AL (Artificial Life) and the people who love it

(7 messages later) Which is it, rat?

AL will eat, "breathe", move, reproduce. By even the most rudimentary definition, this constitutes life. And it will evolve (insertions, deletions, point mutations, etc.). After all, nobody's perfect, not even AL.

Now if it does do all that, then that is evidence that we were designed, lol.

The Bible deosn't do such a good job at clarifying for us whether God made everything from nothing, or just the first thing from nothing.

No. That will be evidence that, given the periodic chart, random chance alone will produce life. It was inevitable. Given the initial conditions.

... they aren't making life from scratch, like God did.

The RNA World model for prebiotic evolution posits the selection of catalytic/template RNAs from random populations. The mechanisms by which these random populations could be generated de novo are unclear. Non-enzymatic and RNA-catalyzed nucleic acid polymerizations are poorly processive, which means that the resulting short-chain RNA population could contain only limited diversity. Nonreciprocal recombination of smaller RNAs provides an alternative mechanism for the assembly of larger species with concomitantly greater structural diversity; however, the frequency of any specific recombination event in a random RNA population is limited by the low probability of an encounter between any two given molecules. This low probability could be overcome if the molecules capable of productive recombination were redundant, with many nonhomologous but functionally equivalent RNAs being present in a random population. Here we report fluctuation experiments to estimate the redundancy of the set of RNAs in a population of random sequences that are capable of non-Watson-Crick interaction with another RNA. Parallel SELEX experiments showed that at least one in 106 random 20-mers binds to the P5.1 stem-loop of Bacillus subtilis RNase P RNA with affinities equal to that of its naturally occurring partner. This high frequency predicts that a single RNA in an RNA World would encounter multiple interacting RNAs within its lifetime, supporting recombination as a plausible mechanism for prebiotic RNA evolution. The large number of equivalent species implies that the selection of any single interacting species in the RNA World would be a contingent event, i.e., one resulting from historical accident.

You concede abiogenesis?

There is a big difference between a biological machine, and life.

riVeRraT writes:There is a big difference between a biological machine, and life.

Given the poor history of both science and religion to deliver answers,

That's not what the Bible says. Adam, specifically, was made from the dust of the ground. Eve was made from Adam's rib.

Therefore, what's the problem with humans doing the same thing?

I get the feeling you won't be satisfied unless and until humans can clap their hands, declaim "Presto!" and zap-poof a kitten into being on command.

You, riVeRraT, are a biological machine, and you are also alive.

"The difference is that our molecule has the type of growth that is necessary to allow artificial evolution

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third link you need a subscription

ErrorWe are sorry - there has been an error processing your request. Please return to the Nature home page.

Scientists at The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, a part of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in Southern California, published a paper in the February 15, 2001, issue of Nature that suggests a possible answer to how one of the early steps necessary for the origins of life arose.

This molecule was
initially formed by reacting two other molecules.