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Biologist (Almost) Creates Artificial Life
Aditya Malik writes "Wired has an interesting story up about how a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building 'protocells' from artificial molecules which are very close to satisfying the conditions for being 'alive.' 'Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.' This obviously raises some questions about creationism, not to mention some scary bio-research-gone-wild scenarios."
I won't count it as life until it can build more fatty molecules too.
is it grey, and is it gooey? in which case, it looks like the end of the world is nigh!
I know they aren't really Von Neuman machines, but that phrase always puts me in mind of a replicator apocalypse...
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
eh?
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
They might be changed into something that could terraform Earth 2.0 ?
Lifeforms here on Earth are unlikely to be suitable for such. This could be quite interesting actually IMO.
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life grown in a test tube environment is SOOO well adapted to a planet where other forms of life have fought a life and death battle for SIX BILLION YEARS.
I think many people should be doing this because it is similar to the Star Trek theory that life could come out in Silicon or something we do not know it as. Of course, I think science should also try and database as many species as it can especially since many species are dying off before they're being cataloged. We should strive to know all the viable lifeforms possible even if they're extinct or not a species yet. I think this is one of the reasons why SciFi and Fantasy books and games are so fun, to see what it is like interacting with different life forms.
As for the impact this has on people's belief on God. Personally, I know God exists, and it wouldn't shake my faith even if people start printing out lifeforms from their computer. Maybe I'll find people trying to reason away God more annoying, but it isn't my place to judge.
God spoke to me.
That seems slightly ironic in this particular case, simply because these protocells were "created" by this Jack fellow. I don't believe in Jack.
He tried to create a phallic looking creature.
Similes are like metaphors
Since the scientist did the (almost) creating here, what questions would this raise? Now if the (almost) alive protocells had popped into existence by random chance and from a void of nothingness, that would raise some uncomfortable questions.
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"This obviously raises some questions about creationism..."
Such as?
"Maybe there is no God? We were some experiment?"
The fact that life may be "creatable" does NOT infer that WE were. At least not at the hands of "gods" or other lifeforms.
That's the sound of 100,000 /.ers trying to come up with the perfect obscure movie reference. We'd better get out of here before it gets ugly.
Too late...
Failure to follow this advice may result in non-deterministic behavior.
Shortly after their creation the cells formed a new religion declaring their white coated man God. Also that their world/petri dish was in fact flat and that on Sunday their God did in fact rest/got drunk and watched football.
the life form he creates is not the result of the work of an intelligent being
I wouldn't say that to his face.
Incidentally, all the generations that came before ours thought that life came from some intelligent being, but they were all stupid because they didn't live in the enlightened world that we live in today. There were no cars, computers, airplanes, and other technologies. They didn't have the Internet or Wikipedia. Thus, they were stupid. Today, we're much smarter than that and we know better than to believe in such nonsense.
What an awesome troll. I was going to actually respond, but then I realized that your post discredits itself rather well :D
This neither confirms nor denies any religious beliefs. If your religious beliefs rely on science not being able to do something, then you're almost certainly going to be shown to be wrong.
It's a shame I share your conclusions when your thinking is so fundamentally flawed.
You should look up the word 'logic' in a dictionary.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I was just reading about this in The Living Cosmos by Chris Impey. Very good book btw, worth checking out from the library or even buying.
I'm glad Szostak is doing this though, it starts to fill in the gab on how cellular life started.
This reminds me of a joke:
One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.
The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this, let's say we have a man making contest." To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!"
But God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam."
The scientist said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.
God just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"
Just like the guys who keep ALMOST finding Higgs Boson. They should award an Almost Nobel. (I've qualified for the Almost Darwin Prize a few times as a teen. I don't know why I let them talk me into blindfolded skateboarding.)
Table-ized A.I.
There were questions about creationism? I mean, despite all the facts that say it can't be true. Mmmmmkay...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Well, if an intelligent being (the aforementioned biologist) succeeds in creating a life form, then it follows, logically, that the life form he creates is not the result of the work of an intelligent being. It's simple logic, and any idiot can see that.
Exactly! It's like, last week I made a burrito, and I'm white. Then it follows that all burritos made before me must have been created by white people too. The stupid "burritos came from Mexicans" theory will be dead in the water. Finally, no more Mexationists.
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
Your argument is based on a logical fallacy: just because one life form was created by an intelligent being, it doesn't mean that all life forms were created by intelligent beings.
they were all stupid [...] Today, we're much smarter than that
Oh! The irony!
Amnesty International
Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating...
I'm no bioscientist, but could this project be modified to something which harvests energy from the sun and then can discharge it in a was in which electrical or bio-mechanical energy could be generated?
"This obviously raises some questions about creationism, not to mention some scary bio-research-gone-wild scenarios."
For the sake of brevity, we will not, however, be listing these questions here.
Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system
It's called a Lava Lamp.
Voight-Kampff for short.
The word you are looking for is ignorant, and is often due to a lack of access to knowledge.
To be stupid you have to ignore, deny and/or not study the current knowledge of the topic.
The world is far from enlightened, and one of the reasons for this, is Creationist Stupidity.
This is NOT a signature.
Why does this raise any questions about creationism? To the best of my knowledge, there are essentially no creationists who argue that life was created by humans or any other intelligent organisms(unless they are squirming around on the stand, trying to avoid the establishment clause). And nothing in any current evolutionary hypothesis precludes artificially constructed organisms any more than they preclude artificially constructed computers and hammers. The fact that we can, almost, produce simple organism analogs doesn't mean anything one way or the other, though I suspect that it will be a very convenient mechanism for exploring the capabilities of (relatively) low complexity structures, and will provide the opportunity to do evolutionary experiments from well defined baselines.
