"Immortal Molecule" Evolves — How Close To Synthetic Life? 270
An anonymous reader writes with word of ongoing work at Scripps Research Institute: "Can life arise from nothing but a chaotic assortment of basic molecules? The answer is a lot closer following a series of ingenious experiments that have shown evolution at work in non-living molecules."
what is a living molecule? (Score:4, Insightful)
molecules can live?
ok just making sure
Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:5, Insightful)
> molecules can live?
You are molecules. Do you live?
Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:5, Interesting)
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"We just don't happen to fall apart for a while while we compute."
Uhhh, yea, and we call that attribute life.
Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:4, Insightful)
He did also say "while we compute". None the less I actually agree with your point; it is obvious that you have the equivalent amount of computing power as the average iceberg.
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http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3400/bringing-the-definition-of-%E2%80%98life%E2%80%99-to-closure [astrobio.net]
So easy to look up - how can cowards be so ignorant of the simple magic of Google?
Re: Temporary cohesion equivalent to life (Score:2)
Yes, with the following modified added to
"temporary cohesion equivalent to life"
As long as the cohesion (the maintenance of the mutual information)
consistently lasts longer, for some matter-energy pattern type, than you would expect given the thermodynamic regime which forms the environment of the matter-energy pattern By "thermodynamic regime, I mean the amounts of free energy that are around to do entropizing work on the matter-energy pattern.
Life = Excess sustained negentropy in a space-time region, comp
Repost with important grammar correction - sorry (Score:2)
Yes, with the following modifier added to
"temporary cohesion equivalent to life"
As long as the cohesion (the maintenance of the mutual information)
consistently lasts longer, for some matter-energy pattern type, than you would expect given the thermodynamic regime which forms the environment of the matter-energy pattern.
By "thermodynamic regime, I mean the amounts of free energy that are around to do entropizing work on the matter-energy pattern.
Life = Excess sustained negentropy in a space-time regi
Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:5, Informative)
In biology [wikipedia.org], life is defined as have the following characteristics:
Having these characteristics defines something as being "alive." See, not magic.
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Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:4, Funny)
We are organized here, reproducing asexually (it's a work in progress), responding to posts...
I'm registered. therefore I am.
Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:4, Informative)
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Yeah. IN biology. Because biologic life is the only life that could possibly arise. Ever.
Life is just an expanding (reproduction/growth) mass of something that processes/transforms some matter against the forces of thermodynamics (from chaos to order). That’s all.
It doesn’t even have to be physical matter. Data is just as fine. Or energy in other forms. Or simulated $something inside a computer.
Also, drawing a clear line between “life” and “not life” is the dumbest fuckin
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My point is that life is a word, and that it does mean something very specific. I would argue that it might be best to use a different word to describe what we're talking about here. Likewise with the concept of intelligence. Both "life" and "intelligence" are too loaded with historic and cultural nonsense for us to redefine them with more broad-spectrum significance. This is why people who study such fields create their own nomenclature.
In short, life is a term which only really meaningfully applies to bio
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Because biologic life is the only life that could possibly arise.
Um, you are aware of what "bio" means, right?
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sounds more like one of them high pot thesis
Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the things in the list your parent post gave are processes, as well, not attributes.
"Life" is merely a term we use to describe that collection of processes.
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Except for the metabolism bit which viruses also lack.
Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:5, Insightful)
At the C2 wiki a mad debate once broke out[1] about the definition of "life". What I've come to conclude based on my participation is the borderline is probably inherently fuzzy. Some things are "half alive". It's not a Boolean concept but rather a continuum, or at least many variables that we as humans have conveniently, and perhaps naively, packaged together into the mental concept called "life".
[1] I was about to say "lively debate"
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http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3400/bringing-the-definition-of-%E2%80%98life%E2%80%99-to-closure [astrobio.net]
Most of those C2 morons are just fucking full of themselves.
Computational Beauty of Nature (Score:5, Informative)
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I made a typo. Now I'm going to hell.
Oh jeez. They're letting everybody in these days.
-
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Damnit, I made a typo. Now I'm going to hell.
I think FSM would have forgiven you for the typo...
You should see how livid one I was interacting with became!
...but that sentence was just blasphemous.
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I would lump this together with String Theory in the "cute, but doesn't get us anywhere category" but at least String Theory uses some kind of math to back itself up.
