our current techniques.
Where authors of the original article fail most miserably is their solution: high throughput sequencing techniques. Huh? How would those techniques lead to the discovery of life that is fundamentally different if they are dependent on the standard properties of DNA and DNA replicating enzymes??
The Sound of Music ... (Score:2)
... with which the hills are alive.
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The internet (Score:2)
The internet is a life form:
1. it is growing (new devices are added every day)
2. reproducing (new subnets are created every day)
3. functional
4. continually changing
Re:Discover life? (Score:5, Informative)
Historically, "Life" has been defined as being any phenomenon that possesses all 5 life processes:
#1 Food intake/ nutrition
#2 Respiration
#3 Excretion
#4 Growth & Repair
#5 Reproduction
However, this seems to have been expanded to 7 [passmyexams.co.uk]:
#1 Movement
#2 Respiration
#3 Sensitivity
#4 Growth
#5 Excretion
#6 Reproduction
#7 Nutrition
This is for "Life" in the generalized sense, fully abstracted away from any specific mechanisms by which those processes may be achieved. It is perfectly sensible for an artificial lifeform to be constructed, as long as it is able to fully carry out those processes. It needn't have any organic components whatsoever.
Nowhere in the historical definition of "life" used by life science is there a requirement for specific mechanisms-- just processes.
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I've never seen that list without "adaptation". Evolution and life are essentially inseparable.
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That would be "Sensitivity"/Responds to stimulus.
Evolution is the phenomenon that occurs as a result of living organisms responding to changing stimuli in their environment, coupled with the need to consume energy to procreate and survive.
If the phenomenon consumes energy, reproduces, and responds to stimuli, it will experience evolution.
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No, not at all. Response and evolution are distinct.
Survival of the fittest has nothing to do with individual response to individual stimuli.
A self-reproducing system that does so perfectly, with no errors won't ever change, and isn't really alive.
Re:Discover life? (Score:5, Interesting)
A self-reproducing system that does so perfectly, with no errors won't ever change, and isn't really alive.
If it is successful at surviving, why would it need to adapt to be alive ? Maybe it's already perfectly adapted to its environment.
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I'm sure there was a lot of life on Earth that was perfectly adapted before the Oxygen Catastrophe [wikipedia.org]. As has been said before "evolution proceeds in spite of natural selection".
Organisms well-adapted to their niche are the norm. But when the environment changes, as it so often does, suddenly only the outliers - the poorly adapted mutants, barely surviving - are the winners.
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There is no such thing as perfect replication.
Such an organism may evolve slowly, but since there is no such thing as perfect data copy, (Even in computers-- which is why RAM has such things as ECC, and uncorrectable errors) the organism would still evolve.
Even if we go full on SciFi Robot Apocholypse here, we have the potential for manufacturing defects in the replication process prohibiting perfect program upload, and other forms of imperfect data transfer/replication, which will have cumulative effect gi
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There is such a thing as perfect replication... say... in the context of software, or so near that evolution is impossible.
You send the bits, you send them in an error correcting code format. You send a checksum as well. And you send them on a channel that's designed to completely fail if the noise is sufficient to cause errors, the entire message fails.
The number of bits that have been sent this way over the internet this way are over quadrillions, and the numbers of errors that wouldn't be caught by a t
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Your proposal still does not have 100% reliability.
You will find that even crazy-expensive cloud appliances do not guarantee 100% availability and uptime. They offer "four 9s" of availability. 99.99%.
Network worms do not have fully dynamic programming, and even then, are not alive, because they don't eat. ;P
Stargate "replicators" ate-- network worms dont.
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It doesn't need 100%. It just needs greater odds than the sum total of instances of the duplications that will happen under its current design.
Then *kaput*.
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Survival of the fittest has nothing to do with individual response to individual stimuli.
Well, indirectly it does. Those who respond a certain way might be more likely to survive and prevail, passing on all their goodies to the next generation.
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Okay, obviously pedantic point completely ceded.
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Oh bull. Your preconceived notions have nothing to do with whether something lives or not.
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Evolution and life are essentially inseparable.
Then you don't need to include "adaptation".
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That's like saying "energy and life are essentially inseparable, thus you don't need to include respiration"
Logical equivalence is one of the best things to have in a definition. A->B && B->A means that A defines B.
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doesn't that lead to some circular reasoning?
"what is A?" -> "b"
"well what is B?" -> "it's a".
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It's not circular reasoning when you're defining a term.
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Evolution/adaptation does not occur within a single organism. If you include that in the definition, then a parent and child combined might be "life", but each of them separately would never qualify. That doesn't really make sense.
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You can't really separate a living things' existence from its ancestors like that. It's like if you had a child in a room by themselves and went "HA, HUMANITY ISN'T SOCIAL CREATURES."
(Sorry for making fictional you so shouty)
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The "movement", "respiration", and "excretion" requirements would disqualify most plants. On the other hand, a robot can already be made to satisfy all 7...
