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Really? Let's see a natural rock formation precisely in the shape of a human being or other animal. There are of course natural rocks capturing living forms: f

Really? Let's see a natural rock formation precisely in the shape of a human being or other animal. There are of course natural rocks capturing living forms: fossils. And a huge number of them are completely obviously from ancient life. Nobody goes to a museum and sees a T Rex skeleton and thinks, Hey, that might actually be rocks that had nothing to do with life. The real issue - not well stated in the article - appears to be regarding single celled life, or at least small-cell-count ancient organisms. Then there's ambiguity in interpretation because of overlap with inorganic possibilities.

4death4 3y ago
There are plenty of rocks with a human form. The moai for instance. They’re pretty much universally considered to be artifacts of human life. But I think the point is that, we know the moai are human built because we know that humans are living animals and we know their form. If you don’t know the form of a living being, then you can’t tell if something was produced by a living being based on its shape.
- RagnarD 3y ago
  Function follows form. No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects. When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    No boulder's shape is arbitrary either. Everything has its form for some reason. Something like a field of basalt columns sits the junction. They look like a living thing carved them, but that isn't what causes them.
  - gilleain 3y ago
    Oddly, the original phrase is "Form follows function", although it was in the context of (human) architecture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function There is a school of though that says that evolution acts on forms that arise through natural processes. One of the ideas Philip Ball is interested in is how the forms created through natural processes (say, a cloud) differs from those formed partly by evolution (say, a tree). He has a series of three short books on this - "Nature's Patterns, a Tapestry in Three Parts": "Shapes", "Flow", "Branches".
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    >No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects. No, the same is true of non-living things. The shape of a rock is not arbitrary. At any given time, it's the only shape it could have when you take into consideration all the trajectories of all particles since the Big Bang. What makes the trajectories of particles of living things different from those of the particles of non-living things? >When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it. This is just begging the question. It presupposes both a clear morphological delineation between living and non-living and that supposed results of purely physical processes are not in fact works of art by sufficiently weird aliens. Also, necessarily life must have started at some point from non-living materials, so how is the shape a rock takes when it's struck by another rock falling on it fundamentally different from, say, a particular sequence of base pairs in your genome? The reason you can tell a sculpture is a sculpture is that it conforms to a particular cultural language that you understand. For example, it might reference something you know, such as a particular animal. If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive?
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      > If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive? Well, yes, and if you took away everything we know about the things in the world, we would not know anything about those things!
      - fluoridation 3y ago
        The GP used the fact that we tell apart sculptures from rocks as a key point in their argument. The fact that removing knowledge eliminates the ability to tell them apart means that there's nothing intrinsic that we're observing when we say that something is a sculpture. There's nothing about the object itself that makes it a sculpture; it's a sculpture to the observer because it looks like what they understand sculptures look like. If the observer thought sculptures look like something different they would say the object is not a sculpture, even when nothing about the object changed.
  - trimethylpurine 3y ago
    I think it's completely subjective, because it depends what degree of specificity you are edging on. In one extreme, plenty of people are convinced they see animal and even human like figures in the Martian landscape photos. On the other extreme, under a microscope, no two rocks look exactly alike, let alone like humans. That subjectivity of scope, I think, clouds our ability to grasp the complexity of the subject, and our ability to discuss it from an objective perspective.
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      The fossil record is not, as you put it, "completely subjective." There are some cases where the evidence is insufficient for a determination to be made, but that does not justify your sweeping generalization.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
You are talking about cell count as cell is a requirement to life. Can't there be a big blob in some planet that is doing something lifelike like say waterball making copies of itself. Also is advanced humanoid who doesn't know that it is a humanoid alive?
marginalia_nu 3y ago
It's fair to characterize life as a process that locally decreases entropy. Non-living processes tend to increase entropy. Even if you have a rock that looks exactly like a human being, say one of Phidias' statues, it will decay until it looks like every other rock given enough time and exposure to the elements. It rarely goes the other way around, the wind does not sculpt David out of marble. It's probably not a sufficient criterion for life, but it's at least necessary to avoid granting life to a wildfire or some other process most would not consider living.
- wwarner 3y ago
  All true, but equally important is that life is rapidly increasing entropy in a larger, but also local, frame. It’s like a fire. So, in a closed system, living things must exhaust their source of energy and reach equilibrium with its surroundings.
- willis936 3y ago
  It's certainly not a sufficient criterion. I argue nothing about my air conditioner is living and is no closer to living than any other rock.
  - Cyphase 3y ago
    This isn't a fully formed point, just a thought.. but your air conditioner wouldn't exist without a living system directing matter to form an air conditioner; at least, it's so unlikely as to be practically impossible. So an air conditioner may not be a living system, but it's the product of a living system (at some point; maybe there are other non-living systems in the pipeline, e.g. factory robots).
    - willis936 3y ago
      I don't understand a heat pump to be an inherently artificial thing, but I am struggling to think of an example of a naturally occurring heat pump. If there were natural valves and compressors (which there might be from certain perspectives) then I could see a naturally occurring heat pump being possible. It seems strange to say process devices are the thing that make a system living or not.
kylebenzle 3y ago
Your comment has no relevance to the article. Article is saying that chemical/physical properties can be mistaken for life and the line is thin. You seem to be trying a version of the argument, "if evolution exists then why the heck do we still have monkeys?"
- soared 3y ago
  The article says “fossils of single celled organisms can easily be confused for rocks”. But the title says does not make the same claim, so the parent comment is refuting the title not the article. The title implies something like “for any biological process of a living being, there exists a non-living version”. Which is clearly false
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(Mars) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(Mars)
nathanfig 3y ago
Survivorship bias, you can't count how many fossils you did not recognize.
boxed 3y ago
Yea, the title is a bit clickbaity. First of all it's only talking about FOSSILS, so that's a big thing. Secondly, it's only talking about single celled life. In this narrow context, the title is correct.

