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Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
- corobo 6y agoProbably because news articles don't use his name in their headlines
- fileeditview 6y agoStill laughing. Thanks!
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoLooks like the title was changed to add it. I was also going to point out the irony that the news article cares more about the man rather than the discovery of the origins of life.
- sthnblllII 6y agoThe headline oversells what this guy actually did and was probably penned by an editor interested in views and not the author. The HN admins seem to have agreed with me that the headline is bad and came up with their own much more accurate one.
- rtatay 6y agoIf someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.
- hoyd 6y agoIt would certainly be called reverse engineering.
- Ericson2314 6y agoI don't think so. Primitive proto-life has little moral value, just as vegans eat plants, hypothetical super-vegans only eat blue-green bacteria, and hypothetical hyper-vegans have a 500 year deadline to be electrically powered. I don't believe in a hard barrier between life and non life, so any discrete moral function would be non-computable, and therefore I reject it outright.
- Ericson2314 6y agohypothetical hyper-vegans must always bootstrap from source, because vendored binaries that exceed the size of small small genomes is heterotrophy.
- dudeman13 6y ago>I don't think so [...] and therefore I reject it outright That's not a problem. There can be insane theological and ethical consequences for everyone else.
- phkahler 6y agoNot really. They'll just say a chemistry experiment isnt life.
- chess_buster 6y agoOnce the "chemical experiment" escapes its petri-dish and replicates in the laboratory's drain, taking over whole beach resorts and a third of the Pacific ocean, people will rethink!
- whimsicalism 6y agoI think it's pretty optimistic (? or pessimistic) to assume that the "chemical experiment" would have a chance in hell against the bacterial super-predators that have spent billions of years evolving to adapt to this environment.
- tjchear 6y agoI don't think there will be any consequences of importance, for a different, simple reason: people generally resist changing their worldview and will do mental gymnastics to preserve it.
- goodthenandnow 6y agoExactly. Not really the same thing, but if alien life was found on Europe or Enceladus, religions would resist to change their theologies.
- sydd 6y agoI don't think so either. We will likely be able to create something that self-replicates under similar circumtances what we think were in the primordial soup. And we will call this thing (or after some more research things) as possible first evolution steps.
- m12k 6y agoWhat do you think the ethical consequences will be? Genuinely curious, because I don't really see what they would be, or why there would be any. At least not compared to something like e.g. creating an actual artificial intelligence, and then needing to decide if it has rights, and what kind and so on. Creating a novel type of microorganism out of non-living components doesn't really seem to come with the same kind of can of worms, but maybe I'm overlooking something?
- mannykannot 6y agoWell, for those whose ethics are founded on their religious beliefs and whose religious beliefs are dependent on the premise that only God can create life, then there might be some adjustment to be made - but people are very good at dealing with inconvenient facts in ways both rational and irrational.
- originalvichy 6y agoI think goal posts will rightly move towards creating a universe. I guess agnostics have already ”given up” with the thought that a creator was needed for biological life. A creator for a universe is a greater question.
- postalrat 6y agoI think that goal post has already been moved. Big bang theory created a perfect point to separate god the natural world.
- NateEag 6y agoAs a Christian that has read the Bible probably a dozen times, I know of nothing in the book that says only God can create life. Can you point me to a spot where it says that?
- jddj 6y agoIt depends. For me it would be incredibly interesting. If we take that life plausibly "started" as as one single-celled individual who then "reproduced" through cell division (let's call him Luca), then he's effectively never died - in the same way that we consider ourselves to have not died despite regularly cycling tissues and cells. All life as we know it, if viewed like that, is one organism whose chain of cell division has never been broken as he's grown over billions of years. Variation between those cells (kingdoms, species, plant / animal etc) become like skin, hair and brain / liver cells within the human body. It would be like taking a runner grass or banana tree and trying to draw a line around true individuals. If we created life outside of that unbroken chain of cell division, we would have created something which is definitely "other than Luca" and that feels philosophically significant.
- proc0 6y agoNot much different than previous big discoveries that make us as human less special than we once thought.
- glouwbug 6y agoBut we already do know how, through means of reproduction, and that on it's own already has millions of philosophical, ethical, and theological debates
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoEvery time we do genetic engineering, we're creating life. And the consequences have not been insane. We just accept and move on.
