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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."
I wonder what latin name this will be christened with? . . .
A B A C A B B
Our brains limit us to only create something less "intelligent" if we were to do it from scratch.
We are certainly moving towards artificial intelligence. We actually have programs that can write themselves to a limited degree. And so we'll probably have artifical intelligence shortly. But making a new biological species with our level of intelligence sounds tough because of our limited knowledge of the brain.
I'd recommend you read things by Ray Kurzweil on this topic. In particular, "The Singularity" seems relevant. Apparently there is a short collection of essays by him online, but I don't know if it'll have what you're looking for.
Some people think that before DNA evolved, everything was done with RNA. Both hereditary information and the physical catalysts. Like proteins, RNA molecules can fold up into odd shapes and perform catalytic reactions. The only difference is that Protein based system work faster. The Ribosome, which converts RNA into Proteins is actually made from RNA, rather then proteins, and is almost exactly the same in all life.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Imagine a bug that can convert cellulose to alcohol. Or eats dioxins and destroys them. Or generates hydrogen from sun and water. Wouldn't these be somewhat beneficial?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Eugene Koonin and William Martin just came out with a fascinating paper on the LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). Link to Article on Pubmed
In brief: the RNA/DNA/protein worlds evolved at hydrothermal vents in inorganic chambers. At some point, the information molecules sheathed themselves in lipids and sugars, and free-living cells emerged from the vents.
In response to at least one of your questions: the LUCA to cell transition may have taken 500 million years (primordial soup = 3.5bya, 1st evidence of prokaryotes = 3bya). That's not very long on a geologic, or even evolutionary, time scale (about 20x the time for humans to diverge from apes). But it could have been happening at thousands and thousands of vents worldwide, in thousands and thousands of inorganic chambers per vent. All of that combinatorial power adds up.
4-star general in a one-man army.
can we create *intelligence* from scratch?
I think I fundamentally disagree with you in saying that intelligence is hard to create, given life in the first place. At this point in time, science has (almost) undisputedly proved the theory of common descent. I pretty well believe that humans eventually came from single-celled organisms, and so does most of the world.
So assuming that is true, intelligence more or less created itself, through life, by a glorified trial-and-error system. Although it seems surprising at first, if you consider how many many different orananisms there are (were) at any given time, and how many trials (generations) there have been, it becomes much more down to Earth.
Actually I think even 'intelligence' today is still a glorified system of trial and error. Think about solving an elementary algebra problem. What's your first intuition (or was when you were learning)? Isolate the variable, etc? Hell no! Trial and error. It's intuitive and doesn't take much mental 'work'. Example: Mary and Sue have a combined age of 15. Mary is 5 years older than Sue. How old is Mary?
Spit this problem at an average 5th/6th grader and I promise you won't get anything along the lines of x + (x + 5) = 15. You'll just get 3 + 8 = [crossed out], 4 + 9 = [crossed out], 5 + 10 = 15 !! And that's how the problem is solved by a (we'll say) 10 year old.
Now, I know I don't seem to be really getting at anything big, but consider this: the average 10 year old has solved a LOT of 'problems' in his/her lifetime, from how to balance to stand up, how much food to eat so you aren't hungry anymore but don't throw up... I could go on forever, but I will call one example: pouring.
Is it hard to pour water from a pitcher into a cup? I'm pretty sure most of you have figured out how to do this reasonably well by now. To do this problem systematically is EXTREMELY difficult. I'll simplify the problem slightly and boil the problem down to two varibles: The height of water in the cup (we'll say % full), and the tilt on the pitcher (an angle between 0 and 180). There is ABSOLUTELY no simple, one-line algebraic equation to solve this one. You can't simply say, when the cup is 100% full, put the angle to zero. You have to correct for how much water is out of the pitcher already and is about to fall into the cup (a time delay), and also the time it takes to move the pitcher from say, 20 degrees to 0 degrees (more time delay). Even better, the flow of the water within the pitcher depends not only on the angular position (zeroth derivative), and the rate and acceleration (first and second derivatives), but also the "jerk" of the pitcher (third derivative of angular position). Wow. That's hard.
