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Synthetic DNA About To Yield New Life Forms
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."
How exactly does this blur the boundaries of life? I could see some people questioning if a virus was really alive, but adding more things like viruses wouldn't *further* blur the line, and anything as complex as bacteria would be life regardless of if they were natural or not.
I suppose if you let religion define "life" for you this might cause trouble, but definitions shouldn't be the job of religion.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
We can probably hit maxima that would be outcompeted in nature in a second.
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.