I'm sorry, but as much as I appreciate you not preaching a Judeo-Christian system, you're still just proselytizing.
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The name aside, MIT Press publishes plenty of totally non-mathematical (and even outright flaky) books, and it's good that they do. They're in the business of interesting (which they do quite well), not necessarily rigorous.
I've read Computational Beauty of Nature. It'd call it moderately mathy, but it's definitely not coherent about it. The math is there and it's interesting, but it's not systematically developed and you can basically skip it, for all its relevance to the book as a whole.
For a simple examp
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This is what philosophy education buys you: you pay to learn to enjoy hearing yourself talk. ;-)
For what it's worth, I'm partial to the materialism.
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This is what philosophy education buys you: you pay to learn to enjoy hearing yourself talk. ;-)
For what it's worth, I'm partial to the materialism.
For what it's worth, the philosophy of (scientific) materialism [wikipedia.org] is based on the immaterial rules of formal logic, as are the materialistic ideas in the book the GP referenced.
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Non-working cats (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks for the reading tip. Like many other people trained in computer science I also belive that combined with Darwinian ideas it will radically change our understanding of biology and ultimately ourselves.
To paraphrase how Douglas Adams put it [youtube.com] for millenia science has been done by pulling things apart, but the first thing that happens when you pull a cat ap
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When your only tool is a computer, everything looks like a computation.
Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:5, Funny)
Are these listed items AND'd together or OR'd?
Yes.
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They can talk, and language will alter if you let them learn on their own without help (Organization).
I think you're missing the meaning of "organization" in the definition of life. Organization refers to the structure of the living organism. Take creatures, they have tissues that make up organs that make up organ systems which make up the entire organism. Then you have plants, with their various parts, roots, leaves, veins, etc. The ability to organize as a group of organisms is not part of the definition.
Overall, I think this debate about what is life is a whole lot of semantics. The word life has be
would you hesitate to murder someone? (Score:2)
if yes, then you admit to something about this "life" concept is real
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There is no Slashdot posts either, just cohesive list of letters, but it doesn't seem to stop people from reading them.
Claiming that there is no forest, just lots of trees near each other, is kinda stupid argument.
Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:5, Insightful)
Example: a watch can keep time therefore a cog can keep time.
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I see nothing wrong with the philosophical approach [slashdot.org] of headkase (another replier to your post) who merges properties of components and the whole. For example, a typical metal screw sinks
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She's a witch!
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My car is metal. I drive my car. Therefore I can drive....
Waaiit, I think we might be missing something.
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Re:what is a living molecule? (Score:4, Funny)
Sure. Anything with nipples can live.
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Sure. Anything with nipples can live.
I believe the correct quote is, "I have nipples Faucker, can you milk me"
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Why, YES. http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3400/bringing-the-definition-of-%E2%80%98life%E2%80%99-to-closure [astrobio.net]
Maybe you should re-think what you think you learned in school.
That's right, we're proposing a NEW DEFINITION for life.
Evolution is a Process. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would not follow you to that extreme. For some substrate to evolve it has to be able to replicate itself, i.e. locally work against entropy. The following steps of mutation due to imperfect copies and selection are then simple or even self-evident. I wonder if you could call the process before that point a competition between non-replicating substrates to become the first one to replicate itself.
And if science finally manages to crack the abiogenesis nut there, I can still appease those of more religiou
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The word "evolve" existed long before biological evolution was ever contemplated. It is, in fact, a synonym of "develop", and simply means "to achieve over time".
The universe, the solar system, cars, computers, and all the various business schemes we know and love today all evolved over the history of the universe.
Apply it to biology, and you have biological advancements that are achieved over time. That evolution has become associated with biology is a new evolution of language.
Re:Evolution is a Process. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, if you read the definition of evolution, the use of evolution in biology fits perfectly, as does the use in describing the development of the car.
The word is still used in common language, and its meaning has not changed in any way. Your confusion of the word evolution as having to do solely with biology is unfortunate, but completely incorrect. Furthermore, I am reasonably certain that Darwin himself never used the term when referring to his theory on the origin of species.
Evolution means simply to "achieve over time" and is used equally correctly when referring to either the development of the automobile or to the development of life. As I said before, "evolve" is a synonym of "develop".