- bufferoverflow 6y agoTheology is not based on facts. It's based on faith. So no major consequences.
- csomar 6y agoThere are no consequences. We are already eating fish and chicken, which are pretty alive by any definition.
- Ericson2314 6y agoConsidering that the first proto-computers were not programmable, I can't help but be skeptical that the first life needed genetic material. Certainly there were lipid membranes. Maybe there were spontaneous proteins, maybe there was purely-catalytic RNA. I guess it's also a matter of line drawing. I'm OK with calling crystals life, for example. One should feel bad about breaking up big ones the same as one should feel bad about killing 150 year old lobsters.
- angst_ridden 6y agoI think you've got a minority opinion calling crystals "alive," although it does jibe with one definition of life that I heard: "any self-sustaining system that reduces internal entropy."
- DanBC 6y agoDawkins doesn't call crystal structures alive, but he does mention them as a potential hypothetical source for life. http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160823-the-idea-that-life-began-as-clay-crystals-is-50-years-old http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160823-the-idea-that-life... > Cairns-Smith found a more eager audience in science journalists and the popular press. Other scientists showed interest, too: the evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins discussed the crystals-as-genes hypothesis in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker. [...] > His aim was to find a system much simpler than modern life, but which had some of the crucial properties of a living system. He found an answer in an unlikely place: clays.
- kevmo 6y agoThat's one place where my "What is Life?" college class landed.
- adrian_b 6y agoWhile obviously crystals are not alive, they satisfy more careless definitions of life that were sometimes encountered, i.e., when put in a "nutritive" solution, they are able to grow and reproduce themselves.
- kvetching 6y agoRelated to this; Check out the book The Revolutionary Phenotype. "The Revolutionary Phenotype is a science book that brings us four billion years into the past, when the first living molecules showed up on Planet Earth. Unlike what was previously thought, we learn that DNA-based life did not emerge from random events in a primordial soup. Indeed, the first molecules of DNA were fabricated by a previous life form. By describing the fascinating events referred to as Phenotypic Revolutions, this book provides a dire warning to humanity: if humans continue to play with their own genes, we will be the next life form to fall to our own creation. "I am VERY impressed with this book—very important topic very well treated." - Robert Trivers" https://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Phenotype-amazing-story-begins/dp/1729861563 https://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Phenotype-amazing-story... fyi: I'm not the author
- offtop5 6y agoThanks , purchased
- Aardwolf 6y agoThis template replication reminds me of von neumann cellular automata: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_cellular_automaton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_cellular_automat...
- sthnblllII 6y ago> many biological molecules can be constructed from just six simple molecules, including water, methane... There is no news here. This is just the same speculation that has been made thousands of times before for decades. Of course we can make big molecules from small ones in a lab. Of course life has to reproduce, metabolize and have a boundary from the environment. Pointing this out is not "the key to the origins of life". It is still an interesting topic, but why cant national geographic discuss these things honestly?
- dang 6y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- posterboy 6y ago> and have a boundary from the environment This is not self evident. Maybe this is the news? I am not sure, what are you saying?
- uoaei 6y agoNot the person you're replying to, but: That the processes inside the boundary and those outside the boundary only interact through relatively narrow-bandwidth channels across that boundary, and that it maintains the high level of internal organization, the boundary, and the input/output channels through self-sustaining internal processes.
- bbojan 6y agoThe fact that bacteria and archea have a chemically different cell membrane strongly suggest that it evolved twice, and therefore their original ancestor didn't have one at all.
- sthnblllII 6y agoIts part of the standard definition of life: > organisms are open systems that maintain homeostasis, are composed of cells... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life Cell by definition have a boundary called the cell membrane. >Cells consist of cytoplasm enclosed within a membrane... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(biology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(biology)
- breck 6y agoHas anyone seen a visual tree of life that starts before life on earth? Or in other words, say at some point we discover aliens in a distance galaxy. Would we be cousins? Are there visualizations that show what that kind of family tree would look like? I am a neophyte in this area but I'm sure there's a lot of good research out there.
