[HN Gopher] The Grayness of the Origin of Life
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The Grayness of the Origin of Life
Author : Breadmaker
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-07-23 20:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mdpi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mdpi.com)
| NotSwift wrote:
| A nice article. It seems likely that we will never really know
| how life started.
|
| It is still very interesting to research this subject, because it
| might help us to learn more about the possibility of life on
| other planets.
| ExpiredLink wrote:
| From a scientific point of view we can - not just will - never
| know the origin of life. Of course, popular science frames it
| differently.
| mypalmike wrote:
| What makes it fundamentally impossible to know the origin of
| life? It seems we are likely to develop and refine
| experiments and theories that approximate the initial
| conditions and processes by which life took hold. Some of the
| details of how it happened are certainly lost to time, but it
| seems there's a lot of room for exploration towards a fairly
| valid model.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _we will never really know how life started_
|
| A big bang of another sort.
| AprilArcus wrote:
| I think in our lifetimes, we'll know enough about the
| preconditions for abiogenesis to perform experiments
| replicating portions of the process in vitro.
| aazaa wrote:
| > A more inclusive representation is to recognize a spectrum
| between the non-living and the living--a "grayness" resulting
| from the protracted evolutionary process that gave rise to life.
|
| The meaning of "grayness" would appear to have something to do
| with the fuzzy line between life and non-life.
|
| There is a footnote to the article "The Seven Pillars of Life":
|
| https://www.pps.net/cms/lib/OR01913224/Centricity/Domain/333...
|
| But it doesn't mention grayness at all.
|
| This gets cleared up a little a few paragraphs in:
|
| > The ability to clearly distinguish between abiotic and biotic
| systems is considered by many a prerequisite for effective
| astrobiology studies. However, since no natural demarcation truly
| exists, there is a profound difficulty in advancing the field if
| we rely on a strict dichotomy. ...
| antattack wrote:
| Motor proteins look alive:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8
| Koshkin wrote:
| As do these:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsLJdpjSJcM&t=15s
| AprilArcus wrote:
| I love this animation because it's beautiful, but I hate that
| it gives the impression of deliberate one-foot-in-front-of-the-
| other movement. In reality, when the "foot" of the motor
| protein is unbound, it is oscillating to and fro in a state of
| brownian motion until it happens to snap into place at the next
| (or, infrequently but inevitably, the previous) subunit. At
| this scale, quantum effects such as tunneling come into play,
| and it would be cool to visualize the organized thermodynamic
| chaos of the cell rather than the mechanical operation of a
| homunculus.
| macawfish wrote:
| I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday
| distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human
| categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far
| as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part
| of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of
| transformation and recapitulation... even if something
| temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager little
| narrow timeframe of experience, it's not.
|
| Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are
| meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in
| human experience.
| slibhb wrote:
| > Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are
| meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in
| human experience.
|
| In that case, describing the distinction as "arbitrary" seems
| wrong.
| shrimpx wrote:
| Why not go further and say the entirety of "our reality" is a
| human hallucination, as our senses are limited and our brains
| peculiar in how they process their inputs. That the "real
| reality" is an imperceptible-to-us dance of fields (even that
| is only as far as our theories take us).
| [deleted]
| jollybean wrote:
| That's a good thought - but worth considering that just because
| lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary' or even
| 'subjective'.
|
| That a materialist perspective gives us some nice hard rules
| for understanding certain things, it also by definition
| struggles to help us understand the nature of other things,
| i.e. 'most important bit' which is 'life' itself, so maybe we
| should be thinking about that problem a little bit differently.
| 'Emergence' seems to be a least one idea, among many.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > That's a good thought - but worth considering that just
| because lines are fuzzy doesn't make them either 'arbitrary'
| or even 'subjective'.
|
| Interesting and plausible, but you didn't give an argument or
| any example for that.
| jollybean wrote:
| For most things in the real life that we categorize, the
| rules that distinguish those categories can be vague. It
| doesn't mean those categories are not valid, or a function
| of 'human perception'.
|
| We have difficulty with biological distinction, but we can
| still confidently categorize something as being a 'Horse'
| and 'Not A Horse' ... even if sometimes it's a little bit
| ambiguous, aka 'Kind of a Horse'.
|
| Edit: and as for 'other ways of thinking' it very quickly
| goes into metaphysics so it's hard to talk about because we
| don't spend much time in that realm. 'Emergence' and
| 'Biocentrism' are interesting ideas (fields?) that sit
| within more or less regular bounds of science and so
| they're just examples of what I'm referring to.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| I think it's simpler than you're allowing. Death in animals is
| the absence of consciousness with no possibility of recovery.
| In plants and maybe-but-probably-not-sentient life, it's more
| complicated.
| gus_massa wrote:
| We all agree when we should say that a cow is dead, but what
| about sponges? You can pass a sponge through a sieve, and the
| isolated cells will recombine
| https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse-
| sponge-... (Is there a better link?) Can a single cell of a
| sponge create a "new" sponge? Or it's just the "old" sponge?
| Should you wait until the last cell is dead until we can
| claim it's dead?
|
| Back to cows...
|
| You can remove the heart of a cow and keep the heart alive in
| a proper device, and keep the rest of the cow alive with an
| artificial heart. (I don't know if someone has tried this
| with cows, but this should be possible with the same
| technology for hearts transplants in humans.)
|
| Are both parts alive? What happens if I unplug one of them?
| Is the heart-less-cow is the real cow? I think we all agree
| about this last question, but from the cellular level it's
| just an arbitrary classification, in spite it's useful for
| us.
| mysterydip wrote:
| My favorite example of this is the planarian. You can cut
| its head in half and it will generate two new halves. Same
| with the tail. Or cut the whole thing into pieces, and each
| piece will regenerate the whole body.
| [deleted]
| xor99 wrote:
| So interesting! Some similar work on this area:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23258-x
|
| https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020AGUFMP001...01C/abstra...
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