- #71
DaveC426913
Gold Member
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Dembadon said:Common for what age?
At one point, Play-Doh and Elmer's Glue would've been on my list!
True but Elmer's glue was once horses, and I believe Play-Doh is actually alive.
Dembadon said:Common for what age?
At one point, Play-Doh and Elmer's Glue would've been on my list!
DaveC426913 said:Your nature commands you to conjure junk science?
There's lots of books out there on 'The Power of Attraction' and other woo-wooism.
I'm not saying "don't search for something worthy"; I'm saying "this is a road to folly".
There's nothing mystical about emergence. FaceBook is an example of emergent behaviour. Social networking structures have properties that are not detectable in the individual components. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Galap said:Emergence isn't mystical, but it is easy to think it is, because so little is understood about it.
BANG! said:You can always jump on the whole "Complexity Theory" bandwagon with Murray Gelman, the creator of Mathematica (I forget his name), et. al.
DaveC426913 said:Well, do computer simulations count? They fit that definition.
DaveC426913 said:The one I was thinking of is honey. But then again, I guess pollen is technically seeds.
DNA packages either way.Max Faust said:Honey isn't made from pollen! (Pollen is more akin to "sperm", BTW.)
Fair enough. So it was once a fluid of a living thing.Max Faust said:Flower-nectar!
Max Faust said:My mind went to "dairy products" upon this question - since milk is a body fluid, but not thought of as "alive" as such, in and of itself.
Are viruses alive is a good question - it just doesn't have a good answer.Archosaur said:"No, viruses are just a bunch of chemicals," said my bio prof.
mgb_phys said:biologists/medics tend to say no (they have learned the defn of life)
Andy Resnick said:It's not completely arbitrary- a cell is the smallest self-contained unit of living matter. Viruses must hijack a cell to make copies- they cannot reproduce on their own (nor do they 'eat').
I suppose it's possible to imagine other alternatives, but on Earth anyways, cells are the basic building block.
Studiot said:Including cells in the definition adds the complication.
For any aggregate of cells, some living some dead, is the aggregate alive?
Is there any difference between the 'life' of an aggregate and the 'life' of a single cell?
Pythagorean said:Viruses are a very Interesting aspect of this discussion. I've always considered them a sort of wrench in the cogwheel, more so than a lifeform.
I would also generalize Q Goest's definition to genes, not the specific DNA type molecules.
So it is not about the cells themselves but about their metabolizing.
DaveC426913 said:It would appear that no definition of life can concentrate on the parts; it must concentrate on the processes. So it is not about the cells themselves but about their metabolizing.
Studiot said:So is dormant life then dead?
I would respond that a seed has the potential to become alive.
Studiot said:chance encounter
If we hypothesise that "life" happened by chance
Sea Cow said:It seems perfectly possible and reasonable to me that life started by chance.
What's the alternative?
Studiot said:I think you already did.
I didn't comment last time but would like to observe that so has a primordial soup of the right kind of chemicals.
All it takes is the chance encounter of the appropriate molecules in that soup.
Don't ask me which ones, if I knew I wouldn't be here.
Cheers.
Sea Cow said:<snip>
This is a question for biology, not physics. Biological processes are not reducible to physics. You will learn nothing of the biological function of a gene or why it was selected by evolution by studying the wave-function of the electrons in its molecules.
The enlightenment - coming soon to a bio-lab near you ...Sea Cow said:Biological processes are not reducible to physics.
Sea Cow said:Biological processes are not reducible to physics.
Yeah, I do not understand Sea Cow's stance.I cannot put into words how strongly I disagree with this.Sea Cow said:Biological processes are not reducible to physics.
DaveC426913 said:the third option is that life inevitably followed from the conditions that were present
Max Faust said:I agree. I think it is some kind of simple and yet as of now undiscovered principle which causes as well biological life (under such conditions as will allow this) as other arrangements into complex systems to happen. This is why I think it is a "physics issue" rather than a question which biologists are equipped to handle.
DaveC426913 said:First, let's define "chance" in this context. If life started by "chance" that means that, on one hundred Earths in identical conditions, it is entirely likely life would not develop on any others. It just happened to be so on this one.
That being said, the third option is that life inevitably followed from the conditions that were present. i.e. on one hundred Earths in identical conditions, all of them would develop life.