As for the bioresearch gone wild scenarios: all advances in knowledge create the potential for trouble; but I suspect that it will be quite some time before any synthetic organism becomes much of a threat. The world outside is an incredible hostile place, crawling with microbes that have been slitting each others' throats in innumerable horrid ways for millennia. The interaction will be something like this:
[Synthetic wimp organism]:"Hi, I'm synthetic."
[Hardbitten wild bacterium]:"I fucking killed my own family over a nanogram of glucose."
[SWO]:*gulp*
[HWB]:"Hey, look, one of the thousands of antibiotic compounds secreted by fungi as part of the brutal chemical war of all against all."
[SWO]:*Dies horribly*
Creationism is based on faith, not arguments. Mountains of proof are enough to convince those who believe in what they wish were true, rather in what the evidence suggests.
Your side is the one calling creationism "intelligent design" in an attempt to legitimise it. we've never said it's impossible to design or create life, merely that a big man from the sky didn't do it in seven days 6000 years ago and that the animals didn't start out as they are today.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Recall that bacteria have had around 4 billion years to turn Earth into a nanopocalyptic wasteland. Sure, they're everywhere, but they aren't dismantling everything else for parts. If this were a real risk, it would already have happened.
As a biochemist I'm surprised with the 'almost alive' statement in the article: they're still a long way to go. However, the work they are doing is interesting and is proof-of-concept for many elements of the RNA-world theory. I, like others, am surprised by the 'questions about creationism'. This show improper bias where this article doesn't approach creationism, but rather supports the validity of the evolutionary origin theory. The author has assumed that origin is a zero-sum game, and this is flawed and biased logic.
...... and idiots rule the world....
Whenever I start contemplating DNA (!), self-reproduction and the utter insanity of how complex the machinery of a single cell is, much less multicellular life, much less an animal, much less a self-aware brain, I just shake my head in wonder. There can only be one conclusion, really.
No, not God, that's utterly absurd. No, the conclusion is that life is really, really, really, REALLY unlikely. That's the answer to the Fermi Paradox. We are utterly unique, and I suspect that intelligent life is so improbable, that it requires 1e85th power cycles of the universe(s) for it to happen *once*. Of course, we have no idea how much "time" has passed since the last time it happened. We just wake up as a species and assume it must be happening everywhere.
Really, just contemplating the whole idea of DNA when it's really just a wet, sloppy pile of chemicals blows my mind.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
And I, for one, welcome our new artificial protocell overlords.
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Look at this carefully. He is mixing ingredients...not creating anything. He is using "source code" from something else. There is no way he is going to create DNA or recreate the processes that each living cell goes through without stealing from something else. Let's get real and past the hype. He's trying to get headlines somewhere from people that are willing to get excited. Every heard of the car that runs on water!!!!
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It is evident that evolution must be taught in school, not as an objective truth, but so people will learn it enough to find flaws in it. However, many schools teach evolution as if it's the Ten Commandments, which should never be the way science is taught.
I once had a signature.
Why are chicken eggs so tasty? Animals have been stealing eggs from birds for millions of years, shouldn't they have evolved some non-tasty additives by now?
How do you propose a non-tasty egg reproduce to pass on its non-tasty genes, given its tastiness is unknown until reproduction is impossible ?
(Personally, I wouldn't say eggs are "tasty" though. They usually need something else with them...)
Iron is an essential part of metabolism. Brains and nervous systems are basically electrical systems. Some animals even have a compass. So why do no animals have radios? Not even primitive ones.
Passive vs active interaction.
Impressive results have been seen in modeling evolution - for example, genetic algorithms - but all of these systems plateau after a certain amount of runtime. This is the so called "local maxima" problem. Yet biologists claim with a straight face that Darwinian evolution is open ended.
I'll have to leave this one for someone more knowledgable in genetics than I.
Horizontal gene transfer has been observed in the lab between multi-cellular organisms.. doesn't this just completely blow away the traditionalist "tree of life" assumption?
In what way is reviewing an assumption in the face of new evidence a problem with a scientific theory ?
anything more subtle and technical is a waste of time, as we see when creationists make more specific rigorously defined claims that are consistently shredded by informed rebuttals from the only audience that could even appreciate any significance in what they are trying to say.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
a big man from the sky didn't do it in seven days 6000 years ago
Are you sure about that? I have proof it did happen that way -- in writing. It's all there, black and white, clear as crystal.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Call me when he can create an 20-something Kelly LeBrock and I'll be more interested.
(Disclaimer: Actually I find this kind of science fascinating, but that doesn't aid in making a joke)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You can't prove anything for religions morons because it's not science and nothing lets itself be tested. All you can do is tell them to fuck off and shut the fuck up because there is nothing to discuss, no theories, no what if, no maybies. It's just like arguing on the Internet, even if you're not the christian it still makes you retarded. They are not worth it, just hope they all die and burn in hell so we don't have to hear them any more.
... a possibility to get large amounts of fatty molecules to get energy from the sun and other external sources? And this might be bioengineering gone wrong?! Sounds to me like we have a chance to use the obesity in America to create artificial life ...
I wasn't making an argument against evolution.. I was suggesting some remotely sensible arguments against evolution and asking why people who are against evolution never come up with anything similar.
I was merely making the point that your examples *aren't* particularly good.
Fuckwit.
Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School
So when is it discovered that Harvard is another front for The Umbrella Corporation?
And if god was so fucking smart why did he made two sexes? Why not just make one or make us hermaphrodites? If there are no heritage of mutations and ongoing evolution of the species why have two sexes? Seems like such a waste of potential partners. Not very intelligent.
If we made a robot army would we waste our time doing two different models and make it in such a way that you needed both to generate a new one!?!
Isn't HOW the scientist creates life more important than IF the scientist creates life when considering it's relevance to proving or disproving Creationism. If the scientist creates life using methods which have a decent chance of naturally occurring, wouldn't that be evidence against creation. Where if it took more extraordinary and unnatural methods to create life wouldn't it be evidence in favor of creation?
