7 ms·
A simple mechanism could have been decisive for the development of life
- EddieSpeaks 8y agoI investigated this in a simulation 8 years ago, link here and a paper in the description https://youtu.be/UVyTu3o2A9U https://youtu.be/UVyTu3o2A9U
- jacquesm 8y agoThat's awesome! How valid is a two dimensional simulation like this for a three dimensional phenomenon?
- EddieSpeaks 8y agoSimple I guess, easy to extrapolate this to 3d but convection currents are 2d in nature so not much has to change
- diegoperini 8y agoI have no idea what I watched. Can you ELI5?
- EddieSpeaks 8y agoAn emergent lifelike property, the paper describes it. I noticed that it was fairly easy to build up a propulsion system without even explicitly coding it.
- mattbettinson 8y agoThis is absolutely fascinating. Where should I start if I wanted to pursue this kind of thing?
- rashthedude 8y agoIs it so hard to believe that there's a creator maybe?
- NateyJay 8y agoWhy not both?
- IanDrake 8y agoIt’s not hard to “believe”, but it’s impossible to prove. Theological debates usually end up with the creationist position being that belief without proof equals faith, there for proof is not desired. Science is skepticism, religion is unquestionable; the two are opposites.
- kmm 8y agoReligion isn't unquestionable, doubt is a key to faith. There's an entire academic discipline devoted to critically studying the divine, theology. That is not an excuse for avoiding and denying any insight into creation or trying to fill the gap with gods of course. I strongly disagree with the thread starter's sentiment
- infinite8s 8y agoDoes it critically study the basis for itself, or does it start with that 'immaculate' presumption.
- IanDrake 8y agoI didn’t mean to suggest that one is not allowed to question religion (these days), I meant questioning religion becomes either a useless spiral of circular logic or you finally wind up at the point I made about faith. That’s been my experience at least. All that said, reading Jordan Peterson’s book has increased my opinion of the Bible and the knowledge about the human condition that it contains, but as an allegory, not a literal history.
- OscarCunningham 8y agoSure maybe. But there's a long way from "life was intentionally created on Earth" to "an interventionist God created the entire universe". Perhaps aliens seeded life on Earth. So even if the appearence of life on Earth couldn't be otherwise explained, I don't think it would be particularly compelling evidence for the kind of religion that people tend to believe.
- danielmain 8y agoWe are disusing something so ridiculously as we were trying to explain how a baby alone could possibly win the FIFA World Cup 2018
- alexholehouse 8y agoThis is one in a number of papers exploring how biological phase separation/condensation may have provided favourable microenvironments for early life development. For a nice primer on what biological phase separation is, see this (non-paywalled) general audience article from earlier this year in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03070-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03070-2). Some other work on phase separation as a means for primordial evolution and biochemistry includes a paper from Christine Keating in 2012 (WAY WAY ahead of the curve) [1], elegant work by Frank Jülicher [2], and more recently a nice paper from Keating and Phil Bevilacqua [3]. These papers (IMO) tie rather nicely into some theoretical predictions on self-organization from Jeremy England [4]. [1] Keating, C.D. (2012). Aqueous phase separation as a possible route to compartmentalization of biological molecules. Acc. Chem. Res. 45, 2114–2124. [2] Zwicker, D., Seyboldt, R., Weber, C.A., Hyman, A.A., and Jülicher, F. (2016). Growth and division of active droplets provides a model for protocells. Nat. Phys. 13, 408. [3] Poudyal, R.R., Pir Cakmak, F., Keating, C.D., and Bevilacqua, P.C. (2018). Physical Principles and Extant Biology Reveal Roles for RNA-Containing Membraneless Compartments in Origins of Life Chemistry. Biochemistry 57, 2509–2519. [4] England, J.L. (2013). Statistical physics of self-replication. J. Chem. Phys. 139, 121923.
- mxwsn 8y agoPhase separation really seems to be a hot topic in biology beyond early life development too, extending at least to the field of gene regulation. A Phase Separation Model for Transcriptional Control. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28340338 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28340338 which already has 70 citations despite being published just 14 months ago.
- actionowl 8y ago> This one neat trick can develop life, the void HATES it!
- Toine 8y agoOh how I wish we all weren't trying to abuse human psychological weaknesses to get cheap clicks and views. At this point I'm tempted to dump the entire Internet just like I dumped TV... Then I remember you can't live without it nowadays. Then it swallows me back.
