12 ms·
I work with some groups trying to build synthetic cells, and honestly there isn’t even a good definition for what a “cell” is or what “life” is in the scientifi
by koeng 7y ago
I work with some groups trying to build synthetic cells, and honestly there isn’t even a good definition for what a “cell” is or what “life” is in the scientific communities. The best proxy I can come up with, which is universally true on earth, is that life is anything that fully encodes ribosomes and can replicate (there aren’t any discovered exceptions to that yet, though some are close). Very intellectually unsatisfying, but so far factually true for anything generally considered “living”.
Evolution/competition between ribosome encoding and capsid encoding organisms[1] has driven a lot of cool stuff to be developed: for example, bacteria and archaea (+ eukaryotes) gained DNA separately (presumably from viral infection) and retroviruses enables placentas.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19845628/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19845628/
- azeirah 7y agoIt reminds me of a philosophy class where the goal is to find an accurate and all-capturing definition of what a chair is. It is tremendously difficult, perhaps impossible.
- sosborn 7y agoThat exercise makes me feel like too many people believe that accurate == perfect.
- politelemon 7y agoI just tried to come up with a definition and I feel like I'm almost there but not quite. A chair is something you can sit on (but you can also sit on a rock) && it has a backrest (but the foot of a tree serves as a backrest) && it elevates you off the floor (but not all chairs take you above floor level very much) && it is manmade.
- namanyayg 7y agoAlso applies to a Sofa
- hhjinks 7y agoWhat is a sofa if not shared chair?
- ASalazarMX 7y agoNow I'm doubting if car seats are chairs too...
- angel_rs 7y agoNow you have to find an accurate and all-capturing definition to all the terms you used (manmade, floor, backrest, ...) It's a game you cannot win.
- com2kid 7y agoPlenty of ergonomic chairs don't have a backrest. There are also ergo chairs that you "kneel" on instead!
- setr 7y agoI believe the correct approach is by looking at purpose, and more importantly primary purpose, rather than try to describe the chair itself. Eg, a chair is any object whose primary purpose is to sit a single individual If it's meant to seat multiple people, it's a bench, a sofa, etc, but not a chair If it's meant to be extra comfortable, it might be a single-seat sofa, but this itself a chair If it's a rock, but positioned such that it's primary purpose is to sit an individual, such as next to a table, then it's a chair. And most notably, primary purpose is subjective -- it might be understood as a chair, or as a doorstop, depending on your viewpoint, and what you use it for.
- notJim 7y agoWhat about stools? I don't consider a stool to be a chair, I consider them two subtypes of seating. If someone told me to grab a chair and gestured to a stool I'd find it very slightly odd.
- setr 7y agoFine To sit an individual at close to, or at, a right angle in regards to their legs A small rock versus a big rock; Approximating a squat, or standing, is out of bounds But a stool may consistute a chair when sitting a child Regardless, I'm mainly talking about the approach to defining it, and that definition by purpose rather than structure is more likely to find a correct definition, not that my example definition is sufficient
- umvi 7y ago> a chair is any object whose primary purpose is to sit a single individual So is a zabuton[1] a chair? [1] https://www.dharmacrafts.com/01_zb/zabuton-mat https://www.dharmacrafts.com/01_zb/zabuton-mat
- mamon 7y agowhat if we add: "with one's feet firmly on the ground and legs bent at knee at more or less right angle?"
- ken 7y agoThis would classify a Honda Goldwing as a chair, but exclude the Balans kneeling chair.
- d4mi3n 7y agoA chair is anything used as a chair. :) EDIT: Addendum: It may also be worth asking what definition of truth you're using if we're going to be getting into philosophical arguments about what things are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth
- scoutt 7y agoAnd what about an expression like "accounting department chair"?
- klodolph 7y agoThere’s a bit of leeway here, since that’s the word used in a different sense. But I would say that if you ask someone to “define what a chair is” that the word is being used in one sense only, compared to what happens when you ask someone to “define what ‘chair’ means” which is about the word. That is, when we refer to a word like “chair” we use quotes, but without the quotes, we can say that an accounting department chair is not a chair. Alternatively, we could analyze “accounting department chair” as a use of metonymy.
- setr 7y agolimited namespace conflict? Same word, different abstract concept than the chair under question
- tux1968 7y agoI always assumed it came by naming the person who sat in the special seat after the seat itself.
- klodolph 7y agoThis has a name! It’s called “metonymy.” It’s incredibly common in casual speech and poses unique challenges for natural language processing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
- angel_rs 7y agoThe boundary between "life" and "not life" has some fascinating organisms/structures[0]: Virions Viroids Satellites Prions Defective interfering particles (DIPs) I would also add t-RNA[1] to that list. It can almost replicate by itself, and sits right in the middle between "data" (DNA/RNA) and "code" (a small machine that can selectively hold an amino acid) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_classification#Subviral_agents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_classification#Subviral_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_RNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_RNA
- exabrial 7y agoPrions are the things of nightmares. Good god, I wish I never read up on them.
- djtriptych 7y agoThey're the strange matter of the biological world :)
- glouwbug 7y agoSo would that younger than a fetus be considered life?
- ASalazarMX 7y agoBacteria are considered life and you kill them by the thousands daily. You meant conscious life?
- mncharity 7y ago>> viruses [...] are alive. Until reading the above quote, I had never considered the idea there was any question about this. > in the scientific communities "Is it alive? <long property checklist> Yes/No" is an example of K-12 science education content diverging from science community practice. Both by emphasizing a little used concept, and by being inconsistent with community use. With bonus points for it being... widely taught; taught as if it were science; an unnecessary hook for learning a set of properties; and an incoherently unfruitful predicate. I don't know if there's a real name for such? I call them science-education-isms.
- slavik81 7y agoThe categorization of life and non-life is the first step in taxonomy, which was historically based on long property checklists. I think it may be more the case that advances in biology have changed the science. The emphasis moved from stamp collecting to modelling as we acquired better tools and a deeper understanding of biological processes. Education just got left behind.
- mncharity 7y agoInteresting idea. I wonder how one might easily explore it? Google trends has data to 2004. "living nonliving"[1], aside from being a school-year detector, seems to show a 3x increase in the 2010's? I'll also link [2], but I don't know what to make of it. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=living%20nonliving https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=living%2... [2] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=living+and+nonliving+things%2Cliving+and+nonliving%2C+living+and+non-living&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cliving%20and%20nonliving%20things%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cliving%20and%20nonliving%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cliving%20and%20non%20-%20living%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cliving%20and%20nonliving%20things%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cliving%20and%20nonliving%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cliving%20and%20non%20-%20living%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=living+and+non...
- achillesheels 7y agoI’d love to connect with you. I’ve been developing a discrete time control systems model of the central dogma as a signal processor of environmental EM radiation (eg heat).