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Florida Lab Gets Pregnant
Synthetic Biology, a relatively new field, is seeking to find out what happened to a bunch of chemicals to make them capable of supporting a metabolism, replicating, and evolution. A Florida lab is showing some of the most promising advancements in this direction with their AEGIS (Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System) experiment. "AEGIS is not self-sustaining, at least not yet, and with 12 DNA building blocks -- as opposed to the usual four -- there's little chance it will be confused with natural life. Still, Benner is encouraged by the results. 'It's evolving. It's doing what we designed it to do,' said Benner, a biochemist with the Gainesville, Fla.-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. In addition to providing an example of how alien life might be cobbled together, synthetic biology has a broad array of uses on the home front."
KFC rolled theirs out years ago.
it engulfs its first white lab coated scientist.
Squirrel!
Who wants to bet me $20 they just use this technology to invent the first self-replicating pet-boob?
It's the first intelligently designed evolving system.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Clearly if I made artificial life, I'd put it on an ASIC. Otherwise you'd just have too many discrete components and general purpose things to get it in a tiny package.
Then again I'm an EE, and I equate everything biological to the word "slimy" in my mind. Mechanical life for the win...
Anything to come out of those vats would probably need most of the 12 artifical nucleotides, which aren't found in any apreciable quantity outside of the vat. If any gets out it would quickly starve. Not to mention that depending on the conditions that they are evolving under, there might be more immediate problems for anything escaping. Early life evolved under anerobic conditions, oxygen is pretty toxic to cells. They're probably generating these things under anerobic conditions to mimic what were thought to be early conditions of the earth and to maybe encourage things to start growing. I would expect that any bugs growing in this system would be poisoned by oxygen once outside pretty rapidly, much as bacteria from early earth would. Also temperatures are probably much higher in the vats.
Since the vats are -probably- extremely rich in all 12 artificial nucleotides, devoid of oxygen, and very warm in all places, there wouldn't be any advantage or reason for the bugs to evolve ways of overcoming those conditions. There'd be no reason for them to develop ways of making their own artificial nucleotides since they're provided. In fact that would probably be a detriment, since any way of converting one of the natural 4 would be costly to the cell in terms of energetics and would have no gain, they'd quickly be out-proliferated by their bretheren who don't waste energy on things like that. In other words, once stepping out of the vat, they'd be presented with an extremely harsh environment they're totally unprepared for.
I am of course making some assumptions there. I guess we can't rule it out entirely, but there are millions of unlikely apocalypses you can't completely rule out.
I think those are not unreasonable assumptions, providing they're maintained in that environment. The more interesting (and much more nasty) experiment would be to let the critters breed for many generations, letting the fittest gain control of their little ecosystem, then slowly introduce elements of the external environment in, making the habitat *less* supportive. Eventually, and I'm sure this would take a long time (several generations of scientists, say), you would produce an organism potentially capable of surviving outside the vat.
At that point, of course, it would still have to put up with 4 billion years worth of evolution on the outside, with organisms of considerably more complexity in finding and utilizing food sources. A good example are nylon-eating bacteria. In the space of no more than forty years, a population of bacteria learned how to eat a food that hadn't even existed prior to 1935.
Any organism we make in a vat would, I suspect, not last terribly long on the outside.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No, it is proof that the ID vs. evolution argument is bogus.
Something can both evolve AND be the product of the will of somebody. Also, for a hypothetical eternal god POV, not bound by time, there is no "let's setup something and see how it evolves". It is more like "Let's do it, done.", even if it involves uncertainty, free will, evolution: all of those concepts are bound to time, a god is not.
A more classic proof of the argument being bogus is the fact that evolution is not a dogma and ID is not an acceptable scientific theory (unless you have scientific proof of a god to back it up, which slashdot has not reported AFAIK :) )
A cynic proof of the argument being bogus is: it doesn't solve anything, it needlessly divides people, it is perfect for the media to fill up pages instead of giving people useful information.
No ruling class ever liked their sheep to get too smart.
Of course, having proved ID independent from evolution and doesn't mean either is true.
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