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"Immortal Molecule" Evolves — How Close To Synthetic Life?
An anonymous reader writes with word of ongoing work at Scripps Research Institute: "Can life arise from nothing but a chaotic assortment of basic molecules? The answer is a lot closer following a series of ingenious experiments that have shown evolution at work in non-living molecules."
"We just don't happen to fall apart for a while while we compute."
Uhhh, yea, and we call that attribute life.
In biology, life is defined as have the following characteristics:
Having these characteristics defines something as being "alive." See, not magic.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Most of the things in the list your parent post gave are processes, as well, not attributes.
"Life" is merely a term we use to describe that collection of processes.
a key point... ribozymes, not ribosomes. Ribozymes are ribonucleic acids with enzymatic activities. Ribosomes are what our kind of life uses to translate mRNA into peptide sequences.
Living is the attribute of being in the process of life.
What biologists tend to pidgeon-hole as "life" is a sub-set of the wider computational process' in our Universe. How do we get from obviously non-living molecules up to these wonderful structures we call people who morally appreciate beauty? Well, it's all compuation and the devil is in the details: see Figure 1 of The Computational Beauty of Nature. The book both begins and ends with that figure - to reinforce the relationships in the deepest depths of our Universe. The philosophy when scaled up to our noble and good level of reality works smoothly the entire way. Recognition that the Universe, Biology, and Evolution are all Computational is just taking time to work it's way through the teaching material.
Shh.
For those current in the field, this discovery is not surprising. Several people have created synthetic ribozymes already, most doing some trivial and superfluous task. It was only a matter of time until someone created a self-replicating ribozyme. Yet, they do serve as basic evidence that the RNA-world hypothesis may be correct.
However, a soup of replicating molecules is still a far cry from life, and, indeed, there are many more complicated features of life as we know it, even at the most basic level, for which there is no creation hypothesis. We know that membranes can self-assemble into micelles, and one key component of all life is a membrane layer to separate the living environment from the surroundings. However, if, by chance, a micelle happened to self-assemble around a ribozyme, how does the ribozyme continue to function, now that it has no ready source of diffusing ribonucleotides (the building block of RNA)?
Second, how did the first micelles replicate? Did they simply continue to grow as more membrane molecules spontaneously add to them until they broke apart into two? Perhaps life arose in some sort of thermally-cycling environment and the micelles broke apart at high temperture, releasing the contents, and then reformed again, with new randomized contents when the temperature cooled.
Third, how did we transition from RNA contents with lipid membranes into the vastly richer information of the amino acid world? Is there a reductionist "alphabet" for amino acids that may have served as the starting point, from which the extra amino acids were added slowly. Is our alphabet 'optimal' (virtually all life uses the same 20-acid alphabet, which minor variations of 1 or 2 in extreme organisms)? Or perhaps the alphabet only evolved once, and thus had no competition and could be completely far from optimal.
As you can see, there are a number of interesting questions to be explored. We have, however, gone from not knowing how the basic components of cells (proteins, DNA, lipids) functioned, to knowing that DNA encodes the 'heritable' information, to its structure, to the Miller-Urey experiment, and now on to knowing immense details about the complicated protein functional networks within cells, and between cells as well creating synthetic molecules that can evolve via natural selection, all in the span of just more than a century. It's going to be extremely fun to see what we know by the end of the 21st century. Right now we feel like we know all of the basics and just have to work on the hard stuff. I will bet dollars to donuts that we have a lot to learn, and, by 2100, several discoveries will have been made that future people will wonder how we ever thought we knew anything without.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Actually, if you read the definition of evolution, the use of evolution in biology fits perfectly, as does the use in describing the development of the car.
The word is still used in common language, and its meaning has not changed in any way. Your confusion of the word evolution as having to do solely with biology is unfortunate, but completely incorrect. Furthermore, I am reasonably certain that Darwin himself never used the term when referring to his theory on the origin of species.
Evolution means simply to "achieve over time" and is used equally correctly when referring to either the development of the automobile or to the development of life. As I said before, "evolve" is a synonym of "develop".
That you don't understand the words you use is not my fault nor anybody else's, excepting perhaps whatever school you were subjected to as a child. Look up the big word, read the definition, think about it for a couple of hours (I hope it really doesn't take that long), and perhaps you'll come away with a better understanding in the end.
Whether you are talking about biological evolution, industrial evolution, cosmological evolution, or any other evolution, you are talking about essentially the same thing. The processes involved and the driving forces behind each will obviously be worlds apart, but the concept is the same. Your "Evolution" is nothing more than shorthand for "Biological Evolution", and the sooner you figure that out the sooner your vocabulary will grow by one word.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I just saw this professor speak in a lecture to his peers. His conclusion was that what is preventing his molecules from being 'alive' is their inability to undertake novel action. They only go so far as to maximize their sustainability environment and nothing more. Though the 'environments' he gave the molecules were in fact static. It is only a matter of time before we can test situations which really do test our definitions.
I found this looking for more information. A good primer of what they are doing. Joyce Lab News 1
In the former USSR the large scale industrial experiments were conducted to create living cells from a primordial soup. It was done as a part of defense effort.
It does not work. They tried everything lightening, temperature change, radiation, UV, infrared, vibrations, etc. Nothing worked. Life is starting in some different way.
cock-eyed smug believers
believers are bothered by cock-eyed smug atheists
myself, i'm just bothered by cock-eyed smug people
most believers, and atheists, just don't consider the realm of theology to be something to dwell that much on. they're lives are not simple, they are not stupid, they merely know a lesson apparently many don't know: humility on large questions
whatever is, or is not, out there, one thing for certain is: a little tact and subtlety is fucking appreciated from all of you, thanks
to me, one of the greatest questions in the spiritual realm of thought, the most pressing theological question ever devised is: "do i know when to shut the fuck up?"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It does not work. They tried everything...
Obviously not.
Maybe they tried everything they could think of... Where did they get the primordial soup recipe and how do they know they didn't miss something that no longer exists on the planet?
They haven't tried a close pass through the tail of a comet yet or a giant meteor impact, both of which could be potential carriers of a missing spark albeit with some nasty side effects (irrelevant if there wasn't any life to begin with). They haven't tried everything.
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The unknown unknowns are the ones to watch for.