That you don't understand the words you use is not my fault nor anybody else's, excepting perhaps whatever school you were subjected to as a child. Look up the big word, read the definition, think about it for a couple of hours (I hope it really doesn't take that long), and perhaps you'll come away with a better understanding in the end.
Whether you are talking about biological evolution, industrial evolution, cosmological evolution, or any other evolution, you are talking about essentially the same thing. The processes involved and the driving forces behind each will obviously be worlds apart, but the concept is the same. Your "Evolution" is nothing more than shorthand for "Biological Evolution", and the sooner you figure that out the sooner your vocabulary will grow by one word.
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If you have a set of entities capable of some analog of reproduction(whether those be organisms, these catalyst molecules, or religions that spawn sects), a source of variation(whether it be genetic mutation, stochastic thermal buffeting in the test tube, or people dreaming up new rituals and scriptural interpretations), and some sort of selective pressure(whether it be
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If you go to an extreme you can say the all structures in our Universe are evolved with the loosest definition of Evolution as: "Change over time."
Uh, that's not evolution. That's... change over time.
Evolution requires just three things: replication, random mutation, and a fitness function. That's basically it. But those pieces are absolutely *necessary* for any process to be considered an evolutionary process.
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Uh, that's not evolution. That's... change over time.
The actual definition of the word "evolve" is "to achieve over time". It is more than just change, it implies improvement. It is a synonym of "develop". I would definitely consider our current universe a vast improvement over the mass of hot gas that existed shortly after the Big Bang. Evolution is definitely the right word, and you don't have to stretch the definition at all.
What you are thinking of as "Evolution" is simply biological evolution, or as another poster more descriptively put it "evolution
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What you are thinking of as "Evolution" is simply biological evolution
Well, given that the article is explicitely about biological (actually, I prefer to refer to it as "scientific", since the process applies to more than just biology) evolution, I don't see what your point is. Or do you just like changing the subject?
Evolution is definitely the right word, and you don't have to stretch the definition at all.
Correct. You just picked a different one entirely. But "evolution", in the context of this articl
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Evolution = "Change over time" ?!?!?!?!
I think you're confusing "evolution" with "entropy"...
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More correctly, Evolution="achieve over time".
Think about it.
If you still have trouble, find a dictionary.
Interesting route... (Score:2, Interesting)
Working with the ribosome seems like as good an idea as any, but the research seems so restricted. The nutrient rich medium does run out, but they are not selecting for long term viability, they are only selecting for speed of replication.
Problems that this does not address are: how did metabolisms develop, and where did membranes come from? It seems that a membrane bound replicating body of this sort would fit all the requirements of rudimentary life.
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Re:Interesting route... (Score:5, Interesting)
Membranes self assemble. See micelles [wikipedia.org].
No (Score:5, Funny)
It can't be true since God didn't make it. Obviously :)
God who is not God. (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Now, it may just be cognitive cob-webs but who is to actually say that God is not waiting for us beyond the last theorem?"
Oh! That's in the second to last theorem.
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The older I get the more I wonder about the relationships in our Universe. Now, it may just be cognitive cob-webs but who is to actually say that God is not waiting for us beyond the last theorem?
Oh no! Your brain may be degrading! [slashdot.org]
I personally don't care. Atheists tend to be almost religious in spreading the word of no-god. I really don't care. I do good stuff with my life. If there's a god when I die, then he may or may not judge me, and something may happen to me, depending on your religion of choice. If there isn't, then I didn't waste any time in church. :P Instead I was being nice to people, and helping people, and playing videogames.
I agree about the hubris part though - in science, theories t
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I tend to agree to some extent. It's not the concept of God (or gods) that bothers me, but rather human projection of the concept. The problem is that I don't trust humans, and humans probably made up characteristics of what God/gods is out of their petty biased emotional asses.