- kadoban 6y agoWithout seeing what's out there I don't think any such trees would make sense to draw. There's too many possible ones, and the branches would just be "?". We could be cousins of several sorts, convergently evolved to have some similarities, be completely unrelated in any way to other life, or any of several combinations of those. And that's just the broad strokes, trees would be the details. It's worth noting also that even only considering life on Earth that we already know about, the "tree of life" is already kind of a broken abstraction. Consider bacteria that are able to share genetic material without an ancestor relationship for instance, or closer to home even viruses that infect humans or any other kind of mammals. They affect our genetics in ways the tree doesn't/can't capture.
- breck 6y agoIt’s true, in a way the tree of life runs in the opposite direction.
- wanderingstan 6y ago“Panspermia” is the keyword to get you started. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
- breck 6y agoBingo!
- 1980phipsi 6y agoCan I get a ELI5 version of this theory?
- tim333 6y agodunno about LI5 but wikipedia's summary: > According to the chemoton model, life should basically, but of necessity, have an autocatalytic subsystem consisting of metabolism and a replication process, and a membrane enclosing these functions. also >A single chemical reaction is said to be autocatalytic if one of the reaction products is also a catalyst for the same or a coupled reaction
- eddhead 6y agoI wrote a paper to prove something like this is possible, here's a video and paper link in the description https://youtu.be/UVyTu3o2A9U https://youtu.be/UVyTu3o2A9U
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sysout 6y agoAll lives are seeded. The bible is real. The moon is hollow
- tdsamardzhiev 6y agoThe Earth is a triangle.
- fullstackchris 6y agoBut isn't there a major flaw here? If you require all 3 components (proteins, RNA, and lipid bilayers) as what classifies "life", then what necessarily created _those_ components? Aren't only basic compounds and elements the only thing naturally occuring in the universe? So where did the amino acids and fats come from? It's back to the chicken or the egg problem.
- est31 6y agoThe common theory is of the RNA world. In theory, if the entire organism is just a long RNA strand, there is no need for proteins or lipid bilayers. How such an organism emerged in the first place is already quite hard to know. Actually lipid bilayers are extremely complicated as they have to filter what gets into the cell and what doesn't, as well as what might leave it. Earlier systems might have done without them and instead attached everything onto long chain like structures... You know like a keychain. Both RNA and Proteins are long chains so maybe that's how they evolved.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoThe article points out that it's not clear whether RNA-only can work, and that all 3 components might have been required.
- jonathankoren 6y agoAll of these components can form through nonbiological means. For example, amino acids[0] and nucleobases[2] can be found in interstellar gas clouds.[0] Lipid membranes form simply because of their polar properties.[1] [0] https://physicsworld.com/a/amino-acid-detected-in-space/ https://physicsworld.com/a/amino-acid-detected-in-space/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9928/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9928/ [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12404-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12404-1
- fullstackchris 6y agooh wow, i didn't realize this. i had figured that these structures would be forbidden on an energy based standing. clearly not the case!
- alex_young 6y agoIsn’t the question of just-what-is-life-anyway more of a worry for linguists and philosophers rather than scientists? “Life” as it were, is a concept invented with either the intention of distinguishing “us” from the rocks around ourselves, or, if you’re being slightly less charitable, giving “us” a way to insult the, um, others. Sure, drawing some line in the sand between mice and boulders is a great idea, but it’s a pretty arbitrary one, especially if you have to strap a bunch of historical baggage on it. This grand debate is almost as fun as what-constitutes-a-planet. We should do that one again.
- snowwrestler 6y agoThis seems like just another way of saying we don’t understand life scientifically yet. When we do finally agree on a mathematically rigorous definition of life, it will seem obvious in retrospect and scientists will kick philosophers off the field, just like they did with previous subjects like the composition of matter, the movement of heavenly bodies, etc. Every scientific topic has to go through a messy definition phase before its study can be properly organized. People studied heat and cold for a long time before they really knew what they were, for example.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoBoth geocentrism with epicycles and phlogiston were clearly defined as theories. We have just changed paradigms. (Also by phlogiston's time, philosophers and natural philosophers = physicists had already pretty much split.)
- BlueTemplar 6y agoEach scientific paradigm works better when boundaries are clear and scientists don't misunderstand each other. Hence the current astrophysical paradigm where we now have planets and dwarf planets (which aren't planets).
- gitowiec 6y agoYou can watch about this "membranes" concept in Netflix's "Photon" documentary.