Life on other planets

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: jrustles
Whoa whoa whoa, how are they being replicated, and what is randomly altering them in such a way that they happen to come across successful viable replication?

That isn't the point. I wasn't addressing replication or how they got there. When it comes to DNA and RNA, replication is fairly well understood. Heck, look at crystalline formation. It's successful, but much, much less complex and easier to observe. However DNA got there is irrelevant to the fact that mutations occur. And the mutations can be passed along.

With the C++ code, mutations could happen, too.

And no, we're not seeing half-baked blobs of incoherent biology. Even a small transposition on the wrong gene can be fatal long prior to birth, or even prevent fertilization in the first place. Sure, if my legs were a tiny bit shorter, that might make me less fit and less likely to pass on my genes. Or, up north it might make me lose less heat. Neither is a giant deal. But, something that screws even marginally with hormones, for instance, or chromosome numbers, can have disastrous consequences we don't even get to see.

Beyond that, it doesn't matter. We either accept scientific explanations of how this arose, or we accept religious explanations (which are off topic here and I'm not even going to get into that), or we accept that aliens built us, but then who built the aliens, without getting into religion? And if anyone gets this thread closed because of R, I'm going to be cross.

 

[jrustles]

Well, the clock example is a bit removed from the "code" example.

DNA and mechanical clocks, not so many similarities.
DNA and a programming language, I think that's pretty apt.

My example suggested that even after considering the random, inexplicable establishment of a DNA structure, complete with established proteins and binding rules, that still DNA being shone on with sunlight will not arrange itself into any meaningful thing, without intention. How would proteins know that ecapsulating themselves would be good for it? How can it know what what a membrane is, or how to make one to encapsulate itself in the first place?

We approach these issues with too many preconceived biases and 'blind-spots'. For example, no one here is hypothesizing anything new or original- we're too scared to. We're all working with some other person's hypotheses and thinking under their suppositions and with their limitations, and it doesn't help that we're encouraged only to consider popular theories.

My personal beliefs? I'm not arguing against a type of gradualistic evolution (although I outright reject the "phyletic gradualism' theory), and I'm not saying a magical sky man whipped it all up, I am saying that there is an intention behind life and, no I don't mean biological determinism. I happen to believe this intention to be 'consciousness', which has always been and always will be, IMO.

From a good book that has recently got on the queue
Originally Posted By: Stephen Jay Gould introduction to "The Mismeasure of Man", 1981

Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural.

 

[jrustles]

Originally Posted By: Garak
Originally Posted By: jrustles
Whoa whoa whoa, how are they being replicated, and what is randomly altering them in such a way that they happen to come across successful viable replication?

That isn't the point.


That is the point, though. Who abstractly engages in hypotheses without any interest in defining the basis for those hypotheses?

Quote:

And no, we're not seeing half-baked blobs of incoherent biology.

Even a small transposition on the wrong gene can be fatal long prior to birth, or even prevent fertilization in the first place.


You mean apoptosis? Wow, it works as though it was a guardian to the integrity of DNA.

But aside from that, why would one blob be acceptable, and the other not? Who makes the decision??


Quote:
We either accept scientific explanations of how this arose, or we accept religious explanations


NO, this is not a dichotomy! This is not a binary issue. We are not children. I mentioned nothing about religion, and though I AM NOT RELIGIOUS, I'm not so polarized or preconditioned to believe that science is exclusive of religion or that they are two opposing forces.

If you think so, turn off the TV news, put down the paper and look up the word "objectivity".

 

[diver1972]

Originally Posted By: Astro14
Do you believe that there is life on other planets?
Yes, absolutely.

Originally Posted By: Mystic
...I like to say what is more frightening to you: That there may be abundant life throughout the Universe and some of the intelligent life there could possibly be dangerous to us, or the possibility that we are completely alone in the Universe
The latter. However, keep in mind that's what I'm programmed to think as an organism that inherently values socialization.

Originally Posted By: apwillard1986
...I think it is equally arrogant to assume we are the only planet in the universe to support life.