Does that make transcription JIT compilation?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
They're certainly better than "looks like God did it".
Surely you can agree with that. So why argue beside the point?
How we know is more important than what we know.
So why do no animals have radios? Not even primitive ones.
Both gymnotiformes (South American knifefishes) and mormyrids (African elephantfishes) produce electric fields that are used for electrolocation and electrocommunication. It's not as powerful as radio waves, but they still are generating and manipulating electric fields for communication.
I have proof that the Earth was destroyed to make way for an hyperspace bypass. It's all there in black and white.
The Bible is no more proof of something than the Hitchhiker's Guide is. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of faith. Do you believe that the Bible is the word of God, of men, or somewhere in-between? In the absence of proof of the Bible's divine creation, the Bible cannot in and of itself be considered proof of anything except for its own existence as a literary work. It is like hearing expert testimony from someone who has not yet presented his or her credentials in the field of inquiry.
As for myself, I feel that while the Bible is inspired by God, it cannot reasonably be taken as the perfect, unblemished work thereof. It contradicts itself too much, the time scales are too absurd (humans living how many thousand years?), and there's too much overwhelming evidence that contradicts the exact literal interpretation of parts of it. IMHO, Genesis is best interpreted allegorically---an explanation of evolution written very simply so that the relatively primitive people of that era would have a prayer of understanding it. Expecting to read a book from thousands of years ago and read words like "God created the dinosaurs" in a book written more than 2000 years before the discovery of the first intact dinosaur skeleton would be remarkably optimistic to say the least.
In any case, it is not proof, as in the absence of a very strict constructionist view of the Bible, the mere existence of Genesis in print does not compel one to accept its words as truth.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Small nitpik: one who ignores knowledge is precisely ignorant. Before creating you own pet definition of words, pay attention to the obvious etymology.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No Nobel prize for you, Jack! We don't give awards for attempted chemistry, do we? Or punish people for attempted murder! Wait a minute...
Surely the OP doesn't believe that an intelligent being almost creating life is somehow threatening to those who believe life was created by an intelligent being?
Speaking of self replicating, I had sex last night with a supermodel (almost). Well, I guess that depends on what is meant by almost. Also, the definition of supermodel might be relevant here 8^)
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
I was merely making the point that your examples *aren't* particularly good.
Compared to the usual drivel IDiots usually spout, they are almost Einsteinian...
Why are chicken eggs so tasty? Animals have been stealing eggs from birds for millions of years, shouldn't they have evolved some non-tasty additives by now?
I would see here two main reasons: one that if eggs changed their taste to discourage predation, predators would be under evolutionary pressure to change their taste sense to ensure they liked the taste of eggs - so this problem could not be directly solved. Some animals develop poisons to discourage others to eat them, but generally this only works for a short while before the main predators develop immunity to that poison, and now developing the poison is a penalty to you as you have to spend resources to make it while giving no benefits. The second part is that for eggs it might be more functional to focus ALL resources in getting the chick to the stage where it can defend itself / run away rather than diverting resources to producing some kind of deterrent.
Iron is an essential part of metabolism. Brains and nervous systems are basically electrical systems. Some animals even have a compass. So why do no animals have radios? Not even primitive ones.
This is an interesting question - but you have to look at what benefits a very weak radio might give a creature over using your voice (Hint: also think about possible downsides)? Generally once a solution has evolved to a problem, better solutions even if they are already in a primitive stage are blocked from evolving by being out competed.
Impressive results have been seen in modeling evolution - for example, genetic algorithms - but all of these systems plateau after a certain amount of runtime. This is the so called "local maxima" problem. Yet biologists claim with a straight face that Darwinian evolution is open ended.
Well I work in genetic algorithms so this one is easy to field. GP/GAs have a massive limit in that they don't have a simple success/failure measure like natural selection. In nature the only qualification is that you can survive, and success is easy to measure. But if you are trying to develop say an better antenna the success can be hard do measure. Now nobody says that evolution can explore all the search space - that is a basic limitation of this search algorithm - but natural selection is still massively better than our implementations of it. Co-evolution is another force multiplier for natural selection that is hard to replicate in GAs - while a GP problem might see a plateau after a while, nature will not as not only do they have to solve a problem (stay alive) they have to compete against other beings that are being evolved - leading to an arms race, and the red queen effect (you have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place).
Horizontal gene transfer has been observed in the lab between multi-cellular organisms.. doesn't this just completely blow away the traditionalist "tree of life" assumption?
Well this is not really a question, and all I can say is so what? Hybrids are common in nature as well and a model doesn't fit well in the tree metaphor either. If something doesn't fit any more with data its replaced with something that does.
Not to get at your actual question - the reason they don't pursue these tactics is that their current tactics are successful enough at their target audience. They are not targeting people who will think will logically about this - they want the people who like easy mantras "evolution is just a theory","I'm not related to apes","randomness != order". Evolution can be hard to comprehend as it is a complex dynamic that is not easily understood by our brains which are evolved for solving linear causality - and hence the mantras appeal to our "common sense". And they don't need to disprove it either, they just need to chip away at the confidence people have in it - inserting a bit of doubt so they can have support for introducing their "Alternative theories".
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
The Bible in its entirety is not the unblemished work of God. The so-called Five Books of Moses were dictated by God and written down by man. The rest of the Bible is made up of many works of man. So my proof is the first five books. And what if I could tell you that it can be shown mathematically that these first five books have certain numerical characteristics not found in any work of man? It has been demonstrated mathematically.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
If god is omnipotent, then god should be able to make something he cannot understand.
If god can, than god is not omniscient, because he would be able to understand it.
The same can be said in reverse.