4death4 3y ago

There are plenty of rocks with a human form. The moai for instance. They’re pretty much universally considered to be artifacts of human life. But I think the point is that, we know the moai are human built because we know that humans are living animals and we know their form. If you don’t know the form of a living being, then you can’t tell if something was produced by a living being based on its shape.

RagnarD 3y ago
Function follows form. No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects. When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it.
- roenxi 3y ago
  No boulder's shape is arbitrary either. Everything has its form for some reason. Something like a field of basalt columns sits the junction. They look like a living thing carved them, but that isn't what causes them.
- gilleain 3y ago
  Oddly, the original phrase is "Form follows function", although it was in the context of (human) architecture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function There is a school of though that says that evolution acts on forms that arise through natural processes. One of the ideas Philip Ball is interested in is how the forms created through natural processes (say, a cloud) differs from those formed partly by evolution (say, a tree). He has a series of three short books on this - "Nature's Patterns, a Tapestry in Three Parts": "Shapes", "Flow", "Branches".
- fluoridation 3y ago
  >No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects. No, the same is true of non-living things. The shape of a rock is not arbitrary. At any given time, it's the only shape it could have when you take into consideration all the trajectories of all particles since the Big Bang. What makes the trajectories of particles of living things different from those of the particles of non-living things? >When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it. This is just begging the question. It presupposes both a clear morphological delineation between living and non-living and that supposed results of purely physical processes are not in fact works of art by sufficiently weird aliens. Also, necessarily life must have started at some point from non-living materials, so how is the shape a rock takes when it's struck by another rock falling on it fundamentally different from, say, a particular sequence of base pairs in your genome? The reason you can tell a sculpture is a sculpture is that it conforms to a particular cultural language that you understand. For example, it might reference something you know, such as a particular animal. If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive?
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    > If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive? Well, yes, and if you took away everything we know about the things in the world, we would not know anything about those things!
    - fluoridation 3y ago
      The GP used the fact that we tell apart sculptures from rocks as a key point in their argument. The fact that removing knowledge eliminates the ability to tell them apart means that there's nothing intrinsic that we're observing when we say that something is a sculpture. There's nothing about the object itself that makes it a sculpture; it's a sculpture to the observer because it looks like what they understand sculptures look like. If the observer thought sculptures look like something different they would say the object is not a sculpture, even when nothing about the object changed.
- trimethylpurine 3y ago
  I think it's completely subjective, because it depends what degree of specificity you are edging on. In one extreme, plenty of people are convinced they see animal and even human like figures in the Martian landscape photos. On the other extreme, under a microscope, no two rocks look exactly alike, let alone like humans. That subjectivity of scope, I think, clouds our ability to grasp the complexity of the subject, and our ability to discuss it from an objective perspective.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    The fossil record is not, as you put it, "completely subjective." There are some cases where the evidence is insufficient for a determination to be made, but that does not justify your sweeping generalization.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

You are talking about cell count as cell is a requirement to life. Can't there be a big blob in some planet that is doing something lifelike like say waterball making copies of itself. Also is advanced humanoid who doesn't know that it is a humanoid alive?

marginalia_nu 3y ago

It's fair to characterize life as a process that locally decreases entropy. Non-living processes tend to increase entropy. Even if you have a rock that looks exactly like a human being, say one of Phidias' statues, it will decay until it looks like every other rock given enough time and exposure to the elements. It rarely goes the other way around, the wind does not sculpt David out of marble. It's probably not a sufficient criterion for life, but it's at least necessary to avoid granting life to a wildfire or some other process most would not consider living.

wwarner 3y ago
All true, but equally important is that life is rapidly increasing entropy in a larger, but also local, frame. It’s like a fire. So, in a closed system, living things must exhaust their source of energy and reach equilibrium with its surroundings.
willis936 3y ago
It's certainly not a sufficient criterion. I argue nothing about my air conditioner is living and is no closer to living than any other rock.
- Cyphase 3y ago
  This isn't a fully formed point, just a thought.. but your air conditioner wouldn't exist without a living system directing matter to form an air conditioner; at least, it's so unlikely as to be practically impossible. So an air conditioner may not be a living system, but it's the product of a living system (at some point; maybe there are other non-living systems in the pipeline, e.g. factory robots).
  - willis936 3y ago
    I don't understand a heat pump to be an inherently artificial thing, but I am struggling to think of an example of a naturally occurring heat pump. If there were natural valves and compressors (which there might be from certain perspectives) then I could see a naturally occurring heat pump being possible. It seems strange to say process devices are the thing that make a system living or not.

kylebenzle 3y ago

Your comment has no relevance to the article. Article is saying that chemical/physical properties can be mistaken for life and the line is thin. You seem to be trying a version of the argument, "if evolution exists then why the heck do we still have monkeys?"

soared 3y ago
The article says “fossils of single celled organisms can easily be confused for rocks”. But the title says does not make the same claim, so the parent comment is refuting the title not the article. The title implies something like “for any biological process of a living being, there exists a non-living version”. Which is clearly false

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(Mars) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(Mars)

nathanfig 3y ago

Survivorship bias, you can't count how many fossils you did not recognize.

boxed 3y ago

Yea, the title is a bit clickbaity. First of all it's only talking about FOSSILS, so that's a big thing. Secondly, it's only talking about single celled life. In this narrow context, the title is correct.