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: Shannow
Originally Posted By: 2oldtommy
Any airline pilot will tell you that, as a group, they are much more suseptable to cancer than the average population.


Can't say that I've come across that...yes, they can receive higher doses of radiation than the average population, but haven't seen that turned into a "much more suspceptible...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12862322

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/about-cancer/cancer-questions/airline-staff-and-cancer

just my supposition,but they are probably more exposed to formaldehyde, and various exotic lubricant fumes than the rest of the travelling public.


http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20070422222547data_trunc_sys.shtml

Quote:
a robot sent into the still-highly-radioactive Chernobyl reactor had returned with samples of black, melanin-rich fungi that were growing on the ruined reactor's walls.
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Casadevall and his co-researchers then set about performing a variety of tests using several different fungi. Two types - one that was induced to make melanin (Crytococcus neoformans) and another that naturally contains it (Wangiella dermatitidis) - were exposed to levels of ionizing radiation approximately 500 times higher than background levels.

Both of these melanin-containing species grew significantly faster than when exposed to standard background radiation.

"Just as the pigment chlorophyll converts sunlight into chemical energy that allows green plants to live and grow, our research suggests that melanin can use a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum - ionizing radiation - to benefit the fungi containing it," said co-researcher Ekaterina Dadachova


Once again, life adapting to conditions that we would have "known" were completely hostile to life.

jrustles...shuffle the code enough times (and with radiated fungi, that can be many many times in our lifetiem), and maybe only 1 in a trillion mutations make it able to survive a foot closer to the source...keep shuffling.

 

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: jrustles
DNA and mechanical clocks, not so many similarities. DNA and a programming language, I think that's pretty apt.

The point is that we are looking at relatively complex systems that have some functioning. When I said that replication isn't the point, I meant it. Replication is the way a mutation is passed along. It's really not the same thing as the mechanism of mutation or whether or not the mutation is "good" or "bad," unless that mutation causes the replication procedure to fail altogether for some reason.

Look at the code (be it DNA, C++, or a clock) as a complex system. It has to make "sense" within that system for it to work. If you take a piece of working C++ code and examine it, you'll see it's probably not perfect. There may be a misspelling in a non-essential part of the code. Or there may be an inefficiency. Or, perhaps a typo makes a subroutine dormant, but doesn't kill the program altogether (i.e. primates cannot produce Vitamin C due to a mutation, while many other mammals can). A random mutation to the code might fix a typo or reopen a subroutine. More often than not, though, it's going to cause the code to fail miserably.

And proteins don't "know" anything. They simply exist, or they don't. If a mutation makes an organism more likely to pass its genes on than another, then the mutation has the chance to be passed on.

And don't look at failures as if they were a "guardian" of DNA. If I took your C++ code and randomly changed a couple characters, it would probably fail. It's not protecting itself. And, as for which blob of biology is more fit than another, and who makes the decision, no one does. It's the environment. Eagle's wings don't work very well under water, and a walrus would have a heck of a time in the Sahara, and whales don't tend to be seen in the wild in Saskatchewan.

And I never tried to make anything a dichotomy. I offered three possibilities. Heck, none of that is necessary. Ignore religion altogether (which is what I'm trying to accomplish in this thread). If something doesn't add to a theory and its predictive nature, it does not need to be part of the theory.

Look at the laws of gravitation. The equations work perfectly well without knowing the cause of gravity. Whether it's gravitons or an invisible elf with a special magnet doesn't change the accuracy of the equations. Therefore, the cause is irrelevant to the equations.

That's not saying that knowing the causes and origins of things is useless - quite the contrary. But, tossing in something untestable into a theory muddies the waters.

And I bet Gould wasn't suggesting that we should come up with untestable theories. Of course, theories take imagination and intuition. So does fiction. So does non-fiction. So does engineering, and physics, and mathematics. Try doing complex integration without some intuition and imagination and see how far you get.

In the end, if what you imagine or come up through intuition cannot be tested or is tested as false, then it's time to revise things.

