NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin of Life 115
William Robinson (875390) writes "A new study from researchers at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has proposed the "water world" theory as the answer to our evolution, which describes how electrical energy naturally produced at the sea floor might have given rise to life. While the scientists had already proposed this hypothesis called 'submarine alkaline hydrothermal emergence of life' the new report assembles decades of field, laboratory and theoretical research into a grand, unified picture."
Not Evolution (Score:5, Informative)
This is the theory of abiogenesis, not evolution. Evolution is how life changes, not how it got started.
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But life probably cannot start until evolution helps it along. Something that was half-alive probably had to be shaped further by evolution to become true life.
For example, an early molecule that was perhaps either too poor a replicator (sloppy & broken) or too accurate a replicator (exact clones) would have reached a dead end if evolution didn't start pruning the copies to find the Goldilocks range o
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Hypothesis: the origin of life in a hydrogel environment
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15826671
Re:Not Evolution (Score:4, Informative)
But how does Evolution prune the repication mechanism itself? If an early replicator was very sloppy and mutation prone, then any possible advantages occuring by random mutation would have little chance to be tested before other random mutations overwrote them or other mutations killed off the organisms carrying that mutation. Working backwards, let's start with modern DNA, in cases where there are many additional mechanisms to cut the mutation rate so the non-random part of Evolution has more time to work. Putting DNA inside a walled cell, and making that cell nucleated, both reduce the exposure of the DNA to chemicals that can mutate copies. Multicellularity further shields the DNA from some more mutagens, and lets Evolution prune cells with bad copies by apoptosis, which can't be used by single celled organisms. Right there, we have a trend in Evolution - Nature seems to be trying to reduce error rates to target, as you put it, the Goldilocks range. "Advanced" organisms, such as us, or mosquitos or oak trees, have many features that make the selection rate occur at an optimum, where Nature gets enough time for selection processes to occur. In fact, sexual selection is probably just another form of targeting that Goldilocks range, and I'm sure a professional biologist can think of may more examples than the four I've mentioned. Some more minor steps in this pattern might include the evolution of Alcohol Dehydrogenase enzymes and others, but that's getting beyond my depth.
But if we extrapolate a historical trend from that, the mutation rate must have been higher for 'primative' DNA based life, but the selection pressure must have been lower. Mutation must have been still higher if RNA was once the core molecule of heredity, which seems pretty solidly established. And if there's several more primative replicators, selection pressure must have moved glacially compared to the modern era. So how did selection have time even in 3 billion years to evolve DNA itself? If the earliest replicators were something like crystaline clays that were subject to a very modest amount of selection by erosion, as some biologists have speculated, how do we get the time for these to evolve through many stages to RNA and then DNA and eventually all the extra trimmings of today? Given that we've been in a DNA based biosphere for close to 1.5 billion years, that's about half the time since Earth cooled enough to support organic compounds,, and we're trying to cram probably at least 5 or 6 earlier replicators into less than half the time, knowing that each one was subject to less selection pressure than it's successor probably by orders of magnetude.
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Time. Billions of years is a long time to try various and sundry things. Although it probably didn't happen this way (likely there were multiple attempts at 'life'), it just takes once....
Life finds a way.
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This seems longwinded for a question you ask and answer in the first sentence:
If an early replicator was very sloppy and mutation prone, then any possible advantages occuring by random mutation would have little chance to be tested before other random mutations overwrote them or other mutations killed off the organisms carrying that mutation.
That's the answer. Mechanisms which have too short of a half-life, or too long of one, are out-competed by randomly occurring ones with different half-lives.
indeed. nor why (Score:3)
+1
Evolution doesn't try to explain how life began.
It is therefore funny to me thatsome people think there's a contradiction between evolution and ancient stories about how it began. Even more odd, some people assume the HOW is incompatible with ideas about WHY life exists. Those are three separate questions.
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Considering that a sizeable percentage of americans seem to count geology and cosmology and god knows what else under "evolution" (thanks to inbred creationist hicks calling the big bang an "evolution" theory, etc) , calling biogenesis evolution is probably a forgivable mistake to make
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How so? What creates that constraint? (Score:2)
> Although evolution isn't an explanation of how life began, it does introduce some constrictions on what that explanation can include.
> For instance, all life on earth today is descended from a single common ancestor. Plants, animals and humans were not created apart from each other, one at a time.
We know that the iPhone "evolved" from early cell phones via natural selection aka market selection.
We know that the latest cars similarly "evolved" via a process analogous to biological evolution.
We also k
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We know that the iPhone "evolved" from early cell phones via natural selection aka market selection
Damn that kool-aid is sweet? IPhones DIDN'T EVOLVE. There are individual phones that were built (created) for specific functions. All still exist even though their functions aren't prevalent anymore. None are extinct. The last was the brick cellular phone. Then computers were miniaturized enough to allow for a phone to become an simple program on that computer. It was named IPhone because people wouldn't buy pocket computer to call each other. Evolution is at beast a biologically process. When a
you seem to be good at ignoring evidence (Score:2)
You obviously know what you're talking about, you are very good at ignoring evidence. For example, just recently in Egypt, archeologists discovered Egyptian documents several thousand years old. These ancient Egyptian records show pharoah's army chasing the Jews out of Egypt after the Jews' worship of a false god brought great suffering to Egypt - plagues and the like.
The scene by the Egyptians looks strikingly like another account of the Jews' exodus from Egypt, for the same reasons. The only differenc
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I reject your notion that evolution is unrelated.
Both variation and selection are still at work, even on "inanimate" objects.
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I reject your notion that evolution is unrelated.
Both variation and selection are still at work, even on "inanimate" objects.
I moved to a place where my favorite convenience store isn't available. I still use there selection of cups. However, I don't expect them to one day 'upgrade' to the cup of the gas station across the street. Outside of biology, variation and selection are static. They can and are eliminated in communist societies as ills.
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Abiogenesis [youtube.com]
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It is one of several theories of abiogenesis, which are all under consideration by researchers.
Re:It's alive (Score:5, Interesting)
inanimate matter
What does ‘inanimate’ mean? The problem is that people are always making this bizarre differentiation between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, when really there is just matter interacting with matter; some sets of interactions are more complex and organized (or, shall we say, repetitive and sustained) than other sets of interactions. Indeed, sometimes that complexity and organization is so great that we call it ‘life’ and even ‘intelligent life’, but it’s all one and the same:
Matter interacting with matter.
When you eat some metal such as calcium, that calcium may become incorporated in your bones. Is that calcium all of a sudden ‘animated’ and ‘living’? Is the water that you drink somehow ‘animated’ because it flows through your brain cells?
A child is a continuation of that complex interaction between matter that we call the parent.
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A few times a week, I realize that everything is everything, any further claims are likely to be false. What we consider objects or individuals is just an aspect of everything, indivisible from the rest. It's just that this would leave me with nothing to do, so I shake it off quickly ^^
Thank you Dr. Manhattan (Score:2)
Matter interacting with matter.
When you eat some metal such as calcium, that calcium may become incorporated in your bones. Is that calcium all of a sudden ‘animated’ and ‘living’? Is the water that you drink somehow ‘animated’ because it flows through your brain cells?
"A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally there's no discernible difference."
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Was the lead author Dr. Kevin Costner? (Score:1)
I'm just sayin'...
NASA trying to find something to do (Score:1)
Rubbish! (Score:4)
Everyone knows that life was started when inanimate matter was touched by His Noodly Appendage [wikipedia.org].
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Life appearing from nothing isn't logical or scientific. Anything appearing from nothing isn't logical or scientific. I used to be all Atheist, before I realized that the only logical thing to be is Agnostic. (Meaning you realize that you cannot know either way, whereas Atheism is the stupid religion of thinking that you "know" that there is no God, which is the opposite of scientific reasoning.)
Wut?!?!
That's all over the place logically. First, "It was God". OK, but you later say "the only logical thing to be is Agnostic". But you weren't. You claimed "It was God."
And what does, "Life appearing from nothing isn't logical or scientific" even mean? No one claims "life appear[ed] from nothing." There have been numerous experiments that created "building blocks" for living creatures from simple elements and compounds known to exist in quantity on the early Earth. Just because we have yet to det
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As an Atheist I don't know anything about the existence of god, I just don't believe anybody else does either. If someone claims we are surrounded by invisible unicorns, I am not going to believe they know any such thing, and yet I no information about the existence of invisible unicorns either. Either the universe popped into existence from nothing or it is eternal, people who believe in an eternal god believe in an eternal universe (the universe means everything), the idea that anybody could have access t
Why no cells in the lab yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a rare occurrence (Score:2, Insightful)
The earth had a billion years and the entire surface to a depth of some hundreds of metres.
That's a lot replicates for an experimental team limited to 500 ml flasks in a lab.
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The sheer scale of the chemistry involved is staggering. The Earth was concentrating the heat and energy of a star into itself, and churning billions of tons of material in millions of different chemical and pressure environments.
At the current scale of things, we're not sure what the early conditions were like - were things mostly concentrated, or was their natural processes which were separating out reaction products to give a domain of purer precursors? And would anyone be happy if we assumed as such bef
You just have to wait a bit. (Score:2)
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Because proteins are incredibly more complex then base amino acids. The Ribonuclease protein is the simplest protein that we know of, and can be considered the most basic building block of a cell. It is made from 124 amino acids, the first one in the strand being Lysine, and there are 17 different amino acids in this protein. The only process we know of that can produce proteins are proteins, i.e. RNA and DNA transcription. We haven't yet figured out how to bootstrap this process, much less produce syntheti
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Further discussion (Score:3)
As he points out, proton imbalances (across membranes) are actually the way all bacteria generate energy, and the way all life likely did before a phenomenal accident gave us mitochondria (in the case of most eukaryotes, it's proton imbalances across mitochondria within our cells, giving us far more energy for a given cell volume and quite possibly the thing that made multicellular life possible). He also calls the "primordial soup" life precursor picture into serious question, as fermentation is actually more complex, from an enzyme standpoint, than respiration.
Really interesting stuff.
http://www.nick-lane.net/ [nick-lane.net]
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... which was published a number of years ago. My copy has been on my bookshelf for at least 3 years, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't news when it came out.
The basic ideas that are presented here are not new (this isn't to diss Nick Lane - he's done some very interesting work, and written some good popular scie
Nothing new here (Score:1)
The bible has been preaching a similar theory for thousands of years, why is this news today? Here are some verses from the book of Genesis chapter 1
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the wate
Nope. The origin was in "fire"... (Score:1)
Re:NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin o (Score:5, Insightful)
And then what mind-boggling intelligence begat the mind-boggling intelligence that begat us? Turtles all the way down, mate.
Re:NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin o (Score:5, Interesting)
Carl Sagan, in Cosmos:
If the general picture, however, of a Big Bang followed by an expanding universe is correct, what happened before that? Was the universe devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly, somehow created? How did that happen?
In many cultures, the customary answer is that a "god" or "gods" created the universe out of nothing. But, if we wish to pursue this question courageously, we must of course ask the next question: Where did God come from?
If we decide that this is an unanswerable question, then why not save a step, and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe always existed? There's no need for a creation—it was always here.
These are not easy questions; cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries, with the questions that were once treated only in religion and myth.
Re:NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin o (Score:4, Interesting)
We can't "save a step and conclude that the universe always existed" because we think the universe had a beginning, the Big Bang. We could have saved that step if we thought the universe was Steady State. Dr. Sagan is asking this as a rhetorical question, yet he himself gave the answer not 20 pages earlier in the same book when he addressed the Steady State/Big Bang controversy in historical physics. That's showing a completely non-scientific bias and committing a logical error, and I really hoped for better from the good doctor. Fortunately, if there Is a real God, I suspect "he"s not going to be that hung up on whether his creations beleived without evidence or not.
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What scientist call the universe and what philosophers call the universe are two different things, for the philosopher the universe means absolutely everything, it can not have a creator because the creator would have to create it's self, if you exclude something from the universe to explain its creation then you are not answering the question of how did their get to be something in the first place. For scientist the universe can have different meaning depending on the context, it can mean the space and tim
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I think you are wrong Mr. AC, the "Scientists" exclude the Lord in any number of ways (google it) and the "Philosophers" exclude Him on the basis of Him not being all in all I think. What if the Universe is in a part of HEAVEN (where the Lord lives after all) and we are just Worms on this Planet who don't want anything to do with Him. That is a much more accurate scenario and so that doesn't help anyone and that is what Satan wants, NO HOPE. The Lord does offer an experience that saves us initially and can
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because we think the universe had a beginning, the Big Bang.
That's not an accurate description - there's no requirement that the Big Bang be the beginning of everything. Something may have existed prior to that point; the Big Bang Theory makes no attempt to describe it.
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Fortunately, if there Is a real God, I suspect "he"s not going to be that hung up on whether his creations beleived without evidence or not.
Most religions claim otherwise. I think those religions that "survive" the competition from other religions (like an evolutionary process), are those that "procreate" well into the next generation.
Therefore, successful religions must force people (with the threat of divine punishment) to adopt the theory, like belief in god.
Religions that would not mandate a belief in god, and promise punishment to those that don't, would die out fast.
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It is an interesting question, and one that we must ask.
I'll never be convinced the mass of the universe came from nothing. I think that even beyond 4 dimensional manifolds and relativity, whether you're talking Star Trek science, or before the Big Bang; the conservation of mass and energy will always hold. The universe came from something. That assumes the Big Bang theory holds; it always had a pseudo-religious feel to me. I wouldn't be shocked if the steady state universe makes a comeback in our lifetime.
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Fortunately, if there Is a real God, I suspect "he"s not going to be that hung up on whether his creations beleived without evidence or not.
My opinion too. For the record I don't believe any intelligent entity was involved in the creation of the universe, but if there was then after 14 billion years I don't think they will give a toss about what any of the multitudinous lifeforms that inhabit it think or do.
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Re:NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin o (Score:5, Informative)
"Well we don't understand this and probably never will, so we should ignore it."
Accepting that you don't understand something isn't the same as ignoring it. In fact making up myths about what might have happened is ignoring the reality that we don't know.
If it WAS created, then what? You are going to look pretty fucking stupid standing before the creator when you die, as smart as you think you are now.
This presupposes a long list of arbitrary ideas about the nature of a being that might have conciously created the universe:
There's absolutely no reason to believe any of these arbitrary assumptions to be the case, even if for some reason, apropos of no evidence whatsoever, you do decide to presume the universe is the consequence of a concious act.
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Deciding you just get to make up an answer because you don't understand it is the egotistic cop-out.
If there actually is a creator who does those things, I think you're the one who will look stupid, despite your lucky guess.
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Who's to say that we even exist [outside of our universe]? The fact is we assume we exist in absolute terms. However, this reality could be nothing more then some mathematical construct in a sea of infinite probabilities and random chaos. If the universe is 14 billion years old, and the earth is 4.5 billion years, and the human race is 2.5 million years old, then it's probably reasonable to conclude that the realm outside the universe (i.e. unbound probability) has existed for at least 7 trillion years. If
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Where are you getting 7 trillion years from?
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Has anyone on this site ever heard of Humility? Are we too proud to truly know anything? Have we learnt nothing from God's inspired Word especially on this weekend? Can the human brain possibly contain all the knowledge in and about this Universe? To all of these questions, not in a Million years and we don't have that much time remaining to learn either! We can theorise and hypothesise till the Cow's come home (or the Lord returns) and we will never know much about our Universe because it is just too big
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Time is such a universal concept... in that it only applies inside the universe, as far as we know. Furthermore, since undoubtedly something exists, we either have to assume it's possible for something to come out of nothing, or for something to have existed since forever, "just because". So then why not grant this to a theoretical god, too? It's not really logic when you apply it that selectively.
I think even the weirdest god you could dream up would not make reality any weirder, it'd be like a drop in the
Re:NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin o (Score:4, Insightful)
why not grant this to a theoretical god, too?
Because the god adds nothing to the explanation. Hence Occam's razor. Do not multiply entities unnecessarily.
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why not grant this to a theoretical god, too?
Because the god adds nothing to the explanation. Hence Occam's razor. Do not multiply entities unnecessarily.
More importantly because they're not granting a non-interventionist god with unknowable. People run in circles to try and have god added to the picture, because in the next heartbeat they then want to tell us all about exactly what he's like and how he definitely hates gays or something.
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Are you talking to me? Pah. I call out broken logic when I see it, is all. And I also note the hybris of pretending to have any sort of "full picture" that makes any sense at all, defending it from introducing elements which don't. That's some pretty dumb shit, and the strawmen about religious people are expected compensation.
Right now, you are telling me how
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I wasn't talking to you at all. So you know, look in the mirror and try not to be blinded.
Re:NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin o (Score:4, Informative)
He wasn't using it wrong.
The structure of this thread is:
Premise 1: The Universe exists.
Premise 2: Either something came from nothing, or something always existed.
Hypothesis: That something is God.
Counterargument: The Universe is also an internally consistent "something" to fit the premise. The Universe necessarily exists due to premise 1. God does not necessarily exist given the premises, and does not better fulfill either premise. Therefore the hypothesis is unsupported.
You need to introduce new premises or arguments in order to endow God with extra attributes so that the God hypothesis passes Occam's Razor.
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And then what mind-boggling intelligence begat the mind-boggling intelligence that begat us? Turtles all the way down, mate.
The answer? An even more staggering, self existing, mind-boggling intelligence. Seriously, What exactly is wrong with 'Turtles all the way down'?
Maxwell's Demon (Score:3)
Sounds like NASA finally discovered Maxwell's Demon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
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Nope, just an exciting 1980s proposal for one way in which significant parts of life's metabolism could plausibly have developed from an inorganic system into an organic one. There's nothing new about this article - OOL people have been discussing this since the detection of sub-surface water on Europa, and the basic research (Mike Russell's) was done in the 1980s based on theoretical work in the 1970s by Gunter Wachtersha
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Random processes
The variation may be random (whatever that really means). The selection is not random.
The whole process, evolution by variation and selection (yes, "abiogenesis" is as specious as the notion of "nonliving" matter), is decidedly not random.
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Theists don't say "must," they say "plausibly."
[laughs]
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you added that constraint specifically to fit your argument.
No he didn't, you deleted it to fit yours. He wasn't arguing with your generalised concept of what a "theist" does and doesn't think (Enjoy it, it's yours), he was arguing specifically with the OP, who said:
mind-boggling complexity of life that could never be duplicated but by a mind-boggling intelligence.
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Supergod created god and god's god-verse. And megagod created supergod and supergod's super-verse. And hypergod created megagod and megagod's mega-verse.
AND NOTHING CREATED HYPERGOD. HYPERGOD IS ETERNAL. ALL HAIL HYPERGOD.
[BTW, turtles-all-the-way-down means that our god is the worst god of all. Since he was unable to create a being capable of creating a universe.]
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>
[BTW, turtles-all-the-way-down means that our god is the worst god of all. Since he was unable to create a being capable of creating a universe.]
Unless we someday create a new universe! This could be by starting a new Big Bang in one of the empty spaces of our universe, or by creating a powerful simulation where the life forms inside it think it is reality or really, it would be their reality. Nobody said we have to create the new universe immediately.
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Supergod created god and god's god-verse. And megagod created supergod and supergod's super-verse. And hypergod created megagod and megagod's mega-verse.
AND NOTHING CREATED HYPERGOD. HYPERGOD IS ETERNAL. ALL HAIL HYPERGOD.
[BTW, turtles-all-the-way-down means that our god is the worst god of all. Since he was unable to create a being capable of creating a universe.]
How do you know we aren't capabl? maybe our way is through our books and literature. What if every piece of created story IS another universe. That would make our God best ebcause he created not just one but millions who created millions more.
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Re:NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin o (Score:5, Insightful)
mind-boggling complexity of life that could never be duplicated but by a mind-boggling intelligence
Complexity can arise spontaneously out of simple interactions [wikipedia.org]. We see this over and over and over again [wikipedia.org]. Pretending it requires intelligence just reveals our collective cognitive bias towards personifying the world and ascribing agency to inanimate objects and processes.
This is our tax dollars being spent on a national religion.
No, it's merely a line of scientific questioning that threatens your worldview. A lot of things can threaten a worldview (science, humanities, foreign travel, self-reflection, getting older, etc.), but we should only call them a "religion" if they substantially function like a religion (e.g., providing things like community, life ceremonies, spirituality, moral codes, holy texts, etc.).
Duplicating all pagan religions. They start with water because Genesis starts with the Holy Spirit hovering over the water.