In fact, I'm *sure* most of it is made up because much of it conflicts. If there is One True Brand of Religion, that means the other 99,999 brands are the wrong one. (Although a few religions allow a big flexible membership of gods.)
atheists are bothered by (Score:2, Informative)
cock-eyed smug believers
believers are bothered by cock-eyed smug atheists
myself, i'm just bothered by cock-eyed smug people
most believers, and atheists, just don't consider the realm of theology to be something to dwell that much on. they're lives are not simple, they are not stupid, they merely know a lesson apparently many don't know: humility on large questions
whatever is, or is not, out there, one thing for certain is: a little tact and subtlety is fucking appreciated from all of you, thanks
to me, one o
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but if we do finally solve all the questions posed by physics, biology, neurology, et al... Would we not be "God" ourselves? We would be able to create whatever we wanted having full knowledge over matter, cause and effect chains, and all that. So, while striving to find all the answers, we'd become "Gods" ourselves, thus invalidating all religion except that of answers. You'd find that "God" is you and I and your friends, family, etc. If that were the case, then who created you
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For me it's the exact opposite.
I was raised Catholic but as I started to think for myself as a teen I found out that the emperor doesn't wear any clothes. Ever since I have wondered why other people don't see that.
Now as I get older, I understand more about psychology, sociology and evolution, and start to see why religion evolved and that it did (and does) have an evolutionary fitness aspect. I still don't get it but I can see why it exists. Just like many other weird human behaviors.
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"Until then, don't be so cock-eyed and smug in your "logical" denial."
You should take a little of your own advice, your mind is slipping in your advancing age old man. Your arguments are absurd antique canards as unreasoned as the incoherent ramblings of a senile witch doctor.
"who is to actually say that God is not waiting for us beyond the last theorem?"
Who's to say there isn't a fucking purple unicorn that shits rainbows and barfs candy? Yeah, you're right, absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of abs
you have that burden of proof on backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
You are getting the issue sort of backwards. You are asking for evidence of a negative--evidence that God does NOT exist, and since proving a negative is impossible (disregarding logical impossibilities, like square circles), it's no wonder that you're coming up short. The issue is
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Ill admit you have at least seemed to put some thought into this, which deserves respect....
However, why is it the world of Physics which will be able to, or not, tell you the definition of god? Why not music theory, why not philosophy, why not war? What is so important about Physics in particular that you think it will be able to one day 'answer' what god is?
What you seem to be doing, from an outside perspective, is wanting there to be a god, but are too uncertain in what you believe to form an opinion
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Prepare for the next painful years of your life dying your hair black, listening to My Chemical Romance and Linkin Park, wallowing aimlessly in existentialist anxiety until you give up on life and become a nihilistic professional troll.
There are professional trolls? I think I could get paid handsomely for the following post:
If you believe that about all believers, it may help you to think about it pragmatically. Belief in a particular sky-wizard lets an live life in a richer reality - the seemingly chao
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You see, now you are getting into the debate on rather your actions are bound by fear (a belief, in this case, that you will be held accountable.) One could argue that if you live your life simply because of fear of reprisal at death, are you truly a moral person or are you progressing a strain of anger eternally and passing it along to your children? If someone can live their life productively while not believing in a "God" figure, wouldn't that make them a better person than someone who's only motive n
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God did make it. It's just that to these new critters, God is a giant pink two-eyed thing in a long silly white coat.
Immortality means no evolution (Score:2)
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"death is a critical for evolving... without it, you will consume all consummable resources, and when that happens no more copies will be possible."
That happens all the time and it's called ecological microsucesion. On a complex environment, when a colonizator consumes all its share, it disappears and its very detritus is the basis for the next colonizing wave (cow shits and death trees are the two paradigmatic examples). On the starting point you either are lucky enough that some deviation from the origi
Mars, Life, and Really Small Shit (Score:2)
The "Alan Hills" Mars meteorite has triggered interest in a type of bacteria temporarily coined "nanobacteria". The alleged bacterial fossils in the meteorite have been criticized as too small to be bacteria.
Since then the search for earthly equivalents has taken off. Some of the candidates appear to be either non-living, or on the borderline, including curious objects found in human blood.
And it tickles the question of how small a bacterium can get and still be "alive". It's too new of a field to make any
only one step of a great many (Score:5, Informative)
However, a soup of replicating molecules is still a far cry from life, and, indeed, there are many more complicated features of life as we know it, even at the most basic level, for which there is no creation hypothesis. We know that membranes can self-assemble into micelles, and one key component of all life is a membrane layer to separate the living environment from the surroundings. However, if, by chance, a micelle happened to self-assemble around a ribozyme, how does the ribozyme continue to function, now that it has no ready source of diffusing ribonucleotides (the building block of RNA)?
