Slashdot Mirror
"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."
"evolution at work in non-living molecules."
:)
molecules can live?
ok just making sure
Evolution is a process, it applies equally well to many substrates. Organic molecules are one of the classes and many other phenomena can be described in evolutionary terms. If you go to an extreme you can say the all structures in our Universe are evolved with the loosest definition of Evolution as: "Change over time."
Shh.
Working with the ribosome seems like as good an idea as any, but the research seems so restricted. The nutrient rich medium does run out, but they are not selecting for long term viability, they are only selecting for speed of replication.
Problems that this does not address are: how did metabolisms develop, and where did membranes come from? It seems that a membrane bound replicating body of this sort would fit all the requirements of rudimentary 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.
It can't be true since God didn't make it. Obviously :)
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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)
The older I get the more I wonder about the relationships in our Universe. Now, it may just be cognitive cob-webs but who is to actually say that God is not waiting for us beyond the last theorem? Physics is not complete yet so isn't it hubris to proclaim that there is no God without a complete understanding of where our Universe came from? I am finding it more difficult to remain an atheist to the point that I have become an igtheist as I have gained more life experience. Just because most of what the world pushes on you as the concept of "God" is complete crap does not mean that "God" does not exist. The definition is where the meat lies. Perhaps someday physics will be complete assuming the incompletness theorem doesn't prevent that and we will know for sure. Until then, don't be so cock-eyed and smug in your "logical" denial.
Shh.
"They're just molecules, so they do what they do until they run out of substrate. And this will go for ever it's an immortal molecule, if you like, he told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here in San Diego."
Later in the evening working alone, Dr DeSilva accidentally cut himself with an x-acto contaminated by his cultures. The RNA slowly overtook his own cellular composition, "blindly finding solutions that made them more successful". Ironically, he had unknowingly predicted his own end, "They do what they do until they run out of substrate". He (the self-replicating RNA by this time) was later to discover the best substrate was brainz...
And so the zombie apocalypse begins...
"The team then extracted a random subset, and put them in a new medium: ribozymes then competed with each other to consume as much of the medium as possible." Sounds like my ex-boyfriend & his beer buddies.
please evolve
Table-ized A.I.
I found this looking for more information. A good primer of what they are doing. Joyce Lab News 1
"Recognition that the Universe, Biology, and Evolution are all Computational is just taking time to work it's way through the teaching material."
Thanks for the reading tip. Like many other people trained in computer science I also belive that combined with Darwinian ideas it will radically change our understanding of biology and ultimately ourselves.
To paraphrase how Douglas Adams put it for millenia science has been done by pulling things apart, but the first thing that happens when you pull a cat apart is you have a non-working cat, computers have given us the ability to do science by putting things together from the bottom up.
Despite what many people erroneously belive about computer models of things such as climate and the mammalian brain they have already demonstrated a level of sophistication that we could only dream of 30yrs ago.
BTW: My definition of life is; the process by which the universe achieves self awareness.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
--
The unknown unknowns are the ones to watch for.
They should have tried that for billion years, that would be more like real creation of life.
You're misunderstanding the point because of the bad summary. They observed "spontaneous" evolution because the molecule has three qualities: it can self-replicate, it can pass down heritable information to offspring, and it can alter it's code (in some way that the article doeesn't describe). The descendents of the original synthesized molecules were much more tuned to their environment and out-compete "weaker" descendents of the original molecules.
So, really this just nicely shows the necessary conditions for very simple natural selection.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
You are getting the issue sort of backwards. You are asking for evidence of a negative--evidence that God does NOT exist, and since proving a negative is impossible (disregarding logical impossibilities, like square circles), it's no wonder that you're coming up short. The issue is whether or not there is any reason TO believe.
Have you found it more difficult to continue not believing in Zeus, Thor, Quetzalcoatl, etc? It's not in dispute that there are many things about the universe that we do not understand. I just don't see how "I don't know" maps to "God did it." Ignorance is not a theological argument.
Isn't that just as true of all the other gods? I'm an atheist because I see no reason to believe in God, not because I claim to have total knowledge of the universe and can definitively tell you that there is no God. Please stop acting as if atheists are the one making untenable knowledge-claims. Theism is the claim that God exists, and atheism is just skepticism towards that claim. The burden of evidence still rests on the theists, just as it always does for the person making the claim.