To solve this problem analytically, you would need a lot of math. A LOT. In fact, even more than we know today. Using LaPlace transforms and 3rd order differential equation solvers, this can be done, but even the DE solvers are written in trial-and-error form to some extent. If you've read this far, you're probably asking: What exactly am I getting at?
YOU ALREADY SOLVED THIS PROBLEM! Ever fill up a cup and not spill? Not bad. Basically, your mind (body?) has already found at least some solution to this problem without you knowing it. You have subconciously short-circuited hundreds of PhD's worth of math with a magic black-box of trial and error. Remember when you were a kid? You tilt the pitcher little and tilt it back. Not enough. You do it again. Not enough. You tilt the pitcher until the cup is full. Crap. Spilled it. Note to self: stop before the cup is full.
So there you have it. Our 'intelligence' has solved math problems than most college graduates could do (even with Maple) to save their lives. If it works, do it again, and if it doesn't work, do something different. That's all our 'intelligence' is.
I really don't think this whole 'intelligence' thing is a very novel concept at all.
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
Obviously you have never read "Dorsai". Where they discuss this very thing. For example, what would happen if a bunch of apes could design and build the ultimate ape. Would it have the intelligence of home sapiens? Probably not. Rather it would have more strength, greater size, more powerful jaws, better olfactory glands, etc. It would probably not have a better mental capacity to conceptualize and build tools like a man (or woman if you insist on PC).
Thus, could we really build real better people? Sure we could enhance those features that we believe are important today. But could we conceptualize and build a better human with skills and capabilities that we can't even imagine? Perhaps.
It is far easier for us to create true intelligence from scratch within a software simulation than in wetware. We can literally run millions of generations of evolution very quickly there, and have very fine-grained control over the natural selection process. If we managed to create intelligence, the first place we'll create it will be in software. We might move on to apply the techniques to wetware and let it evolve a little slower in a little more natural environment, but probably by then SkyNet will already have enslaved us all, and it'll take care of the wetware experiments from there on out.
11*43+456^2
Sorry, but as others have pointed out this isn't the way the word created is used or understood by anyone but probbably yourself. By your definition NOTHING is created except by a god. People DO use this word quite commonly when referring to things not created by a god.
Your word definitions are thus extremely confusing because you're using a word with an existing definition and giving it a new definition contrary to the accepted definition. I could for example define cat as an aquatic animal that swims in the sea, but if I used my definition of the word cat in conversation expecting people to understand my personal definition, no one would understand me.
AccountKiller
Another question is whether we want to do that. Will it increase overall human happiness?
Run that past me once again in English?
OK. "They're fscking cheating"
They're using PNA because it does fancy stuff "on its own", just because the out of it is soluble in oil, but the inside of it is repelled by oil and prefers water. So it goes up and down according to whether it's "single-stranded" or "two-stranded" (i.e. whether the inside is expopsed or not). You don't need the complex machinery of metabolic reactions which is necessary for "real" life to cut, assemble and move stuff around.
The whole thing is a fraud, at least if TFA from the New Scientist is an accurate description. Never mind that the genome is essentially random bits of PNA that don't code for any chemical machinery. TFA says that it does influence "metabolism" directly, through electromechanical influence. Wow, that leaves a lot of degrees of freedom for evolution to play with, doesn't it ? (Hint: no, it doesn't). I could mention the utter lack of self-regulation (that thing just grows and divides when it's too big, period), removing the essential computational component of life (wonder what Packard's friend Stuart Kauffman would say about that).
The worst part is the thermodynamics. Apparently all the reactions that occur within the bug are "downwards", degrading reactions. The bug doesn't relly "build" anything. The miracle of life lies precisely in its self-constructing aspect: life is able to couple downwards, energy-releasing reactions and upwards, constructive reactions so that the former "feed" the latter. Thus living systems really construct themselves. That "bug" just uses hand-tailored, pre-activated, energy-packed components which are fed to it by the experimenter and degrades them according to a carefully hand-defined pathway. Evolution of the inner processes is utterly impossible because, essentially, there is no real "inner process". It's just like fire - a downwards, energy releasing reaction without any self-regulation. .
If this thing is alive, then so were Sydney Fox' "protocells" from 40 years ago !
That thing is about as relevant to understanding life as Deep Blue was to understanding intelligence - i.e. it gives a good example of what life is not.
Thomas.
To be sure, some practitioners are more annoying than others. However that they are doesn't remove the inherit fallacies which exist in those religions.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Actually, you are. I was disagreeing with the compairson between needing to show how non-organic chemicals turned into life with arguments about the origin of God. I was showing that in order to say that the first occured requires you to find a scientific process whereby it is liekly to occur. If you can't, then there is no reason to support the theory. God, on the other hand, does not require an origin or a scientific explanation of his existence.
Where did I say that?
If the grandparent was saying that then he's misinformed as God has already said who he is and that he didn't come from anywhere, if the Biblical account is true.
No, I'm saying that the theory that non-rganic chemicals could change via a scientific process into life is thus far lacking in evidence. There is no reason for me, as a scientist, to trust it.
I wasn't trying to help us understand, preserve or improve life. I simply pointing out a flaw in a comaprison that GP made.
|I'm an evangelical with a degree in Physics so I knida agree on that :^)
I half agree with you there. Science doesn't tell us how the universe works. It merely gives us a description of how it appears to work, based on observations. The underlying truth of how it works could be completely different, but as long as the model gives us results that match our observations, we can't really tell the difference and we're happy. I guess we're getting into the realms of philosophy of science here. In fact I'm coming round to the view that all science degrees should have a compulosry philosophy of science component in the first year.
Anyway, science is handy for making prediciotns about the future and figuring out the likely reason why something happened in the past. Trouble is that it's possible fore God to go and do something miraculous and then for our observations to not be able to tell the difference between that and something ordinary happening. Hypothetically, if God created the world in 6 dyas in a per-aged satate, so that it looked like it was 13.7 billion years old, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and a universe that really was created 13.7 billion years old. As long as the univer works as if it was 13.7 billion years old, then we can build our scientific models on the assumption that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. It might only be a few thousand years old in reality, but it makes no difference to our models. Too many people (including many scientists) don't seem to get this, which is quite sad because it ends up with a lot of scientists wasting their time warring with religion and a lot of religious people bashing science in the name of God.
That "bug" just uses hand-tailored, pre-activated, energy-packed components which are fed to it by the experimenter and degrades them according to a carefully hand-defined pathway. Evolution of the inner processes is utterly impossible because, essentially, there is no real "inner process". It's just like fire - a downwards, energy releasing reaction without any self-regulation.
What you just described is a virus.
Like a fire a virus burns resources without aquiring them. Doens't mean both a virus and fire can get out of control. Take a forest fire or a building burning.
So real question should be "is a virus alive?"
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Do you think "real" life began with complex machinery? I don't; complex metabolic reactions were not required then. It seems unlikely that when the first RNA based protobiont was "born" that it didn't have RNA polymerase to go along and replicate it, nor did the first DNA based organism have DNA polymerase sitting there waiting to do its job. One of the benefits of using PNA based genetic material is that, as far as we know, there are no lifeforms on earth based on PNA, therefore a system of reproduction and machinery is lacking. If we can make this thing "live", we can also watch it develop its own system of regulation/replication machinery, which is a very intriguing prospect.
The protein encoding portion of the human genome is now estimated at 3-5%, the rest isn't junk but it doesn't code for proteins, so the notion that the experiment is a fraud because the random bits don't code for proteins, siRNA, ribozymes, etc... is kinda ridiculous. Again, look back at when our genetic material was formed, do you think RNA and DNA just assembled in such a precise order that rRNA genes were formed and transcribed to magically create ribosomes to translate proteins? Again, I doubt it, we're looking at very simple molecules here with PNA, as were most likely to exist when RNA and DNA were evolving.
My same point applies to the rest of the parent post. The most primitive life did not require anabolic (building-up) reactions to create energy storing molecules, structural components, etc... these are all things which would have evolved far down the road. It is very likely that the first life only had the capability to break down things it picked up from the environment (or fed, as in the experiment in question).
PNA isn't entirely new, researchers have been utilizing synthetic PNA oligonucleotides for a couple of decades in various experiments, mostly involved with gene silencing. Despite that, PNA is still rather unknown, so I felt this info may be of interest to those of you who are wondering WTF this stuff is.
Well those are my $0.02, and I'm not trying to say that the experiment isn't bunk, because I all I have to go on is