Modularity, A distinguishing property of life

Very true, but putrefaction is not the sole qualifier. There was an entire list of characteristics.The point that you seem to be overlooking is that while only multicellular animals decay versus unicellular ones, inorganic things never decay as an organic one would.So if you ask yourself, "An amoeba doesn't putrefy and neither does dirt, but a cat would. Amoeba's must be inorganic." That would only be true if we were using putrefaction as the sole qualifier, which we aren't.

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Hyroglyphx writes:

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Parent isotopes radiologically decay in to daughter isotopes at different rates.

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Yeah, I saw that later on. But there is a significant difference between radioactive decay versus the chemical process of decay. Somebody earlier mentioned that sand is evidence of rocks decaying. I fundamentally disagree. Frictional forces acting upon a rock, slowly chipping away until it is reduced to sand is entirely different than a chemical process.That would be like saying water that erodes stone is the same as fire consuming wood. One is an actual chemical process and the other are just dynamic forces. If you mean that you can find fungus on a rock, therefore the inorganic rock no longer qualifies, or if you swallow a pebble somehow you are not fully organic, I don't see how that would change anything. Everything in your body is organic, save the occasional surgical implants. That matter will all break down by chemical process and the flesh will be reconstituted elsewhere.

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That seems to be the point... That it was on the nano level that life made its transition from non-life in the first place. Perhaps so.

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Not necessarily though. That still has not been witnessed. I'm not talking about going back in time and witnessing the moment when non-life suddenly had the spark of life, where it first made that transition in some primordial puddle. I'm saying that if inanimate, inorganic matter was able to become living matter, giving rise to all organic matter, wouldn't that have been empirically known to science by now? I would think it would happen all the time being that there are so many carbon compounds to utilize all over the earth. No, not everything has to be 100%. But it damn sure needs to be hovering in the 90-99% range. Science compartmentalizes all species and subspecies and genus', kingdoms, phyla, etc, etc. To now and only now suggest that science refuses to delineate or distinguish between characteristics is simply not true. Two of those characteristics are organic and inorganic.

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"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." Thomas Jefferson

Whether something is considered inorganic or organic depends on its chemistry, not on its provenance. CO₂ is not organic or inorganic depending on whether it comes from a fire or is breathed out by a donkey; it is always inorganic material. Similarly whether CH₃CH₂OH (ethanol) is fermented from sugars by yeasts or formed in the laboratory by scientists it is still an organic material.Edited by Mr Jack, : No reason given.

Your exactly correct on this as always Mr. Jack . I think we are mixing up the simplified, colleqial use of the terms 'organic' and 'inorganic' and those used in biochemistry. Even the military uses the terms 'organic' and 'inorganic' but with very different tactical/strategic meanings.Thanks for the correction.Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.

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For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Dr. Carl Sagan

After reading your post I ask myself, "Now why isn't CO₂ organic?" So I go to Wikipedia, look up Organic Matter, and find this in the opening paragraph: Clicking on the link for the article on Organic Compounds I find this: Then going to the article on Compounds of Carbon I find this in the section under Inorganic Compounds: So I learn two interesting things. First, Hyroglyphx might be drawing his "decay" critieria for life from the definition of organic matter, since decay features prominently in that definition, at least at Wikipedia.And second, CO₂ really isn't organic. Who knew!--Percy

And, apparently there is a distinguish drawn between organic material and organic compounds which I had missed. Interesting.I think CO₂ is a fine example of the arbitary nature of the inorganic/organic divide, especially as methane (CH₃) is considered organic.