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Only if you creatively redefine both of the terms to mean something they don't in a colloquial usage. Which, in turn, would make the great-grandparent's definition of life useless — because it did not contain the necessary (re)definitions of the terms it used.
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During prolonged darkness, plants with low carbohydrate reserves exhibited a lower whole-plant respiration rate, which decreased rapidly to almost zero after 24 h, and carbohydrate pools were almost exhausted in leaves, roots and flowers
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http://www.biology-online.org/... [biology-online.org]
Already covered for some time.
And plants DO engage in carbon dioxide release type respiration. They do it at night, when they are not photosynthesizing, and are metabolizing stored sugars.
They also excrete through structures called stomata [hubpages.com], found on the undersides of leaves, and in the grooves of stems.
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Not all plants have stomata ("stomas" would've seem like proper English). Non-vascular [slashdot.org] ones do not — are moss and algae not alive?
And we still need to deal with the movement requirement...
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My car breathes, excretes, senses, and eats. It neither grows nor reproduces, true, but then it moves — unlike plants...
The proposed definition of life is crap.
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Sunflowers.
Named, because they move their flowers to track the sun. [youtube.com]
Then there is the dodder vine.. [youtube.com]
Plants move all the damn time.
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No, ALL plants move. Some move more perceptibly than others. The two examples I gave were "Very noticeable movement", but even grass moves.
There are several mechanisms by which a plant may be able to move. The most common is "Phototropism" [education.com], but there are other forms of plant movement, including those responding to tactile stimulous [wikipedia.org], and many others [wikipedia.org]
Your argument is what needs work.
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I don't really have one — I was offered a definition and saw a number of problems with it. The best I hear back is that "science" defines a number of things — such as breathing, excretion and even movement — differently from the rest of the world.
To me, for example, moving one's leaves or fingers is not "movement" — changing one's location is. Moss can't do it — not on its own volition, anyway — so it is not "alive"...
And if a definition
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Only if you creatively redefine both of the terms to mean something they don't in a colloquial usage.
Or if you use the scientific definitions instead.
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Have we yet built a self-replicating robot? (without cheating)
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We may have. But if we haven't, it is only for lack of interest — not because it is not possible.
A lot of human self-replication involves cheating [aboutaffairs.com], why rule it out?
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What do you mean "cheating"? Many parasites can only exist and reproduce in extremely specialized environments.
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So, is fire alive? A key qualification has to be heredity, otherwise you can't rule out simple chemical reactions like fire.
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#1 Hereditary reproduction
#2 Metabolism
The reason viruses aren't considered alive is because they don't metabolize. Admittedly, though, I'm not a biologist.
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I think you need to think more carefully about metabolism. If a virus not alive because it externalizes its metabolism? Many forms of life externalize, say, their digestion, and yet we still say they digest their food.
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While I agree that there are forms of life that externalize digestion, I challenge you to show me one that externalizes metabolism. Viruses might be an obvious candidate, except that they're not considered to be forms of life (I believe precisely because they are not capable of metabolism).
But again, I'm not a biologist. My understanding of this subject is informed primarily by the writings of physicist Freeman Dyson.
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That is the question. I think what these scientist mean is that life is a "naturally occurring" complex and organized set of matter that can reproduce and consume energy. So naturally occurring mechanical entities may be alive where as a robot built by man wouldn't.
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I doubt that could happen from scratch. So far humans have only been able to make life from life. Which makes sense.
But if one would build an organic cell from scratch, is it life or is it a gooey robot?
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We can, in principle, find out exactly how a sufficiently simple life-form is put together. There's no obvious reason why we couldn't construct one out of simpler, definitely not living, chemicals. It would be a very large project, but it appears doable. Given two identical single-cell organisms, one from nature and one from the lab, does it make sense to call one life and one a gooey robot?
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fully synthetic biology is closer than you realize.
This is from 2 years ago-- Researchers succeed in creating fully artificial cell membranes [huffingtonpost.com]
This from about 4 years ago-- First fully reproducing bacterium with fully synthetic genome [jcvi.org]
This is from last year-- Creating synthetic ribisomes [northwestern.edu]
For real, being able to fully engineer a cell from the ground, all the way up, is fast leaving the exclusive realm of science fiction, and entering the realm of science fact.
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why care about "naturally occuring"? Dogs are not naturally occuring. Neither are GMO crops. They are alive.
They use natural process to exist and they come from naturally existing life. A scientist doesn't create a tomato from scratch. He reprograms existing life to manipulate life. Same with dogs. Dogs are breed using natural mechanism (fertilizing eggs, etc...) Nobody just builds a dog from scratch.
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existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.
Dogs and GMO crops are artificial lifeforms. They were caused by humankind. If humans did not exists then dogs would not exist. Humans don't create anything from scratch. We always create using a mix of natural and artificial parts. Everything we create is artificial by definition.
Definition of artificial:
made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, typically as a copy of something natural
Definition of supernatural
(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.
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yes, freak