Is there a border dividing life from non-life?

jarCertainly but what is probably lacking is enough data to narrow it down to at least a ballpark area for each mutation,again we at one time did not know how rust formed or how stars produced energy but all things are easy in hindsite.It may well be that the complexity is too great to catalog in order to see the pattern and because of this never fully resolve the issue.I also mentioned that enzymes mutate yet are they considered alive?

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With organisms we see the separation of these reactions from the outside environment, and the production of new "thermodynamic islands" through reproduction.

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I like it. and I roughly agree with your anlysis of the terrestrial water cycle. But we usually define life in part with reproduction; what I was driving at was the entropic role life plays, the format for that role requires bounding and reproduction, indeed.This message has been edited by contracycle, 08-06-2004 05:16 AM

When you say that enzymes mutate all you are actually talking about is mutations in the protein coding regions of the DNA for that enzyme. Unless there was something on that site of yours which actually specified a way of making reproducible enzyme variants without changing the DNA/RNA coding for them, which I doubt.So all you are really asking is whether DNA is alive.TTFN,WK

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Nope. Because that is what always happens. In living creatures mutations lead to new and unique results. It is entirely predictable while the random mutations that happen in living things are unpredictable.

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Is the air alive then, since we can not predict weather with pinpoint accuracy? For instance, can we predict the number and severity of hurricanes in the year 2006 with the data we have now?Or perhaps weather and living organisms share a similar characteristic, a level of complexity that defies simple predictions. There are simple experiments that give a predictable result when looking at simple organisms. For example, if I add S. cerevisae to wort I will get beer. If I add glucose to a culture of lactobacillus, I will get lactic acid in return. However, your example of mutation is like that of weather. There are multiple pressures and mechanisms that can result in several outcomes. Not knowing an outcome before the environmental change is initiated is not different than not knowing how many hurricanes will develop before the seas start to warm during summer.

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Unless there was something on that site of yours which actually specified a way of making reproducible enzyme variants without changing the DNA/RNA coding for them, which I doubt.

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Just being nitpicky, but it is possible. Post-translation modification of proteins is quite common, and can include glycosylation, proteolytic cleavage, or conformational changes through binding to another protein. However, all of these modifications are also controlled by DNA/RNA, just not the region specifically coding for the enzyme in question.

In which case they aren't reproducible because they aren't reproducing, not beacuse you can't do it more than once, perhaps heritable would have been a better way to phrase it. You can't have post-transational modifications with nothing to translate, and the post seem to imply no role for gnetic material, all you are doing is moving the mutation from the coding region of one enzyme to the coding region of the protein doing the post-translational modification not removing the genetic component. The evolution is still clearly in the genetic sequence and not in the enzyme.Perhaps you could have an environmental factor causing a post-translational modification without the involvement of another protein but I don't se how this could be heritable.TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 08-07-2004 06:23 AM

While predicting hurricanes or a tornadoes path is fairly complicated, we are getting better and better at understanding and predicting such things.But the conditions that bring us hurricanes always bring us hurricanes. Given the set of conditions that leads to a hurricane never (at least so far) produces a blizzard.Mutations in living critters though is different. It would be the hurricane adding snow to its list of features or removing high winds as a characteristic. The only difference that I can see between living and non-living systems is that unique variation. New forms do evolve and those new critters are as different and unique as the hurricane with snow or one without wind.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

jar Hurricanes are different from one another even though we can recognize a hurricane by pre-determined criteria such as wind speed and damage but there is no more anyway to predict the individual aspects such as cloud height,barometric pressures and diameter in the eye,velocity of the winds of the eye wall,influence of el nino etc.
Each hurricane is a unique variation on the general designation of the classification hurricane.The conditions that bring us human beings always bring us human beings.

So far. But once they were reptiles.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

jarAnd hurricanes were once gentle breezes.

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But the conditions that bring us hurricanes always bring us hurricanes. Given the set of conditions that leads to a hurricane never (at least so far) produces a blizzard.

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And selective pressures always give us a change in allele frequency (or extinction). Given a selective pressure, adaptation is inevitable. The variance in adaptation is no different than the variance in hurricane shape, path, velocity, etc. As far as a hurricane producing a blizzard, this would be the same as bacteria using their cell wall for protein coding instead of DNA.

I'm going to take a philosophical look at the language and concepts we are using for this phenomna. I think the discussion is having trouble with entity and entity is a tough thing. It's partly a result of language and partly a way our nervous system organizes input. And living organisms particularly, since each of us is one, have a strong attraction in our thinking.Take the conditions for a star to begin and then end. When does a cloud of gas become a protostar? a protostar a star? a star a dead star?Back to semantics. "I gave my love a cherry that had no stone". Nouns are illusions created by semantic structuring and neuroprocessing. There are no things. What there are are stages in processes that we give names to. Budding, blooming, fruiting, ripening, rotting are all stages in a process of cherrying. Our organism process is most interested in interacting with the end of the ripening process of the cherrying, so to for birding processes, but beeing processes prefer interacting with the blooming process. Unless we are doing some sort of decorative process that interacts with the blooming process.So living processes occur and continue and include something sort of like the ripening process and the rotting process. Matter and energy move through living and non living processes.Conjecture: the universe is a collection of movements of energy/matter creating space/time. And then there is consciousness which I'm spending a lot of time musing about but just don't know quite how it fits.The concept of border might be easier to understand if we spoke of threshold, and action threshold. Under what conditions does water change state from solid to liquid to gas? Under what conditions does matter change state from nonliving to living to nonliving? And what role does consciousness play in this?lfenThis message has been edited by lfen, 08-14-2004 09:21 PM

IfenTherein lies a great fault with philosophy and that is the endless questions without a formal means of acting upon the questions to check if they have any substance of reality or if they are merely for the sport of speculation.The aim of my question is to delve into the limitations imposed upon us by our convention of naming things while ignoring that the real world has no such imperative.The border itself seems to be an illusion simply because our consciousness is one of the aspects we grant ourselves as part of being "alive".However we have no evidence of consciousness in most animals.Hell just try to define what is meant by consiousness.This is going to be a seperate topic that I will try to get started.

sidelined,Be kinder and gentler and call it a "limitation" and not a "fault". Unexamined philosophical assumptions can create problems in doing science. And I think my suggestion to look at thresholds insteand of borders while admittedly only semantic recasting of your question, might lead to looking at the situation differently enough to better understand it.Border as a word tends to call to mind the lines on a map. But the border of the land and water is a transition zone. The borders between living and dead are likewise transition zones.So will you accept that though there are no discrete borders there are zones that lie between what we clearly recognize as alive and dead?As to a thread on consciousness I will be there when you get it going.lfenedited to note: I am speaking of life as an emergent property so I agree with your initial formulation only emphasizing the emergent property rather than the reductionist emphasis.This message has been edited by lfen, 08-14-2004 09:48 PM

Ifen I would accept that yes when you can tell me how you would determine where water ended and land began {which I feel can be done} AND where living things end and non-living things begin.{which has yet to be satisfactorily accomplished} Non-living is not necessarily the same as dead.