- acbabis 8y agoYou must be really fun at parties
- stochastic_monk 8y agoHe makes a great point. How can we get the internet to be more useful and less clickbait?
- that_jojo 8y agoClick here to find out
- Viliam1234 8y agoBan online advertising? No, this is not a serious proposal, but I am afraid that nothing less will help. When you have a strong financial incentive to do something, saying "but it's not nice" is not going to convince many people; in best case, those convinced by the argument will change their business, and someone else will take their place.
- Toine 8y agoI think advertising is great. It allows people in need of a product/service to be able to purchase it, and it allows people providing said product/service to be known and deliver the value. As always, the problem is not the concept itself, but to what degree you allow it to grow. A civilized society has laws and rules limiting individual freedoms so that things don't get out of control. Different societies have different values and put laws in place to enforce those values on the people. About advertising, did you know that in France, the law literally says "The dental profession may not be practised as a business.", which means no direct or indirect advertising ? This is a consequence of the belief that citizens health is more important than private gains (that doesn't stop French dentists to earn very good money compared to the rest of the population). On the other end of the spectrum, you have all these insane marketing tactics who use known human psychological mechanisms to push products/services into their mouth until they swallow it. In other words, people create a need from nothing in their own interest, at the expense of other people. I believe that is bad, and we should have laws preventing that.
- TekMol 8y agoI find it fascinating that we have not witnessed self reproduction and evolution in a simulated world as of now. Unless we manually put it in of course. Any guesses when this will happen? Life springing up in a 2D-Automata or something like that? What size will it be? How many cells does the smallest self reproducing 2D-Automata need?
- jabgrabdthrow 8y agoIn the familiar Game of Life automata the smallest known replicator takes 34 million generations: http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0 http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0 But in HighLife there is a trivial replicator: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(cellular_automaton) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(cellular_automat... Of course for life you need not just replication but mutation and antifraility
- kanzure 8y ago> I find it fascinating that we have not witnessed self reproduction and evolution in a simulated world as of now "The evolution of self-replicating computer organisms" (1996) http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/The%20evolution%20of%20self-replicating%20computer%20organisms%20-%20A.%20N.%20Pargellis.pdf http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/The%20evolution%20of%20se... 4096x4096 grid. 16 opcodes. Randomly seed the field. Observe string replicators at surprisingly high frequency. Much simpler than y'all think.
- Florin_Andrei 8y agoRight, but then you need a universe where string replicators then proceed to evolve to the point where they paint the Mona Lisa and come up with general relativity. That might be the much harder problem.
- TekMol 8y agoHmm... They created random computer programs and say that one in 10000 turned out to be self replicating. But that is just because they gave them all the necessaray tools to do so. So the program only has to 1) Set pointer A to its beginning 2) Set pointer B to somewhere 3) Copy from pointer A to pointer B 4) Increase pointer A 5) Increase pointer B. 6) GOTO 1 If you look at the actual instruction set they use, it's even worse. They served the opcodes needed for replication on a silver plate. That does not count. You could just as well give the programs an opcode that says "copyMyself" and say that creating life is easy because many programs used that opcode.
- nayuki 8y ago> Boekhoven explains the principle of phase separation with an analogy: "Imagine an old and rusty car. Leave it outside in the rain, and it continues to rust and decomposes because rusting is accelerated by water. Put it in the garage, and it stops rusting, because you separate it from the rain." Is the writer sure about this claim? I've seen cars and bicycles in the garage rust due to humidity and condensation, especially from the day-night temperature cycles.
- losteric 8y agoIt's the right analogy in the context of this research - the anhydrides survived longer when they formed a bubble, but still decayed. A car in the rain rusts faster than a car in a garage. The sheltered vehicle still rusts... but the lower rate makes it feasible to maintain.
- rdlecler1 8y agoSo basically by removing exogenous factors from the environment you get a chance to develop a more robust system. Sounds like an accelerator.
- DrImplausible 8y agoSo how would this process work in the context of a self-organizing criticality (SOC) [0]? I've long taken that to be one of the more plausible mechanisms for getting to simple automata. I guess this could work in conjunction with SOC, providing discrete stages for development. Interesting stuff. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality