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The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death
- suzzer99 1y agoIs this different than wood frogs, whose heart freezes and stops beating until it thaws again?
- verisimi 1y agoWhy wouldn't seeds also be considered in the same category? Seeds also do not change or exhibit life, and can remain in that state for years, even centuries. But then, with water, they start to grow. Could it not be considered the same mechanism, except that as these organisms are simpler than seeds and retain their shape (ie do not grow and change) and it is possible for these microscopic creatures to revert to the initial 'seed state' then animated life repeatedly?
- eh_why_not 1y agoSeeds were also the first thing that came to my mind. I've always found it fascinating that I could plant many spice seeds (e.g. mustard) as long as their container said "not irradiated", and they would sprout and grow just fine, several years after buying them. I.e. they are still technically alive, and can stay as such for many years, which is just amazing life resilience. That said, > ...except that as these organisms are simpler than seeds... I wouldn't say any animal that can move around to be simpler than seeds. IMHO by any definition animals are a big jump up in complexity over plants.
- falcor84 1y agoPlants in general have much larger genomes than animals, and that's clearly a definition of complexity.
- immibis 1y agoThat just means they have less selective pressure to reduce it - possibly because they are simpler. Genome size isn't correlated much without complexity. Obviously it provides an upper bound, but a lot of genes are repeats.
- saagarjha 1y agoYes. You'll find that plants generally survive better after being irradiated, indicating that a lot of these genes are apparently not important.
- falcor84 1y agoLarge software systems also often have significant chunks of code that is only historical and/or "accidental complexity" and can be removed. But we would typically say that removing it is reducing the system's complexity, rather than that it wasn't complex.
- saagarjha 1y agoGenes are not maintained by people
- oulipo 1y agoWell, on any timescale, even rocks are alive. We're made out of star dust. Life is everything, it's just on different timescales, one long continuity
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago“Philosophers are still grappling with the idea that life and death may not be the only states of being.” Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be. It loses its identity as the thing it was. That’s why, strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive. So, in the case of rotifers, if they are alive, either they are hibernating or suspended, or reanimation really is the instantiation of a new rotifer. I am curious what kind of metaphysics these philosophers are leaning into, or why “living thing” entails the actual function of respiration, metabolism, etc. and not just the potential for these things, for example. A rock has no potential for these, but a desiccated rotifer does. (Modern philosophy has a problem dealing with potentiality, so this is not necessarily surprising.) “At the time, fear of excommunication or condemnation by the Roman Catholic Church for publishing scientific observations that challenged Church doctrine impacted communication about new scientific findings.” The perennial boogeyman of the Enlightenment. Publishing scientific findings did not get you excommunicated. Indeed, fundamental to Catholicism is the recognition that reason and faith cannot contradict. If a scientific finding could or would authentically contradict Catholic doctrine, then Catholicism would be undermined and there would be no meaning to excommunication. (Some will point to the punishment of Giordano Bruno, but he wasn’t charged for his scientific findings —— he was a crackpot —— but for his heretical theology. Others will bring up Galileo, but again, he wasn’t excommunicated and the whole affair concerned a decades-long conflict of a personal or political nature that Galileo himself enjoyed provoking and which ended with a cozy house arrest in his old age at a time when Protestants were burning witches in Northern Europe.) A tiresome cliche. Frankly, I’m not sure how rehydrated rotifers and tardigrades are supposed to threaten Catholic doctrine. Because someone used the word “resurrection”? So what? Sloppy thinking.
- lisper 1y ago> Giordano Bruno ... was a crackpot Yeah. He though the earth revolved around the sun. Crazy, right?
- ordu 1y agoThis belief doesn't make people immune to become crackpots. I personally know one crackpot that happens to believe that the earth revolve around the sun. He believes also that 2+2=4, and it doesn't help either.
- pdonis 1y agoThis is what comes of trying to define binary, all-or-nothing categories in a world of continuous variation. Any sharp boundary you try to draw between "life" and "death" is going to have exceptions. Making heavy weather out of this, instead of recognizing "life" and "death" as approximate categories that are useful for many purposes but can break down at the edges, is just muddled thinking.
- justonceokay 1y agoSounds like most of philosophy
- pdonis 1y agoI agree. I think it's telling that Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is basically entirely about how all those philosophers peddled nonsense masquerading as deep thinking. For example, here's his money quote about Kant: "Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."
- mathattack 1y agoThis! I was going to write the same thing. Life, Death, Alive, Dead - these are all terms created by humans to make sense out of the world. In reality it's about more life-like and less life-like.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoAt the end of the day it is just self sustaining chemistry. Everything else is abstraction that muddies waters and invites semantical exercises.
- ordu 1y agoI believe that all categories are like that, not just binary ones. All models are wrong, it is their bug and their feature.
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- kvark 1y agoThose rotifers might have inspired the 3-body problem's concept of dehydration/rehydration as a skill to survive cataclysms.
- taneq 1y agoDon’t a lot of small organisms do this? Eg. “Sea monkeys” (brine shrimp)?
- bobmcnamara 1y agoTardigrades also do anhydrobiosis
- Ghos3t 1y agoThe World of Null-A is a book where the binary vs non binary way of thinking is a core theme
- ggm 1y agoAt some level, if you are capable of being revived, I think your death was prematurely reported, defined by being revived. But, if you are not revived from a quiescent state, now or into the future, is there a functional difference between being quiescent, and being dead? Down at the viral level, if they crystallise, they're stable. If they managed to get into rock in a crystallised state, how long would they remain stable? Do we define viruses as "not alive" now? or prions? or mitochondria?
- franze 1y agoIn my understanding, viruses are not alive, they are information gone wrong (for the recipient).
- paulddraper 1y agoYes, canonically viruses are not alive. Though they are close.
- tejtm 1y agofrom another understanding, all life is just virus that stumbled on this one weird self replicating trick.
- otikik 1y agoThe weird trick that polynucleotides don’t want you to know!
- AIPedant 1y agoIn an abstract philosophical sense, who knows? But any real organism in the real universe has a finite limit on how long they can be quiescent, so it is fine to say that they're alive until they can no longer be revived, even if that takes hundreds of thousands of years. Death implies irreversible damage.
- mcv 1y agoWe tend to think about life and death as metaphysical states, but life is really just a process. And death the absence of that process. Or actually, life is a bunch of different processes. It's possible for some to stop while others continue. Some, if stopped, can be restarted again, others can't. It all depends on whether the systems supporting those processes survive is a useable state. Often they deteriorate without the metabolical processes, but some systems are stable enough to survive a long time without the processes that maintain them so the processes can be restarted. So are you dead when the processes stop, or when the system has deteriorated to the point they can't be restarted?