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First Digital Simulation of an Entire Life Form
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting on what appears to be the first digital simulation of an entire life form. Researchers created more than a million digital atoms to reverse engineer the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a relatively simple organism. But is it really a life form? From the article: 'Viruses are tiny bundles of protein and genetic material that straddle the line between life and non-life. Many scientists prefer to call them "particles" because even though they contain RNA or DNA like other lifeforms, they can only replicate inside other living cells.'"
Story is a dupe...original story can be found here.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Language is digital (as opposed to analog) in the sense that you either use a word in a sentence or you don't. You can either use the word "life" in a sentence or not but you can't use a fraction of the word ("li" or "fe" don't mean fractional life - or anything at all for that matter). This creates (willful?) confusion in the minds of people who are very focused on a literal interprtation of language based laws and moral codes that "life" is a binary distinction.
The reality, however, is that the word "life" refers to a whole variety of concepts. There are all different ways of being alive and there are all different levels of being alive. Certainly we can find examples of things that are very "alive" just as we can find examples of colors that are very "blue" - but that doesn't mean every color is either pure blue not blue at all and it doesn't mean that something is either completely alive or not alive at all.
Going way off topic, the whole "life begins at conception" is what we in the sciences refer to as "not even wrong". After all, it's kind of hard for dead people to have children. If you really want to talk about when life began it would be at the big bang when matter developed the properties that cause it to form into complex self-replicating patterns over very long time scales.
If they can simulate something else than a virus (because I don't think viruses are intelligent) could they by this way obtain intelligence by simulating an intelligent animal?
You just got troll'd!
...Symantec/Norton, McAfee, CommandPoint, Crudpuppy, ClamAV, Grisoft and the rest are all preparing signatures, otherwise if this thing gets in the wild it will turn your data into nothing but pond scum... ;P (Aren't there ANY moderators with quirky senses of humor anymore?)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
...We've been able to have viruses on computers for many years now.
And it took 13 days...That's one slow simulation.
The main research page may interest some of you. And for those that it doesn't help, perhaps you want to look at our Linux clusters instead?
Simulating life is awesome. Now the next step is to simulate something like an Amoeba in water... let its DNA drive it to 'eat' a food particle, and see how accurate the digestion (and binary replication) is with the input being only the DNA and initial conditions. I wonder what kind of computers are required to simulate all that, in how much time? I'd more gladly donate cpu cycles to this than to SETI.
Next I wonder if the computer can be used to run regression tests to create the ideal bacteria or virii for a given situation. Virii can be built to repair human DNA in various ways... a particularly disadvantageous gene can be switched off throughout the body once infected with the virus.
Of course this only allows Cybernet to have more destroying power once it 'wakes up'.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
And that word 'lifeform' - it brings the quality of the reporting down to the level of Star Trek psychobabble. Try 'organsim', or even 'virus', next time.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
But is it really a life form? From the article: 'Viruses are tiny bundles of protein and genetic material that straddle the line between life and non-life. Many scientists prefer to call them "particles" because even though they contain RNA or DNA like other lifeforms, they can only replicate inside other living cells.'"
The same could be same for most species of animals; they ``contain RNA or DNA like other lifeforms, they can only replicate inside other living organisms''.
"satellite tobacco mosaic virus"
That sounds like the greatest hits of American products, all in one convenient album.
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make install -not war
This might make a cool game. Someone get Will Wright on the phone.
I think we can agree that bacteria are alive. But there are types of bacteria, the ones that cause leprosy and chlamydia, frinstance, that cannot reproduce outside of a living cell. (They, unlike most bacteria, invade and live inside cells.) It's fairly difficult to draw a hard line between them and some viruses that have lipid bilayers full of receptors on their outsides. Even prions self-amplify, so where do you draw the lines on what's alive?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I personally just put viruses firmly in the "gray area between living and not living" because those are arbitrary distinctions: nature always finds a way to find exceptions to the niches that man creates. Not to say that our classifications are pointless, we just have to realize that there are always going to be things in that gray area. This can be shown more dramatically in other biological definitions as well: when is a fetus "alive?" What is the exact point where two diverging groups are no longer the same species? All questions that have legal ramifications which essentially require a precise definition in order to make decisions as impartial as possible, but some things will straddle the line no matter how precise you try to make your definitions.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Human beings do nothing outside a very specific environment tailored to their needs, where temperature, pressure, oxygen content of air, gravity, radiation, &c., all lie within specific bounds. How is this different from a virus needing an environment that includes cellular structures in order to replicate?
Me, I subscribe to structuralism.
Very much so - I blow up life forms every day on RTCW.
Perhaps the better solution to this dillema is to realize the debate can not be settled because "life" is not a thing. It is a label. Humans invented the label and since it is an artificial construction its scope is equally artificial.
There is no such thing as "life" we invented a classification without defining it and therefore we have a debate. The only reason we even find it to be important is that we are still trying to come up with excuses to think of ourselves as something more than a random cluster of protein soup.
A (biological) virus does not eat or photosynthesize or have any metabolism at all. That's why they are virus particles, other than the slow degradation of all complex molecules if you have a tube full of virii they will just sit in the tube forever. Doing nothing. If you add sugar, protein, complex carbohydrates and sunlight to the tube of virii they will... sit there. Doing nothing. Not eating. Not metabolizing. Not replicating. Living things would either die, metabolize, or replicate, the virii do not. The virii does contain genetic information, if inserted into a cell the information is used to hijack the cell into making more copies of the virus. The virus may only encode a handful of proteins, but it uses the ribosomes and other protein building apparatus of the infected cell to make the viral proteins, and more copies of the viral genetic info (DNA or RNA) which is packaged and released from the cell (sometimes killing the cell in the process, sometimes not). Does this mean the virus is alive? All the protein synthesis, and packaging of the virus is done by the infected cell, the virus does not technically replicate itself, which is part of what we define as "life as we know it". They are not dead they just exist as a glitch. A primordial cell probably had a mutation that produced lots of particles that happened to be capable of causing the same glitch in other cells they encountered, virii are perhaps analagous to a "goto" loop that somehow copies itself to other programs, more than to actual computer viruses which imitate their biological namesake only to a certain degree. Maybe when the sony robot dogs start giving each other roborabies via bluetooth the analogy will be closer... IAABC - I am a biochemist - but genetic coding is still trickier than php scripting :P
That's possibly the most intelligent post I've read on Slashdot. I salute you!
"water" is also a noun. Water, is however a label for something real. "Life" is a label for a concept that does not exist, we made up the concept itself and not merely the label. It is not even a classification like a mammal, there is a valid definition of mammal, there has never been an agreed upon definition of life.
There is a very substantial difference there.
I think we have to distinguish between 'life' as a concept and 'living organisms'. Life is an abstraction - it is the 'quality' that is common to all life processes, ie the processes that we know from living organisms.
The only thing that is reasonably clearly defined is 'living orgnism'; and as several posts have already pointed out, viruses can't quite be called living organisms; not because the don't display life, but because they are too simply to qualify as organisms. However, they do have life proceses - eg. they reproduce.
How can one define the concept 'life'? It is a difficult one - there are many that feel it would be too narrow to define it simply as the set of chemical processes that we know from biology; among other things, there is no sharp boundary between simple non-organic chemistry and 'life-chemistry'. There are some that define life as chemical evolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_evolution) - this theory has the advantage that it can be generalised; all that is needed is a good generalisation of 'chemistry'.
"Life" and "non-life" are useful, but ultimately meaningless ontological distinctions that really have no purpose at the sub-microscopic level. Any sensible person can see that ultimately there is no difference between what we deem living and what we call non-living, as the quick and the dead are still naught but particles in relationship to one another. The notion of self-identical objects larger than the fundamental particles is useful, but when dealing on such a tiny scale it's best to forget about such pointless ontological nonsense.
Life obviously exist since we're having this debate - I doubt we could have it if we weren't alive.
You're confusing concepts with their labels.
He's not saying there's no such thing as life, which is easily falsified. He's saying the concept "life" is arbitrary, and that the boundaries of that concept are arbitrary: there are seven specific conditions you need to meet to be officially alive. Why those particular 7? What if we changed the list to 6 or 8?
Having dreamt up a classification called "alive" it's easy to demonstrate there are things that meet it. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that the classification exists outside our collective heads. Because we dreamt it up it.
Let's say we change the definition of "life", adding requirement number 8 "wings". Things that are "alive" have "wings". Therefore, you and I are not "alive" because we no longer meet the definition. BUT (this is where you got confused) we carry on exactly as we were, still reading Slashdot, still eating, moving around, excreting, etc, because we're only talking about labels, and not reality.
See Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance if you're struggling. It took me ages to get it.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as