Civilization begins with agriculture, and agriculture begins with water. It was true in lower Mesopotamia (the world's first civilization) and on the banks of the Nile (Egypt, the second civilization). It seems appropriate, then, that many creation myths--including those much older than the Genesis 1:1 account--feature water as prominent (and often chaotic) element.
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The short answer is we don't know for sure "why now?", but we do know that unless humans were generated with seed-technology, they would inevitably ask "why now?" when they reach this point because there's a start to civilization *somewhere*.
But one point is that living in large groups is impractical without scaling agriculture, which at minimal technology is impractical to bootstrap in much of the world. The most low-tech-civilization-friendly places on Earth are the ones where we find the first evidence
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Old Theory (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure you're just describing Maxwell's demon
Heck, that's all this NASA proposal is: Maxwell's demon with a theoretical location.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon
Simple Interactions (Score:2)
As a deterministic construction, the 110 Rule is an interesting idea; seems to entertain a certain possibility of materialistic emergence.
Since animal-life seems to be quadratic instead of binary, there's still a bit of a gap between life today and an iterative genesis (DNA codons being made up of four elements (GACT) instead of just one or two). I don't know if that helps by making the field richer for interactions, I do know it makes modeling it much more difficult with this idea.
Maxwell's demon aside, I
Entropy can Increase or Decrease Locally (Score:5, Informative)
"Random processes"? Any randomly assembled amino acid randomly disassembles as well; even Miller proved that.
The randomly assembled amino acid does randomly disassemble as well, but that is not what it must do. An amino acid may stay the same, disassemble, or it it may form a more complex molecule.
Here is a little demonstration of "randomly" assembling complexity in behavior. [vortexcortex.com] I have given each entity the ability to sense the left and rightness and ahead and behindness of 'energy' dots and their nearest peer. They also get a sense of their relative energy vs their peer. The inputs can affect two thrusters which operate like "tank treads". However, their minds are blank. They don't know what to do with the inputs or how they map to the outputs. The genetic program introduces random errors as copies runs of a genome from one parent then the other switching back and forth randomly. The selection pressure simply favors those with the most energy at the end of each generation by granting a higher chance to breed. Use the up/dn keys to change the sim speed, and click the entities to see a visualization of their simple neural network. The top left two neurons sense nearest food distance, the right two sense nearest entity, middle top is the relative energy difference of nearest peer. Note that randomness is constantly introduced, and yet their behaviors do not revert to randomness or inaction, they converge on a better solution for finding energy in their environment.
There is no pre-programed strategy for survival. Mutations occur randomly, and they are selected against, just as in nature. Given the same starting point In different runs / populations different behaviors for survival will emerge. Some may start spinning and steering incrementally towards the food, others may steer more efficiently after first just moving in a straighter path to cover the most ground (they have no visual or movement penalty for backwards, so backwards movement is 50% likely). As their n.net complexity grows their behaviors will change. Movement will tend towards more efficient methods. Some populations may become more careful instead of faster, some employ a hybrid approach by racing forwards then reversing and steering carefully after the energy/food is passed. Some entities will emerge avoidance of each other to conserve energy. Some populations will bump into each other to share energy among like minded (genetically similar) peers. Some will even switch between these strategies depending on their own energy level.
Where do all these complex behaviors come from? I didn't program them, I didn't even program in that more complex behaviors should be more favorable than less complex, and yet they emerged naturally as a product of the environment due to selection pressure upon it. Just because I can set the axon weights manually and program a behavior favorable for n.nets to solve the problem, doesn't mean randomness can't yield solutions as well. Today we can watch evolution happen right on a computer, or in the laboratory. All of this complexity came from a simple simulation of 32 neurons arranged in a simple single hidden layer neural net, with 5 simple scalar sensors and the minimal 2 movement outputs, with a simple single selection pressure. Each time you run the sim it produces different results, but all meeting the same ends, collect energy, reproduce. Just imagine what nature can do with its far more complex simulation and selection pressures... You don't have to imagine, you can look around and see for yourself.
In other more complex simulations I allow the structure of the n.nets and form of sensors to be randomly introduced and selection pressure applied. In larger simulations I allow the breeding and death of generations to occur continuously across wider areas and speciation will occur. Entities will develop specialized adaptations for a given problem space of the environment. I have created simulatio
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