Omnipotence and omniscience are mutually exclusive, thus a truly unlimited being is not possible.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I have actually followed this labs work for some time. The simple truth is that the whole evolution/origin of life concept has a whole lot to do with probability. In fact there is a great argument for life owing much thanks to the moon for it's tidal forces and thus increasing of concentrations of substances in tidal pools. That being said probability of chemical change increases vastly with time and there was a whole lot of time before life arose. I do not think we can even fathem the amount of time to create life from scratch and we certainly will not do it. However, this offers understanding as to what steps were likely taken to reach where things are now.
... go down to the cemetery and fetch a brain for my creation.
Its pronounced "Eye-gore".
Have gnu, will travel.
"Men shouldn't play god!" "Can we play Spore, then?"
These guys aren't anywhere near making anything as complex as actual biological life. What they're doing is more like biological engineering than biology. TFA reports they are close to making a very simple self-replicating system...
it's important to note that this thing they haven't made yet wouldn't be able to self-replicate without 'help' from the researchers once they actually DO make it. Of course, down the road they would like to get something that could be autonomous, but even then it wouldn't be able to survive outside the lab.
From TFA:
and
So we're really far off from what you're speculating about...but, to address your concerns, alarmism about this research along the same lines as the people who are afraid that CERN will open a black hole that will swallow the earth (not saying you are alarmist...but some are).
Bottom line is, once they make a self-replicating artificial organism that can also exist outside the lab we should put it in the same level of quarantine that we give the nastiest of the nasty biochem. weapons or diseases we keep for research. It's not like we don't know how to safely work with dangerous substances/organisms.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Until about 100 years ago, most people ALSO believed that matter existed of a combination of earth, smoke and water.
See, when you burn a solid, it releases the smoke and all that is left is the earth.
And when you dry it, you release the water, so all that is left is earth and smoke.
When you add smoke to it, it clearly also changes its properties.
Obviously wikipedia's entry on the periodic table is wrong, since we're just so full of ourselves to believe in science.
I'm with ya man.
That's pretty easy to answer, it's neither. It's a scientist creating life from scratch in a test tube. Abiogenesis is when there is no scientist involved.
Additionally, creationism is when God is required, so while it's not either, it does demonstrate that God is not required to form a living organism from non-living raw materials.
"some scary bio-research-gone-wild scenarios."
Nature is far better at producing far more and more diverse potentially lethal hazards far faster than all the bio-labs on the planet. Plus, nature has been at it for billions of years. If he could do it, nature probably already has, and we're still here.
Besides, if he builds something not related to Earth life, the possibility that it could affect Earth life is virtually nil.
I remember once there was a science related story on /. that didn't devolve into sCaRy mOnStEr sci-fi speculation. Once. It's amazing what mischief the mind can get up to when it's working with very little information, except no, it's not at all amazing.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Whenever I start contemplating DNA (!), self-reproduction and the utter insanity of how complex the machinery of a single cell is, much less multicellular life, much less an animal, much less a self-aware brain, I just shake my head in wonder.
Doesn't bother me. Evolution is a massively parallel computation and has been going on for a LONG time.
If you skip DNA and just look at RNA it all gets easy:
- RNA caries genetic information and can be copied by an appropriate enzyme. (It's less stable than DNA, but quite stable enough to form the genomes of viruses. At the early stages, with no competition yet, being error-prone is actually good.)
- RNA has enzymatic activity. (It's not as strong or as versatile as protein-based enzymens. But it is quite capable of folding itself up into structures coded by its sequence, sticking together at appropriate places and presenting controlled patterns of charges on outer surfaces of a controlled shape, to become a little molecular machine.
Nucleotides line themselves up on a strand of either RNA or DNA to form the complimentary code sequence. They'll bind themselves into a strand given enough time and jostling. But if you have a RNA strand that also sometimes folds up into a little zipper-tab that runs down the lined-up RNA bases and sticks them together into a fresh strand you're all set:
- You'll eventually have both that and its compliment hanging around in the same container.
- At some point the strand that folds up into a zipper will zip up the new bases stuck to its complimentary strand. Then you have TWO zippers tab strands plus a complimentary strand.
- Now the zipper strand(s) start churning out new zipper strands and complimentary strands.
Slow at first, because rev 0.1 probably doesn't work well and it's completely dependent on randomly occurring bases for "food". But with the exponential under way the errors start to accumulate. Now you get some that are better at zipping than others - and they dominate the regions where they occur. And you get strands with multiple copies and other noise sequences - which can now evolve separately within the strand and evolve new functions.
Whenever a strand evolves one of its "spare" "genes" into a machine to help out, it becomes more successful.
From there you can evolve:
- Machines to make components of the system from other "useless" stuff.
- Machines to string amino-acids into useful structural stuff - and eventually better machines.
- Machines to control a container, creating the "cell" and its division mechanism.
- Machines to make backup copies of the RNA code in more stable DNA and then make more RNA from that.
and so on.
There's plenty of suggestions that this is what happened. For instance: Most of the machinery of RNA-directed protein synthesis - both most of the parts of the ribosome (the stringing factory) and all of the transfer RNA (the amino-acid carrier/code reader mechanisms) are RNA enzymes.
So, no, contemplating the current complexity doesn't bother me at all. It can all be explained by evolution from a single, simple, mechanism that could easily be produced in millions of years of random abiotic chemical reactions in a planetary scale vat of solar-irradiated, weather-stirred chemicals.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I may have missed this bit, and the work is unpublished, but I read this article as saying this guy put chunks of RNA into a big fat glob, added water and saw the big fat glob break into smaller fat globs with bits of RNA in them. Is that not just a kitchen-sink-dishwater effect of division, not replication?
It would be a lot easier to destroy a robot army based on all the same schematics.
All humans are different and breeding helps to insure our survival by keeping us different...unless you live in Kentucky.
