4 ms·

Or, what, like they, uh, "adapt" in some way, like a process of "evolution" or something?

akiselev 10y ago
Yeah, you know, how we humans can adapt and evolve in a few generations to use nitrogen instead of oxygen or replace our mitochondria with microscopic oompa loompas. /s Without knowing how critical the added genes are to the organism's metabolism or how they are integrated into its lifecycle, there is no way to tell if it is even possible for the organism to evolve an alternative in any practical time frame. Evolution does wonders over long time scales but even it is beholden to basic physics.
- JadeNB 10y ago
  > Yeah, you know, how we humans can adapt and evolve in a few generations to use nitrogen instead of oxygen or replace our mitochondria with microscopic oompa loompas. I think that a major difference here is that the length of a generation for bacteria is way shorter than for humans, so that it is feasible for them to evolve in unforeseen ways in an observeable amount of time.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    Unforeseen, sure, but evolution is practically incapable of wholesale changes to an organism at a fundamental level. For example, if we engineered a microbe to use AUCG instead of ATCG for DNA, which would require massive changes to its cellular machinery, even a generation a minute for a million years would not be enough to switch back to regular base pairs because the microbe would be incapable of basic horizontal gene transfer with other microbes or giant evolutionary leaps that require precise simultaneous changes to all of its reproductive machinery. Obviously this is not 100% guaranteed but if we can engineer an organism that fundamentally depends on a metabolic process that is prohibitively difficult to evolve naturally, we can maintain an extreme level of control.
    - JadeNB 10y ago
      > Unforeseen, sure, but evolution is practically incapable of wholesale changes to an organism at a fundamental level. Oh, I see. I incorrectly read the emphasis of your post as being the unlikelihood of change occurring "in a few generations", rather than on the fundamental nature of the changes.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Not really, evolution has a very low probability of making large scale changes. However it can operate in any direction giving many many options for getting from A to B. Many single celled organisms can for example swap small segments of code between them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer Thus the minimum change required for some information exchange is only transcription not survival and thus fairly simple. Sure, the original organism died, but as long as some information carries on that's what evolution is about. A larger barrier is the value of such transcription being limited until it works. But again if there happens to be a simple way to do it then it might show up.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    The E. coli long-term evolution experiment [0] has observed 65000 generations in 28 years. That's the length of about 0.88-1.27 human generations. But humans no longer rely on only sexual reproduction, mutation, and horizontal gene transfer to evolve. We have this CRISPR/Cas9 mechanism now, which is putting us closer to doing something like flipping a known SNP--perhaps changing rs6152(G) to rs6152(A), to prevent baldness. Or we can splice the Bt gene into ourselves, so we won't ever be eaten by corn borer larvae. In five human generations (110-160 years), humans will probably be able to replace/augment their mitochondria with captive subcellular oompa loompa biomachines. But even in 5000 human generations, we would not replace aerobic O2 metabolism with anaerobic N2 metabolism, simply because N2 is not as reactive as O2, thus is not as useful biologically in any environment where oxygen is available. It's more likely that we would add a supplementary anaerobic metabolism such that nitrogen asphyxiation results in a hibernation or torpor state, rather than death. Complexity pays off sometimes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...
    - akiselev 10y ago
      Using CRISPR/Cas9 to modify an organism isn't evolution by natural selection, it's genetic engineering, which is my whole point. Natural selection has the benefit of time but we have the benefit of intelligence and culture, which can be far more powerful because our modifications aren't bound by the fitness of all of the intermediary states. This allows us to make increasingly complex changes to biomolecular machinery that are all but impossible to [d]evolve within our current ecosystem because of the billions of years of biological debt, to borrow a term from software engineering. The question isn't whether we can augment ourselves through advanced technology, it's whether or not we can design a microbe that is so different from existing life that we can control its reproduction indefinitely (in the face of evolution) without crippling the organism's usefulness to our civilization.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
How are engineers supposed to cope with evolution's god-like prowess?

