Synthetic DNA About To Yield New Life Forms 240
mlimber sends along a Washington Post story about the immanence of completely artificial life: "The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive... Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core 'operating system' for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands."
Not completely artifical (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose if you let religion define "life" for you this might cause trouble, but definitions shouldn't be the job of religion.
Re:Not completely artifical (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends on your definition of "maxima".
Even with survival constraints as the basis for a successful design, it can't be denied that an intelligent designer could have come up with much better designs than the ones you see. Attributing evolutionary designs to an intelligent being is practically an insult when you look at some of the shoddy work evolution has come up with. Our testicles, for example, hang from our undersides dangerously exposed, just because some protein denatures at core body temperatures. Apparently something needs to be redesigned that can't be made to work better with slow incremental improvements. Evolution's fix: make them hurt like hell when struck so you learn not to mess with them. A Microsoft-style hack. If we threw a bunch of supercomputers at the problem we might come up with a completely different protein design that would allow reproduction with undescended testicles.
Disregarding survival constraints as a parameter, a world of possibilities opens up. There is nothing in physics or chemistry that prevents the existence of almost any organism you can imagine, so long as fundamental physical constraints are adhered to such as conservation of energy, rising entropy, etc. I'd like an animal with wheels that I can drive to work, with chlorophyll in its skin so I don't have to feed it. Maybe it can sun itself on the roof while I'm at meetings, and ooze a delicious health drink from a special orifice so I can catch dinner on the way home. (Don't spit up your milk laughing, it's quite possible.) A creature like that would go extinct pretty quickly but it would sure be convenient to have one, and no law of nature prevents such a thing from existing.
Re:Not completely artifical (Score:4, Insightful)
While there is probably a lot that can be improved in the engineering of human bodies, I find it slightly disheartening that after thousands of years of learning we are still unable to create a single complex living cell without help from nature. When we do, it will be the greatest feat of engineering ever, and I will party like hell.
Re:Oh come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
vaporware (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not completely artifical (Score:5, Insightful)
Which explains the survivability of so much hackish, clumsy, but real-working software. See, software, or life organisms persist to the degree that they solve real-world problems. How "elegant" the solution is is rather secondary. Often, real-world problems are ugly, pseudo-random nasty problems that don't have a clear, simple, ivory tower style solution. I maintain a large, complex, beautiful software codebase that has the ugliest, most horrible hack of a pile of regex and scripting as its very center. The nasty hacks have been amazingly stable for years now, and work well, even if they are a serious pain to edit during the (very rare) need to edit.
It's carefully sandboxed - the ugly part sits in a single file that is itself wrapped inside a handler function, so the "pretty" part of the codebase is *never* contaminated by the ugly, "written in a day or two" hack that got the whole shebang started.
Sometimes, no matter how much you kick and scream, you have several screens of ugly case statements littered with random function calls, and you end up with a great big ball of mud [laputan.org].
Guess what!?!?! Look in the mirror - YOU ARE A GREAT BIG BALL OF MUD. Your body is a complex set of unclear, un-abstracted dependencies without clear boundaries. For example, we've long thought of the pancreas as a key component of blood sugar control. But recent research shows that the bones (yes, bones!) of the body also contribute to positive blood-sugar control [nytimes.com]. As a borderline type-II diabetic, I pay attention to things like this...
Millions of years of evolution (or a few years of hard work by a half-drunk God) have resulted in your body, which is a festering pile of weird dependencies. For example, if you don't get exposed to enough dirt as a baby, you end up with asthma [bbc.co.uk].
If Microsoft's software is truly evolutionary in nature, that would explain its dominance in today's marketplace - it's well adapted to survive in the software environment we've seen so far, and like the dinosaurs, it will only be beaten back when the basic environment changes. (which it is)
Get used to the world of "dirty" evolutionary solutions - it's the basic building block of life itself!
Defining Life (Score:3, Insightful)
FWIW, "intelligence" is an information model of the physical world at least minimally accurate and at least minimally inclusive (perhaps solely at initialization) of new information that it adds to itself, and that includes representation of itself in its model.