Why does this have to raise questions about Creationism?
I'm an atheist free-thinker, and even I know that Creationists do not have any questions.
They only have answers.
Just ask them.
Why can't we just keep this about science, learning and knowledge?
Just let people think what they want, Creationism, mysticism, voodooism, you'll never change the beliefs of the irrational, no matter how much hard science you come up with.
god damn outsourcing
Just because you only almost accomplish a specified goal doesn't mean you only almost succeeded.
I can almost create cold fusion but perhaps create an efficient and sustainable hot fusion reaction.
The working being done is interesting and of consequence to scientific study regardless of the outcome.
How do you propose a non-tasty egg reproduce to pass on its non-tasty genes, given its tastiness is unknown until reproduction is impossible ?
Evolution is a numbers game. If a particular chicken (in the wild, not farm raised) had the bad tasting egg gene and survived to maturity and laid a clutch of eggs that tasted bad, a predator would be more likely to eat a few but not all, whereas it would probably eat all of another chickens eggs. Eventually, the surviving chickens could conceivably weed out all the chickens with good tasting eggs.
However, on an equal footing here is the possibility that predators could develop a taste for bad tasting eggs and the ones that liked the bad tasting eggs would be more likely to survive to maturity.
Then again, there is the likelihood that egg defense is only one small step in the reaching of maturity for a chicken, and probably not even the hardest step. There was more pressure to develop a way to fly short distances than to make bad tasting eggs.
By the way, my belief and defense of this particular possible avenue of evolutionary pressure does not dissuade me in the slightest from my belief in God.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What questions? Like whether Creationists are really babbling on about some aliens creating life on Earth as some kind of "live action videogame" or something?
Or some ridiculous question about whether having a fabulous chemistry set makes someone a god, and science that dumb people understand equal to a bona fide "miracle"?
--
make install -not war
A living cell is profoundly more complicated than the lipid shell this individual designed. And then he takes already formed nucleic acids, that already have code invented and written upon them, and in the end, has has made the equivalent of a plastic box that he stuck pieces of a floppy disk in. Talk about hype!
"Having not been made by natural evolutionary forces..."
A dude in a lab is just as much a force of evolution and nature as a comet fueling a primorial soup or whatever you think triggered life on Earth. You don't GET to go outside the system. There is no unnatural .
When the researcher adds the next improvement to these globs of goo that allows them to survive better they will have evolved inside the system of nature which includes the petri dish they may someday live in.
And if it comes to pass that one day they evolve into a symbiotic arm for amputees or a blob that eats chicago, that will be natural as well.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
I'm not so astounded by the creation of life, but by the occurrence of the same kind of life in nature (and where) to tell us the chances that abiogenesis likely happened so long ago. Creating a man-made molecule in a collider and making life in a test tube are fun exercises, but I want reassurance that the world happened the way we have been teaching it (YMMV in Arkansas).
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I'll take the random A+ high school biology student over a Wikipedia article. This is coming from interviewing people for a position at my business - you can see the Wikipedia in the resume and hear/feel it in their oral interviews. If you pay attention to Wikipedia, that is. I prefer free-thinking high school students to Wikipedia whores anyday.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"As a Slashdot discussion on any scientific topic grows longer, the probability of it devolving into creationist-bashing fest approaches one."
That still doesn't mean God intended it to be interpreted literally. If anything, it makes it far less likely because it shows a vast intelligence created it---a vast intelligence who presumably would be capable of understanding that primitive man was incapable of understanding something as complex as evolution.... :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Evolved life wins.
We have had billions of years of self replicating machine eating each other for survival. What on earth do you think that they'll do to an organism which doesn't have that background?
Deleted
Then why are you commenting on the subject? It's called talking out of your ass. Please don't do it.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
If you accept the fact we are different and some attributes get mixed/copied/(can't find a good word for it) from your parents you is also accepting the fact that mutations in genomes get copied as well. Except a big enough amount of mutations and you also except that life evolve, and then you probably have no use for old gods and stupid stories since it could be explained without them.. And well, then you aren't into intelligent design at all.
>* Why are chicken eggs so tasty? Animals have been stealing eggs from birds for millions of years, shouldn't they have evolved some non-tasty additives by now?
Your mother hid hers in her womb and most birds put theirs on high tree in places where most carnivores can't get at.
That post was very odd, illogical, and ambiguous. You are saying this.
1) Let intelligent being = IB
2) Let life form = LF
3) IB created LF
which you then conclude one or both of the following (the ambiguous part):
4) LF was not created by IB
5) IB was not intelligent
#4 violates statement #3. Either IB created LF or not. Choose only one please.
#5 violates statement #1. IB was intelligent and now he's not. Choose only one please.
These are your statements which represent your logic. Your logic is invalid because your statements conflict. It's also funny because you declared anyone who doesn't understand your broken logic is an idiot.
Regarding your second paragraph: you stated previous generations were stupid and our current generation is smart, which is why previous generations believed in intelligent creation of life. Your proof was in the fact past generations did not possess modern technology. Of course you've drawn a connection there between technology and religious belief. You're saying the intelligence of a person is measured by the nature of the technology he creates. I challenge that by asking you these questions:
Now. I'm not asking these questions because I don't know the answer. I'm asking them to illustrate just how vacuous and illogical your statements were.
Camping on quad since 1996.
...to start a company called Umbrella Corporation, this would be it :D
Machine9dotNet
Actually, nope, they're quite distinct cases, regardless of the "god" option. Something having a beginning does not automatically imply that it was "created" by something whatsoever.
E.g., there's a rainbow outside. It wasn't "created" by anything. It's just the interaction between a bunch of droplets of water, and the sunlight coming in at the right angle. Both are quite random things, and it seems funny to ascribe the power of creation to them. It's an ephemereal phenomenon.
