Slashdot Mirror
The Los Alamos Bug
Kannappan writes "'You somehow have to forget everything you know about life', says Steen Rasmussen, a colleague of Norman Packard. Packard and his team are working on creating life artificially, nicknamed The Los Alamos bug (pdf). It will be created out of a molecule called Peptide Nucleic Acid(PNA), with a blend of three different factors crucial to life, viz. containment, heredity and metabolism. The researchers believe that the synthetic lives so created will have an enormous practical value in producing clean fuels, healing injured bodies and acting as tiny diagnosticians roaming our bodies."
With our increasing knowledge of the mechanics of life, it's a matter of time until somebody succeeds in creating life from scratch. I don't think it's very controversial these days to say that if we don't already have the power to create life in vitro, we someday will.
For my money, a much more interesting question is, can we create *intelligence* from scratch? Humor aside, I think creating something with recognizable intelligence (not just programming) will be much more difficult -- and have much more profound implications -- than "merely" creating life.
Such experiments should help narrow down the various factors in the Drake Equation. Life, I suspect, is fairly commonplace. I have no idea if intelligence is.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
well, yes, creationists - when we have constructed life - will point out that we have failed to conjure forth mass from nothing. When we have constructed mass - they will point out that we have only converted some other energy into mass. The difference between creation and construction is entirely political and insubstantial - if we believe first life arose on its own, in the primordial ooze, we still believe that that it was constructed of smaller particles....
Lots of seemingly meaningless scientific pursuits have led to things that have had huge impacts on human life.
I seem to recall a silly woman, who specialized in x-ray crystallography, taking a picture of a molecule she wasn't supposed to be wasting her time on. If it weren't for Rosalind Franklin doing that, the discovery of the structure of DNA would have been delayed for god only knows how long.
We've known for a long time that extremophiles (organisms capable of surviving in extreme conditions, often incapable of surviving under human-friendly conditions) exist, and speculated that such life is the kind we'd find on other planets. However, this type of thinking (not necessarily PNA life; I think the slower diffusion inherent to fatty acids relative to water will mean that this new life-form is only useful as a test) allows us to produce extremophiles more exotic than what we see on Earth. All known life is DNA-based, and cannot survive in situations where DNA is for some reason broken up (hostile chemicals, high-evergy environments, low-energy environments, and the like). Imagine, however, life based on elements solid at room temperature and liquid at higher temperatures living on Mercury, where water can't be liquid; or life based on liquid oxygen or hydrogen, living far from any star, surviving distances between star systems without life support. This also challenges (traditional) creationism. If we can make life to exist anywhere, that means that the argument about Earth's specialization as a life-bearing planet is meaningless. This doesn't mean that God doesn't exist or that he is dead, merely that he doesn't have to exist. However, it gets rid of the creationism Trump Card so often played by precocious high-school students in Biology class. Conversely, if we find that we can't make life at all, or can only create PNA life, and can't manage artificial DNA life, it could turn evolutionary theory on its head. If we can't make life in a lab, how could we expect it to happen outside a lab? This would get rid of the Trump Card so often played by precocious devout atheists in High School biology classes.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Beyond some undefinable religious aspect I suspect you're hinting at, what's the difference between the two words?
AccountKiller
I'm hoping the parent was trying to be funny (the sasser worm??) but may inflame people who actually think like this, so I'll bite. And yes, this is relevant.
In all the "we are playing god" arguments that I've heard, I ask "where in the Bible/Talmud/Torah/Qur'an does it say 'Ye shall not create life'?". No one can ever give me a direct quote where it says we are forbidden from doing so. So, with that in mind, and given that we are given, the parent would say, from our devine creator, the gifts of intelligence AND curiosity, who is to say that we are not expressly ALLOWED to do this because we were granted the abilities. Now I'm sure I'll get replys that say "well, I'm given the ability to kill or steal, but it doesn't mean that I'm ALLOWED to do so..." and for the asshat that comes up with this argument, I'll counter with: Taking Life or Doing Harm (TM), in that intent, is usually a direct, willful act of agression. Creating, whether it be life, or a painting, or a controversial book, is not intended to be directly harmful in most cases, especially if the intent is to learn, or open a discourse, etc. Sure, some science has yielded results that might be harmful to someone in some circumstance, but I, driving my car to work, might be harmful to someone, in some circumstance, whether it be hitting them or poisoning the air of their great grand children and causing global warming, the seas to melt, and all of us end up doing bad Kevin Costner impersonations. My point is, and this is my own opinion, that the intent of most of the religious texts of the world seem to be "don't be evil bastards." How can creation be evil, when it's A) not intended to be evil, and B) Not even expressly forbidden? (that I know of)
Flame away!
Simple - the first life wasn't a cell. It was a bit of DNA or RNA floating in a sea rich in organic chemicals. Eventually the bits of what we'd call genes which created proteins that formed a crude shell were more likely to survive (some insulation against changing conditions). Then this little viruslike thingy got in and started making ATP and the cell ended up using that for fuel; The virus-thingy became a mitochondria. Then these simple cells competed and started adding dongles to help them compete. And then the perpetual arms race began, all the cells trying to 1-up each other with the newest addition or minor tweak.
But for each 'stage' I described I probably left out 20 or 30 others...
It just proves that life COULD be made through intelligent deisign (although it would short circuit the notion that only a 'higher power' has such capability.
It doesn't disprove the notion that life could be a product of stochastic processes.
While I am not a creationist, I did see the point of their argument - how simple amino acids and organic chemicals were first formed into cells, I have no idea.