Yeah, you know, how we humans can adapt and evolve in a few generations to use nitrogen instead of oxygen or replace our mitochondria with microscopic oompa loompas. /s Without knowing how critical the added genes are to the organism's metabolism or how they are integrated into its lifecycle, there is no way to tell if it is even possible for the organism to evolve an alternative in any practical time frame. Evolution does wonders over long time scales but even it is beholden to basic physics.

JadeNB 10y ago
> Yeah, you know, how we humans can adapt and evolve in a few generations to use nitrogen instead of oxygen or replace our mitochondria with microscopic oompa loompas. I think that a major difference here is that the length of a generation for bacteria is way shorter than for humans, so that it is feasible for them to evolve in unforeseen ways in an observeable amount of time.
- akiselev 10y ago
  Unforeseen, sure, but evolution is practically incapable of wholesale changes to an organism at a fundamental level. For example, if we engineered a microbe to use AUCG instead of ATCG for DNA, which would require massive changes to its cellular machinery, even a generation a minute for a million years would not be enough to switch back to regular base pairs because the microbe would be incapable of basic horizontal gene transfer with other microbes or giant evolutionary leaps that require precise simultaneous changes to all of its reproductive machinery. Obviously this is not 100% guaranteed but if we can engineer an organism that fundamentally depends on a metabolic process that is prohibitively difficult to evolve naturally, we can maintain an extreme level of control.
  - JadeNB 10y ago
    > Unforeseen, sure, but evolution is practically incapable of wholesale changes to an organism at a fundamental level. Oh, I see. I incorrectly read the emphasis of your post as being the unlikelihood of change occurring "in a few generations", rather than on the fundamental nature of the changes.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Not really, evolution has a very low probability of making large scale changes. However it can operate in any direction giving many many options for getting from A to B. Many single celled organisms can for example swap small segments of code between them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer Thus the minimum change required for some information exchange is only transcription not survival and thus fairly simple. Sure, the original organism died, but as long as some information carries on that's what evolution is about. A larger barrier is the value of such transcription being limited until it works. But again if there happens to be a simple way to do it then it might show up.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  The E. coli long-term evolution experiment [0] has observed 65000 generations in 28 years. That's the length of about 0.88-1.27 human generations. But humans no longer rely on only sexual reproduction, mutation, and horizontal gene transfer to evolve. We have this CRISPR/Cas9 mechanism now, which is putting us closer to doing something like flipping a known SNP--perhaps changing rs6152(G) to rs6152(A), to prevent baldness. Or we can splice the Bt gene into ourselves, so we won't ever be eaten by corn borer larvae. In five human generations (110-160 years), humans will probably be able to replace/augment their mitochondria with captive subcellular oompa loompa biomachines. But even in 5000 human generations, we would not replace aerobic O2 metabolism with anaerobic N2 metabolism, simply because N2 is not as reactive as O2, thus is not as useful biologically in any environment where oxygen is available. It's more likely that we would add a supplementary anaerobic metabolism such that nitrogen asphyxiation results in a hibernation or torpor state, rather than death. Complexity pays off sometimes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...
  - akiselev 10y ago
    Using CRISPR/Cas9 to modify an organism isn't evolution by natural selection, it's genetic engineering, which is my whole point. Natural selection has the benefit of time but we have the benefit of intelligence and culture, which can be far more powerful because our modifications aren't bound by the fitness of all of the intermediary states. This allows us to make increasingly complex changes to biomolecular machinery that are all but impossible to [d]evolve within our current ecosystem because of the billions of years of biological debt, to borrow a term from software engineering. The question isn't whether we can augment ourselves through advanced technology, it's whether or not we can design a microbe that is so different from existing life that we can control its reproduction indefinitely (in the face of evolution) without crippling the organism's usefulness to our civilization.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago

How are engineers supposed to cope with evolution's god-like prowess?