E.g., the formation of the Earth and solar system that that. It's just a bunch of atoms and mollecules which collapsed under their own combined gravity, and happened to settle in this configuration. Some of them first accreted into smaller bits of stone and ice, but nevertheless it's just physics at work. It wasn't "created" by anything whatsoever. It was just a cloud which re-settled in another, more compact, shape under its own gravity. At best you could say that the solar system "created" itself.
Plus, as was already said, you're already postulating that time itself must have existed before the "beginning", which isn't necessarily a given. It's just another axis of the time-space of this universe. Just because we can mentally extrapolate beyond point zero, it doesn't mean it actually existed.
E.g., I can mentally extrapolate going a billion miles west of here. I mean, I can walk a mile or two in that direction, why not a billion? In reality, there is _no_ point that's a billion miles west of here, on this spheroid we call Earth. It wraps around.
E.g., heck, in the Universe itself, I can easily extrapolate something like "a trillion light years in that direction". In reality, there is no such point because the universe itself is finite.
E.g., I can come up with a mental extrapolation like "the 42'th planet around the Sun." I mean, their distancs and periods are just a number series. There's nothing in it that would prevent you from calculatin how far a 42'th planet would be, and what period it would have around the sun. But there is none. Just because you can calculate something it doesn't mean it actually exists.
Ditto here. Just because our intuition can extrapolate something, it doesn't mean it necessarily existed.
Heck, it may even be inaccurate to extrapolate to infinity in the _future_. There is at least one hypothesis based on string theory that there is no acceleration of the expansion of space, it's the time itself that is actually slowing down. And will eventually stop completely. So there might be a point T, past which there is no more future. Much as you can mentally extrapolate past it.
Etc.
Basically don't let your perceptions and intuitions run your model of the universe. Said perceptions and intuition were made to work at small distances, over limited times, and generally with small numbers. There are phenomena which happen too fast or too slow or over too large distances, to bear any relevance to how the mammal brain evolved to deal with or to even resemble anything that your first hand experience includes.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
" Why are chicken eggs so tasty? Animals have been stealing eggs from birds for millions of years, shouldn't they have evolved some non-tasty additives by now?"
Egg-laying animals may well have done so many times in the past, but the lack of any objective measure of tastiness that is common to all species (or for that matter, all members of the same species -- consider for example the wide variety of human foods that are considered to be delicacies in one culture, and repulsive in another) is always producing a situation where those who didn't find the "new variant" egg intolerable ended up displacing the ones who were incapable of utilising these valuable sources of nutrients.
"Iron is an essential part of metabolism. Brains and nervous systems are basically electrical systems. Some animals even have a compass. So why do no animals have radios? Not even primitive ones."
There are some animals that have what amount to radio receivers, e.g. sharks, who can detect the small electrical impulses in their prey's neuro-muscular systems from a considerable distance. if predators already have receivers, you definitely don't want to be the animal who is broadcasting high-powered electromagnetic signals all over the place, because everything with sharp teeth and any amount of sensitivity to electrical impulses will be coming your way to see what's producing this interesting new tingle in their sensor circuits. This is an excellent explanation for the fact that the animals we know about which have harnessed electricity for uncommon applications use it to give those curious toothy things with receivers (and indeed ones that use other senses to find prey) a massive tingling in the sensors that they won't forget in a hurry.
"Impressive results have been seen in modeling evolution - for example, genetic algorithms - but all of these systems plateau after a certain amount of runtime. This is the so called "local maxima" problem. Yet biologists claim with a straight face that Darwinian evolution is open ended."
Anybody who has to deal with local maxima (and indeed local minima) problems in models knows that these are artefacts of the models themselves, not reflections of any limitations in the thing that is being modelled.
"Horizontal gene transfer has been observed in the lab between multi-cellular organisms.. doesn't this just completely blow away the traditionalist "tree of life" assumption?"
No, because biologists don't pretend that such trees are anything other than convenient human abstractions of a continuum, just as metres, Kelvin, grammes, seconds etc. are convenient human abstractions of continua (or more correctly, things that might as well be continua at those scales).
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Well, that any sane person would interpret you like you did, is fairly obvious. Now try telling it to some of the bible-belt bible-thumpers. Last I've read some of their arguments, it boiled down to exactly that:
- evolution can't possibly happen, a dog will never evolve into a cat
- life is too complicated to have appeared by chance, it's only God / The Intelligent Designer who could have made it
- certain organs are too complicated to have appeared by random mutations and natural selection, only God / The Intelligent Designer who could have made them
Etc.
Heck, there even was this recent experiment where a bacteria culture held on a citrate substrate, which it originally couldn't metabolize, eventually evolved the proteins to take it apart and feed on it. A certain group of bible thumpers outright accused him of fraud.
Again, I'm not saying that _all_ christians are like that, or that the bible is like that. But there _are_ people who interpret it just like that: _only_ God could have created life.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Mansy SS, Schrum JP, Krishnamurthy M, Tobé S, Treco DA, Szostak JW. Template-directed synthesis of a genetic polymer in a model protocell. Nature. Published online 4 June 2008(PDF warning). Does not require subscription to Nature, because it's straight from his lab page.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
From abstract:
Here we show that such membranes allow the passage of charged molecules such as nucleotides, so that activated nucleotides added to the outside of a model protocell spontaneously cross the membrane and take part in efficient template copying in the protocell interior. The permeability properties of prebiotically plausible membranes suggest that primitive protocells could have acquired complex nutrients from their environment in the absence of any macromolecular transport machinery; that is, they could have been obligate heterotrophs.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
So far his lab created membrane bubbles that suck in the nucleotides. Inside those bubbles they had primer-template complexes like:
5'-GATTACA-3'
3'-CTAATGCGATGCCGTAGATC...-5'
Once inside the bubble the nucleotides spontaneously build up at the end of GATTACA... primer (primers are actually longer, 15 bases) complementing template. The proof of that is seen in gel electrophoresis pictures on Fig 4 of the original article in Nature(PDF).