Second, how did the first micelles replicate? Did they simply continue to grow as more membrane molecules spontaneously add to them until they broke apart into two? Perhaps life arose in some sort of thermally-cycling environment and the micelles broke apart at high temperture, releasing the contents, and then reformed again, with new randomized contents when the temperature cooled.
Third, how did we transition from RNA contents with lipid membranes into the vastly richer information of the amino acid world? Is there a reductionist "alphabet" for amino acids that may have served as the starting point, from which the extra amino acids were added slowly. Is our alphabet 'optimal' (virtually all life uses the same 20-acid alphabet, which minor variations of 1 or 2 in extreme organisms)? Or perhaps the alphabet only evolved once, and thus had no competition and could be completely far from optimal.
As you can see, there are a number of interesting questions to be explored. We have, however, gone from not knowing how the basic components of cells (proteins, DNA, lipids) functioned, to knowing that DNA encodes the 'heritable' information, to its structure, to the Miller-Urey experiment [wikipedia.org], and now on to knowing immense details about the complicated protein functional networks within cells, and between cells as well creating synthetic molecules that can evolve via natural selection, all in the span of just more than a century. It's going to be extremely fun to see what we know by the end of the 21st century. Right now we feel like we know all of the basics and just have to work on the hard stuff. I will bet dollars to donuts that we have a lot to learn, and, by 2100, several discoveries will have been made that future people will wonder how we ever thought we knew anything without.
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-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19416904
-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19131595
Zombie Apocalypse Begins... (Score:2, Funny)
"They're just molecules, so they do what they do until they run out of substrate. And this will go for ever it's an immortal molecule, if you like, he told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here in San Diego."
Later in the evening working alone, Dr DeSilva accidentally cut himself with an x-acto contaminated by his cultures. The RNA slowly overtook his own cellular composition, "blindly finding solutions that made them more successful". Ironically, he had unknowingly predic
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"Here we go again" says Bruce Campbell.
Sounds like... (Score:2, Funny)
But they still remain molecules (Score:2)
Here is some more info (Score:5, Informative)
Synthesized (Score:2)
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In the former USSR the large scale industrial experiments were conducted to create living cells from a primordial soup. It was done as a part of defense effort.
It does not work. They tried everything lightening, temperature change, radiation, UV, infrared, vibrations, etc. Nothing worked. Life is starting in some different way.
Re:Synthesized (Score:4, Informative)
It does not work. They tried everything...
Obviously not.
Maybe they tried everything they could think of... Where did they get the primordial soup recipe and how do they know they didn't miss something that no longer exists on the planet?
They haven't tried a close pass through the tail of a comet yet or a giant meteor impact, both of which could be potential carriers of a missing spark albeit with some nasty side effects (irrelevant if there wasn't any life to begin with). They haven't tried everything.
--
The unknown unknowns are the ones to watch for.
And they didn't have enough patience (Score:3, Interesting)
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In other words, an "intelligent" being was behind the experiment, making sure the necessary components were there.
I am not a theistic evolutionist by any means. I do find it interesting that apparently, experiments HAVEN'T shown this yet (or this would not be news at all!), and yet so many people say they believe it because it's science...
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So, really this just nicely shows the necessary conditi
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"In the long run, guess what you have more... repeat ad infinitum."
There're two unstated, let's say, imprecisions on your statement.
1) Where you say "molecules that replicate themselves" you should say "molecules that *imperfectly* replicate themselves"
2) Forget about "more complex". They don't need to be more complex, they just need to rise higher affinity to their environment (i.e.: "steal" other molecules more effectively).
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First you have:
1) Basic molecules that replicate themselves
2) Basic molecules that do not replicate
In the long run, guess what you have more...
Next step:
1) Basic molecules that replicate themselves
2) A tiny bit more complex molecules that are better in replicating themselves (or last longer in the environment)
In the long run, guess what you have more... repeat ad infinitum.
I'll take a stab, non replicating molecules. The process of replicating cells (a general principle of life) is the conversion of molecules into other molecules. Molecules do not replicate, they are simply reconfigured through energy absorption and release.
Re:not as close as this first post (Score:5, Funny)
please evolve