 

[jrustles]

Originally Posted By: Garak

And I bet Gould wasn't suggesting that we should come up with untestable theories. Of course, theories take imagination and intuition. So does fiction. So does non-fiction. So does engineering, and physics, and mathematics. Try doing complex integration without some intuition and imagination and see how far you get.


That's critical, though. Because 'intuition' and 'imagination' are "untestable" and considered by many in the same breath as "irrelevant" and a leap of faith, ie religion, which is why religion keeps getting brought up as a poster child for "untestable" intuition and imagination

Of course, that's the difference between the great scientific minds of the recent past like Tesla and Einstein who had dreams and "talked to God" for heeaven's sake vs the pretentious scientists we have now passing their pretentions onto their students. The pretentious dime-a-dozen 'scientists' still to this day try to discredit and "debunk" Tesla and Einstein's works. I cannot support educated ignorance in any manner.

 

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: jrustles
That's critical, though. Because 'intuition' and 'imagination' are "untestable" and considered by many in the same breath as "irrelevant" and a leap of faith, ie religion, which is why religion keeps getting brought up as a poster child for "untestable" intuition and imagination

But, the results of intution and imagination are testable. You need imagination and a bit of intuition to successfully integrate a complex function. When you're done, though, you're either right or wrong, and that's testable. there is no in beteween. It doesn't matter whether you came up with an idea in a dream, a hallucination, a drunken stupor, or found it in the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. If you can test it, great. If you can't, it's not scientific.

And Einstein would be proud that people are trying to debunk his work. Science should be continually tested. Einstein's work doesn't explain everything and he'd be the first to admit that.

As for Tesla, with all due respect to him, he was off his rocker in his later years. Be careful about mixing the two of them into the same sentence. They had opposing views as to the nature of space, and only one of them can be correct.

 

[PandaBear]

Why all the mechanical clock and C++ code comparison?

All it take is to look at how resistant strains of bacteria, fungus, and virus come around when people abuse medicines and you'll see mutation exists.

But that's pseudo science to jump to conclusion on whether intelligence on other planets exist, or how lives start on its own, or address any missing gap in between mutation / evolution (did someone mess around with DNA/RNA and jump over a cliff in mutation?).

 

[earlyre]

Originally Posted By: jrustles


We're not seeing 'half-baked' blobs of incoherent biology anywhere, though. Statistically, most life in existence right now should be little more than tumors with any given construction. Instead we see well developed examples of finished, viable creatures. Even considering extinct species that didn't 'survive' per se, how would they have evolved into exactly the finished beings they are/were through phyletic gradualism only to suddenly no longer be competent enough to survive and succomb to "darwinism"? Isn't is strange that finished, viable creatures are all we can find and not so many one armed tumor monsters?

Quote:

Without getting into the giant debate about evolution, it's very easy to see how mutations arise and that most of them are harmful. You or I or nature start tinkering with chromosomes, something's going to happen and most times it won't be good.


It's easy to see when a finely coded machine is corrupted, you get tumors and cancers and other such malignant mutations, but even in my wildest dreams, I can't imagine those tumors working themselves out into magnificent biological beings (and most certainly not randomly working itself out into the marvel of the conscious mind).

Is anyone familiar with the works of Stephen Jay Gould?


what you are either forgetting, or not realizing, is that "evolution", or"darwinisim" as you put it, is nothing more than natural selection, Survival of the fittest.
survival of those best adapted to their environment, long enough to reproduce.

a person with 6 digits on each extremity, covered in thick hair and a thick layer of body fat may be more suited to life in parts of the world. but if nobody schtupp's them, and they don't have any fat hairy 12 toed kids, well, sorry, evolutionary dead end.

all that process "cares about" is what survives long enough to reproduce, and pass their traits on to subsequent generations.

if you never reproduce, you (and any minute variations that differentiate you from your siblings) are an evolutionary dead end.

 

[Garak]

Absolutely. Hence, there is little evolutionary pressure against senility or heart disease. Most people who hit those ages have already reproduced, and any genetic component is passed on.