The article is pretty readable, btw.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Since when were high school students 'free thinking'? At least the ones reading wikipedia are actively searching out information rather than only learning it because they have to. Yeah, I just watched Good Will Hunting for the first time last week ;) While the story is pretty exaggerated it has some truth. I didn't learn anything at university that I didn't already know, or couldn't have just learned by reading a textbook. Seriously. I was in fact much more interested in learning before I went to university, but part of that was just personal circumstances. I spent a lot of time during high school doing coding in my spare time, but since I had to start doing it for coursework/my job I just want to relax in my spare time..
If by a wikipedia whore you mean someone who will only have a cursory glance at the subject and not look into it in any further detail, then I agree though.
For something as nebulous as the definition of 'life' though, you could start in worse places than wikipedia for seeing a few different opinions. I'm seeing a lot of yahoo question and answer sessions whenever I google for info these days, and some of the answers are atrociously wrong, though presented in such a way as to try and sound like the person knows what they're talking about.
which is totally what she said
Wasn't this the one where captain Oneal goes and tells everyone that bringing the replicators on board is a bad, ...very bad idea....and no one listens, and then the whole ship is taken over.
Or no wait, wasn't this the episode where Scotty brought on one of those little cute furry things on the enterprise and by the end of the episode, they were falling out of the vents and the ceiling and the walls....
Yeah I think that's it....
Does artificial mean "assembled by people" or "not real/authentic"?
If this biologist combine a dash of this and dash of that and life arises, is that artificial? The molecules are just doing what they are supposed to do. If you throw sodium metal into water, it's quite natural for there to be an explosion, even though it was a person getting the whole thing started.
My gf is a geophysicist and she tells me there's no such thing as an artificial diamond. If it was created in a lab, it's a carbon crystal. Diamonds are minerals, minerals come from the ground, not labs. The two materials are chemically identical.
i'm not trying to make either case, just musing on what we mean by artificial.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I, for one, welcome our new protoculture overlords.
Is there a "-1, Duh" moderation? Of course plants/chlorophyll harvest solar energy, but that wasn't the question.
What I was asking was: can we create an organism that produces usable electrical or biolmechanical energy (other than as petroleum-type fuels).
I don't get the connection between artificial life created in a laboratory and creationism...
However, this does seem to lend some credence to the theory of inteligent design...
"In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase),[2] in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". Thus, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper's refutability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science."
My point here is that scientist are constantly directed in two ways 1) to enhance and confirm existing hypothesis's and 2) refute the existing hypothesis's, sometimes utilizing techniques which extend outside the relevant and 'reliable' realm of science.
I hope you are being sarcastic and don't actually believe your post. It is difficult to tell.
So let me get this straight. If an intelligent scientist in a lab creates something, it will prove that those things aren't created by an intelligence. Your logic is stunning.
If a bug is created in a lab by a scientist (i.e. an intelligence), such a scenario will support ID theory, not disprove it.
...very close to satisfying the conditions for being 'alive'
That's the same thing my wife says about me. Hey, I'm a science experiment!
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Thats unfortunate; I didn't learn anything I didn't know already when i was taking classes in high school. College is where things got interesting and challenging. Coding in class has made coding outside of class a lot more exciting.
College provides such a thorough explanation of subjects. Reading a wikipedia article on linear algebra or the antebellum south or ionic chemistry is nothing to the absolute immersion demanded by college courses in the same subject. Forcing yourself to read a textbook because of an intimidating exam is also a great way to learn;unlike will hunting most people will not fully grasp something they study only casual esp. at such a young age.
... welcome our new blubbery overlord.
I agree what everything in your post but it sounds almost like you're disagreeing with me somehow but i can't quite follow your point - what's too easy?
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
What I'd like to know is: What did the first living cells eat? The Earth would have been starel(sp) before there was life. Life eats life.
Plus, how long did those early cells live? Was there so much life popping up that it was ok that the cells only lived a few days? I just don't see how a single cell could live long enough to evolve into anything other then it's original form. It would have to be randomly created with the ability to reproduce asexually in order to pass on it's dna to future generations.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Constructing something that can hijack some or all of a life form is no doubt impressive, but ultimately no more than a virus. And is that creating life? I certainly don't think so, any more than putting some robotic exo-skeleton on a soldier will be creating a human being.
=-+
Pshhh.... I was going to create life, too but instead I just stayed home and played Spore.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
I have been extremely close to being a billionaire for about 30 years now.
I guess that isn't real news either?
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Why are chicken eggs so tasty? Animals have been stealing eggs from birds for millions of years, shouldn't they have evolved some non-tasty additives by now?
Change your point of view: why do "you" find eggs so tasty (because you are the predator in this scenario). Taste is subjective, most common repulsive things are bad for your health or are a danger. You like it because there a lot of proteins and fat. You are "programmed" to like it. Key ingredients for your survival (27% of fat, 12% of protein, the rest mostly water...How could you resist?).
why are those eggs so rich? Because the embryo needs it in order to grow, they don't appear ex nihilo. The prey and the predator are both living being. Both consumes the same thing.
A defence isn't always "material. Why such a short incubation? And after blossoming Why do they grow so quickly? Why such a burden on both parents? Why so many eggs and not just one?
the last part of the answer: parent habits. Why do they use nest? Why do they defend their young ones? Why do their parents stay alternatively inside the nest? Why those maternal instincts are so powerful? Instincts and "cultures" are also part of the evolution.
Thats unfortunate; I didn't learn anything I didn't know already when i was taking classes in high school.