I think this is an important question in biology, and I'm sure no biologist would deny it. The problem comes when the creationists merely assume god must have done anything we can't explain. It's the "god in the gaps" argument that's been popular probbably since we first learned to communicate. The problem of course is that science marches on and when you try to find your god in the gaps of science, science eventually closes those gaps. Religion always fights like mad because they've invested much of their belief structure in the argument. The gaps used to be in evolution. Those gaps have closed and now the gaps have moved to the creation of life itself.
The point that people like you were talking to seem to miss is that assuming the existence of a god to explain current lack of scientific understanding of scientific questions has always been a losing proposition. Where religion always fails is when it gets mixed up with scientific questions. Science adapts, and religion tries to cling to dogma. Religion changes too perhaps.. no one is seriously pissed off about heliocentrism anymore, it just takes about 100 times longer.
AccountKiller
You really need to look no further than the virus. It is little more than a small bit of DNA or RNA and a protective coating. They generally are parasites on cells since they don't have some of the machinery to reproduce on their own, but as you can tell from the epidemics and pandemics they cause they are a quite successful form of life at its most elemental level.
One things people who fall for intelligent design refuse to appreciate is that life has had hundreds of millions of years to evolve and perfect itself. We can't get our heads around that but that is an enormous number of cycles of mutation and natural selection that would inevitably lead to great diversity and complexity over time. Living organisms have to work because if they don't they die. All the failed mutations are dead, we only see the ones that worked so we are amazed life works but if it didn't we wouldn't be here to judge.
You would be really hard pressed to explain why an intelligent omnipotent being would have made all the design mistakes that we carry with. For example why would an intelligent designer give us an appendix that frequently threatens to kill us.
"and they dispute that such a thing could have evolved out of less complex parts."
So where did their creator and intelligent designer come from then? I think I could visualize random interactions of molecules leading to life better than I could that there is some omnipotent intelligence that has existed for eternity or whom just popped in to existence one day. That is at least as far fetched as amino acids randomly assembling themselves in to a virus or proto cell.
@de_machina
Ok, then obviously talking about cells isn't going to get us anywhere. So let's talk about the analogy that ID makes: the mouse trap.
The modern mouse trap has four parts. A base, a spring, a crushing wire and a trigger lever. If you take away any of the parts it doesn't work. The ID argument is that it must have been designed as any small change that removed one of these critical components would render the mouse trap ineffective.
This is a powerful argument, and it is what gets most people suckered into ID. Not because it is a good argument, but simply because you believe the mouse trap was intelligently designed and by drawing analogies to structures seen in nature you fall into the same kind of thinking.
There's one more thing most people are ignorant of that makes the argument powerful: how the modern mouse trap came about. People largely think the modern mouse trap came into the world fully formed without any evolution. Much like Edison's light bulbs, however, the mouse trap actually did evolve. The addition and removal of superfluous parts continues to this day. Designs compete much like genetic variations and the market selects which designs are improved upon.
To suggest that a flagellum or ATP-syntase must have been intelligently designed because it is irreducibly complex is to ask us to believe that no superfluous parts could possibly have been removed from the currently "perfect" design and that the parts which make up the current design could not have served any other purpose (even though I've just mentioned two biochemical systems which have similar components).
How we know is more important than what we know.
The fact that it took about the planets lifetime to form the first cells (BILLIONS of years) smacks of evolution rather than creationism. or did god simply take billions of years to think that he might like life here?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's not the way the word is normally used. We say a chef has created a wonderful desert, an artist has created a sculpture, etc.
I am trolling
i guess thats where evolution outperforms us. it gives randomness a chance and therefor can discover a better brain by chance.
thing is realy, how to put evolution into effect when creating a microchip or a computer program. and then how to test against parameters so that the program becomes self aware.
ie, the moment we can set down the requirements for selfawareness then we can build something thats selfaware. atleast in theory.
and yes, i have not read the book or whatever it is your refering to. maybe ill have to look it up sometime.
still, i belive one could build a more intelligent "being", that is if one fully understood what it is that make up intelligence. understanding what makes it stronger or faster is simple. understanding intelligence is hard.
but it seems that current research shows that the brain is a neural net in a chemical bath. drop the right amounts of the right chemicals and the neural net pathways are changed or disabled.
so, stacking a bayesian system of values on top of a neural net so that they interact and one should get some interesting results if one pipe the raw data of video and audio into the same setup and let it run for any number of years.
but as of now we dont fully understand how the brain works, and therefor can not yet build a better one. but if we manage to figure out how it works then we should allso be able to design a better one. atleast in theory.
so yes, the monkeys would not be able to build a smarter monkey as they dont have the knowhow about how smartness is designed. but if they understood that then they may well have been able to build a smarter monkey.
thing is tho that to fully understand a brain we may well have to put in into a jar and play around with it while its still "alive". but that flys in the face of medical ethics. maybe its time we have another round of nazi medical research? we may not like what they did, but the results where used to help medical science move forward...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Maybe so, but it doesn't address the issue of where their creator came from. Unless the creator is inherently less complex than the system it created, you need to explain how this earlier step came into being.
These people seem to take their existance of their god as a given, not requiring explanation.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Don't forget, it happened with quantities and timescales that you cannot easily (let alone physically) comprehend.
*the following are numbers pulled from nowhere, but help to convey the idea*
So, it takes a billion (1,000,000,000) years for single-celled organisms to evolve. On planet with at least a billion-billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) bits of organic building blocks in it's oceans, randomly and constantly thrown together. So if it's a one in a million chance to do a particular step on the road to life, it'll probably happen a million times a second worldwide for a billion years.
When you look at the numbers like *that*, the odds are pretty good you'll get something like life out the other end.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
get whipped (you know you like it)
Has it occurred to you that the problem lies with some practishoners of said religions, rather than the religions themselves?