Wednesday, August 18, 2021
Much to be modest about
This new attempt to categorize life is vague and sloppy. The authors, for once, are appropriately humble about the highly tentative stage of their understanding.
What REALLY caught my attention in the article is The Unavoidable Typo:
For some reason this particular typo evades all proofreaders. Leaving aside words with plausible alternative spellings, Sante Fe is the champion typo. Anticipatory coarticulation.
The authors see the problems clearly. Taxonomy stopped working a long time ago. Concepts like species and individual simply don't fit the real world. A forest or a field of grass is an individual and a huge group of individuals. Functional modules are sometimes separated by cell boundaries and sometimes not. Many "species" have turned out to be different settings of the variable epigenes, not different settings of the constant genes.
For some reason this particular typo evades all proofreaders. Leaving aside words with plausible alternative spellings, Sante Fe is the champion typo. Anticipatory coarticulation.
The authors see the problems clearly. Taxonomy stopped working a long time ago. Concepts like species and individual simply don't fit the real world. A forest or a field of grass is an individual and a huge group of individuals. Functional modules are sometimes separated by cell boundaries and sometimes not. Many "species" have turned out to be different settings of the variable epigenes, not different settings of the constant genes.
Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself. "Human culture lives on the material of minds, much like multicellular organisms live on the material of single-celled organisms," Kempes explains. Based on their new definition, the researchers argue that life has emerged many times on Earth, and that we in fact are co-existing with many forms of current life.They are trying to steer away from crude physics and materialism, but their proposal is still too static, too materialistic. It appears to pivot on the tired notion of energy efficiency:
For example, life uses many gradients of energy production using the level one constraints, but all of these must adhere to the level two constraint of the law of thermodynamics. "No cell will be found to contain more internal structure than can be accounted for by the total free energy available from the environment," the team writes in their paper.Is complexity limited by available energy? No. MAINTAINING a more complex structure doesn't require more energy. The right structure for a PURPOSE may be simple or complex. A modern car uses much less gas than a Model T. A cellphone uses much less battery energy than a 1950 tube-based computer. There's no correlation. So these authors aren't anywhere near a usable redefinition, but they are starting the process with a healthy humble attitude.
Labels: Grand Blueprint
¶ 11:57 PM