I find that very strange - I learned plenty about geography, physics, chemistry, german and even some Maths in high school. For stuff like Computing, Music and English I didn't learn that much that I didn't know, but I certainly learned some things.
When it came to university I perhaps learned a little about interface design, databases, a bit of logic/set theory etc (though I'll admit I've forgotten some stuff like the logical notation). I did find some of these classes interesting but due to personal circumstances like I said (depression due to my dad dying, and he was the one that got me interested in computers and taught me a lot of stuff about coding) I wasn't very well motivated at Uni. Since I started off basically knowing everything for the first 2 years and getting good grades without even trying, the classes in 3rd and 4th year hit me a bit harder because they were starting to cover things I'd never studied before, but I was already in a pattern of not really going to classes or studying. I actually ended up having to read an AI textbook to pass one of my exams in 3rd year! It was the first exam I'd ever failed. Usually I could get by just by reviewing the lecture slides for a day or 2 before an exam. I basically already knew the first half of the content of that class (probably was stuff like graphs, which I knew about because I'd written pathfinding algorithms for my Counter-Strike bots in high school), and so had stopped going to the lectures, but it turns out the second half was stuff I'd never done before :p
I don't find exams intimidating, I rather enjoy them actually. Theory exams anyway. You have time to think in a nice quiet atmosphere, and you can erase mistakes. Practical tests such as driving tests get me pretty nervous, but I passed my advanced driving test earlier this year, so a normal test would probably be piss easy for me now.
which is totally what she said
Unfortunately, that's only ADHD talking, and I have been guilty of it too. I too used to essentially divide the world into, essentially,
A) stuff i would have learned on myself anyway, and
B) stuff which, OMG, is so unimportant and only some oppressive way to waste my time.
Even if you don't explicitly do that dichotomy in your message, I think that _must_ be the underlying aspect of it. Or are you telling me that you would have also learned Geography, History, Chemistry, Biology and read the classics of literature on your own?
Unfortunately there's a lot of stuff you might (or might not) end up needing later, but you don't know that yet.
As a trivial example, someone who thoroughly understands maths, will have the upper hand in a lot of programming domains, over someone whose only learning was teaching himself (the worst habits of) programming on his dad's C64. I'm not even saying I'm the best example there, because honestly maths was outside my focus of interest at the time, but I grudgingly learned it anyway because even I realized I needed it for physics, which was my main interest in school. But anyway, later I stumbled into programming 3D graphics stuff, and suddenly that maths was actually useful. Just telling someone stuff like "imagine a line in six dimensions" when explaining texturing, and watching him go cross eyed because he lacks the mathematical understanding even for that, is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Or I see people all the time (and often am brought as a consultant to polish their turd) who spend inordinate amounts of time debuging Java's HashMap, and going "OMG, Java is broken! It replaced my old value with a new one whose key has the same hash value!" and maybe even coding comically absurd "workaround" that are trivial to prove that they can't possibly work. When in reality Java just added a new node to the front of the linked list for that bucket. But they don't really know how a hash table or even a linked list actually work. They too thought they don't need a college teaching them that, and when it bites them in the arse, they just don't know what's happening there.
Or I see people who don't even understand the O notation, and why their O(n*n) algorithm may work well on their 10 records test case, but is going to grind to a halt when fed the two billion records of their production database. (And that's actually a pretty small one.) Or I've spent an hour in a meeting explaining to someone (he's been promoted to architech nowadays, btw;) that, yes, in a table of key/value pairs you can store more than two values. Yes, that table has only two columns (ok, three including the parent ID), but you can still store more than two values in there. He obviously wasn't mentally equipped to deal with key/value pairs.
Now I'm not saying that you're of the same calibre. Some people did learn those concepts on their own. But a lot didn't.
That's basically my point. The attitude that you can just teach yourself everything by just banging on your dad's computer's keyboard, might actually leave holes that you're not even aware of. For some people, it's even the basics of the job they end up in. For others, it's just something which would have come in handy later. The ones who'd really learn everything they need on their own, are, in my experience, far and few in between.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wikipedia is routinely considered to be an excellent aggregator of references in fields where references mean something. (You know, down at the bottom in the "references" and "external links" areas?)
The long and short of it turns out to be: Using Wikipedia as a reference in a hard discipline: bad. Using it as a jumping off point: Good.
Btw, A+ biology students in high school are just regurgitating facts (perhaps gained by carefully structured "experiments"), so they're probably only "on par" with "wikipedia whores".
of the creation of the dread penis monster.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
New Forms of Intelligent Life will be created in a Computer Lab!
The future is going to be interesting.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I almost solved world hunger, brought peace to the Middle East, solved the gas crisis.. I think you get my point.. when was "almost" news worthy? BTW> I *DID* post this ;)
I was always hoping to hear about this once, that life was fully created in a laboratory repeating natural processes that started it in the first place. This is closest yet to my hopes coming true.
My other hope is that people stop electing politicians into the office who deny such natural occurrences and base their policies on their religions and other superstitions.
Well one can hope.
You can't handle the truth.
Actually these type of sythetic life forms have already been shaped by evolutionary forces. I think it is wrong to think of this new life forms, they are more like biological hacking together a life form, from genes already known.
Even the genes that are artificially designed and built are done so from the knowledge already gain from the study of genetics/protometrics. Its a bit like mixing and matching engine and car parts, to get something that runs.
Still if you believe that this idea would still constitute artificial Life then in essense its already been created by the J. Craig Venter Institute with Mycoplasma laboratorium & Phi X 174. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology
Which have been built with safeguards (e.g., a suicide gene) to stop it from surviving outside a secured lab. By design most of these initiatives are commerical ventures (think synthetic oil/fuel), so while some genetic code has been released - its the techniques and the genetic databases that are the money spinners.
The phrase "charging elephant" springs to mind.
Eric Baird