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That's an extremely narrow view of life. A broader view might be that life on Earth began a few billion years ago, and has managed to hang on ever since. Do you

That's an extremely narrow view of life. A broader view might be that life on Earth began a few billion years ago, and has managed to hang on ever since. Do you realize that you are, most likely, the direct descendant of one of those early lifeforms? Every single one of your ancestors, for billions of years, has managed to produce viable offspring in an unimaginably long chain of living organisms. How can you call that unreliable? Sure, bits of your DNA are being corrupted every second. Sure, tens of billions of your human cells die and are cast away each day. And, sure, each agglomeration of cells we call a human only lasts a few tens of years. But life has enough redundancies, contingency plans, and diversity that it will in all likelihood keep going for a long, long time. Having a single instance of a particular organism last for a long time just isn't what life is about. If you look at the full context of what life is doing, it is way goddamn more reliable than anything humans have designed, proofs or not.

pmiller2 11y ago
I agree with your argument as far as it goes, but if you're responding to me, you're making a straw man argument. I was saying that living things (i.e. individual organisms) aren't very reliable; you're saying that life is very resilient. That's a true statement, but utterly non-responsive to the point I was making.
- taneq 11y ago
  Individual organisms are incredibly reliable when you consider the range of functions they perform. Compare, say, a quadcopter drone (or any other small air vehicle) with a parrot. Lifespan without service or repair? Drone, weeks. Parrot, decades. Autonomy before recharging/refueling? Drone, 20 minutes. Parrot, hours to days. Cognitive faculties? Drone, slim to none. Parrot, long term autonomous in complex environments. Reproduction? We can't build things that do that at all yet, let alone pack one into a 1kg autonomous aircraft. Yes, we can build simple machines to replicate one function of a living creature, and those machines will be more reliable over short durations, but only because they are orders of magnitude simpler. You might as well call an LCD screen "unreliable" because it won't outlast a photograph.
- nnq 11y ago
  From modern evolutionary biology's perspective "individual organisms" are NOT the "basic units/modules etc." of life. The basic ones are genes at the core informational level level and species at more loose and macro level. So the living things to software analogy would be more like: - gene == source code of a program's module (like an "independently testable unit of code" - natural-selection + sex-based recombination are actually the tests) - ... (organizational levels with with no direct analogy to software go in between) - individual organism == set of processes (running instances of programs) running together with heavy inter-process communication Then at a higher level, genes and their manifestations constitute the "hardware" (more like a VM), run the software called "memes", with its own organizational patterns that are outside the field of biology. What you call living thing or individual organism is, from "life's perspective", closer to a transient group of running processes that can be killed at any time because their sources and binaries are safely stored as genes or memes. Your body and your psychological self are closer to "running threads of nginx on a particular server handling a particular set of requests" than to "the program nginx itself" in source or binary form :)
- mannykannot 11y ago
  In a discussion, it is not unreasonable to say that if you widen your view a bit, you will find a greater truth.
dschiptsov 11y ago
What do you mean by "most likely"? Each living individual is an uninterrupted continuum of living cells (sometimes reduced to a single living gamete) back to the origin of life, whatever it was.

pmiller2 11y ago

I agree with your argument as far as it goes, but if you're responding to me, you're making a straw man argument. I was saying that living things (i.e. individual organisms) aren't very reliable; you're saying that life is very resilient. That's a true statement, but utterly non-responsive to the point I was making.

taneq 11y ago
Individual organisms are incredibly reliable when you consider the range of functions they perform. Compare, say, a quadcopter drone (or any other small air vehicle) with a parrot. Lifespan without service or repair? Drone, weeks. Parrot, decades. Autonomy before recharging/refueling? Drone, 20 minutes. Parrot, hours to days. Cognitive faculties? Drone, slim to none. Parrot, long term autonomous in complex environments. Reproduction? We can't build things that do that at all yet, let alone pack one into a 1kg autonomous aircraft. Yes, we can build simple machines to replicate one function of a living creature, and those machines will be more reliable over short durations, but only because they are orders of magnitude simpler. You might as well call an LCD screen "unreliable" because it won't outlast a photograph.
nnq 11y ago
From modern evolutionary biology's perspective "individual organisms" are NOT the "basic units/modules etc." of life. The basic ones are genes at the core informational level level and species at more loose and macro level. So the living things to software analogy would be more like: - gene == source code of a program's module (like an "independently testable unit of code" - natural-selection + sex-based recombination are actually the tests) - ... (organizational levels with with no direct analogy to software go in between) - individual organism == set of processes (running instances of programs) running together with heavy inter-process communication Then at a higher level, genes and their manifestations constitute the "hardware" (more like a VM), run the software called "memes", with its own organizational patterns that are outside the field of biology. What you call living thing or individual organism is, from "life's perspective", closer to a transient group of running processes that can be killed at any time because their sources and binaries are safely stored as genes or memes. Your body and your psychological self are closer to "running threads of nginx on a particular server handling a particular set of requests" than to "the program nginx itself" in source or binary form :)
mannykannot 11y ago
In a discussion, it is not unreasonable to say that if you widen your view a bit, you will find a greater truth.

dschiptsov 11y ago

What do you mean by "most likely"? Each living individual is an uninterrupted continuum of living cells (sometimes reduced to a single living gamete) back to the origin of life, whatever it was.