Well, lets take a look at them. I have abbreviated their explanations for convenience: Let's go at this in order; I will provide theoretical examples to illustrate my point. Note that because I provide a fictional example does not mean that there is not a real example out there somewhere, I just am not particularly well informed on those peculiarities.1) I present to you "Skynet". Skynet is an intelligent, self-aware entity. More importantly it decomposes in the same general manner as man, repairs itself by integrating new matter into its being, and can undergo cyclical changes by making new little Skynet nodes all over the world. Skynet deviates from the above definition in only one respect: It is not made up of cells.Suppose that it did have a few cells tacked on somewhere, how many would it need to become "alive" with artificial implants?2) I present to you Bob. Bob is sick, really sick. His disease is a terrible one, it prevents cells from repairing themselves. They can still reproduce though, and as his cells are eventually succumbing to damage his body is desperately attempting to create more. It is a losing battle though, and Bob can only limp along for a few months at most. During this time though he manages to sire another child with his wife (remember, he can make new sperm just fine). Bob's new child may well have the same genetic disease that he experienced.Now here is the question: When did Bob die? By this definition he died as soon as he contracted the disease, and if the child has the same condition then it would be dead from conception as well. Bob didn't get the condition all at once though, so there were times when say 50% of the cells in Bob could repair themselves and the others could not. Was he alive then with just a lot of dead material on him? How about if he only had one cell left that could repair itself, and never was affected by the disease itself?For a human this life cycle isn't possible to sustain, but for smaller critters with a faster life cycle it is another story. How about some little bacterial bug that can complete all the other requisite life cycles including reproduction before its cells are damaged beyond use, and continue to do so indefinitely?3) I present to you Zeus. He is made up of cells, he eats regular food along with godly nectar, and repairs damage to himself (should it ever happen). He even decomposes like other animals; at one point he was eaten! The problem is that he and his offspring do not go through cyclical changes. His daughter Athena sprang fully formed out of his head, clothed and armored! Does that one lack of cyclical change make Zeus or Athena non-living?---My point here is that each of these qualities you are saying is required is simply a matter of choice; you choose not to recognize something as being alive not because of some dramatic material change but by an ultimately arbitrary set of criteria. For instance, what qualifies as a cell? A cell wall is by definition a semi-permeable membrane that keeps some stuff in and some stuff out, while allowing still other stuff to pass through. How large can we make those holes? Does it still count as a cell wall if it only keeps out stuff as large or larger than a badger? Ahh, this is another line of debate altogether. There are several good reasons why we wouldn't necessarily know about it by now. For one thing the presence of living organisms makes it much harder for new life to develop, because wherever you find that primordial puddle these days something will gobble it up. Natural selection tends to be quite harsh on those getting into the game very, very late.Another reason is that things have changed quite a bit from when the first forms of life developed. Only one such change would be the Oxygen Catastrophe, a massive environmental change thought to have happened during the Siderian period about 2.4 billion years ago. 3.5 billion years ago organisms had developed oxyphotosynthesis where they produced oxygen (which at the time was very limited). This oxygen was toxic to the anaerobic organisms present at the time and it caused an ecological crisis to their biodiversity. On the other hand it also provided an opportunity for greater energy in metabolic processes for organisms that could cope, so there was a general shift over to this new-fangled oxygen-based metabolism. Some descendants are still around though, such as tetanus or botulism, but they quickly die when exposed to our present day atmosphere.

This is why I try not to contribute too often. Limited time and opportunity to give timely responses. The distinction is arbitrary. It is made by humans to facilitate human communication. The distinction has no independent existence outside human thought. Because the distinction is arbitrary. We find difficulty defining life in detail because each arbitrary line we try to draw produces exceptions. In gross, however, we can clearly distinguish between rocks and birds. This leaves the false impression that there is, somewhere in the detail, a hard line between life and non-life when the evidence before us and the abiogenic hypotheses presented show us otherwise. This concept should not be this difficult for you to grasp. I meant to say precisely what I said. Life is an arbitrary human distinction made to facilitate our understanding in communication with other humans. There is no element nor particle, no force nor energy, that imparts life where in its absence there is none. Outside human thought processes and our need to draw distinctions there is only chemistry in action. You use know as if to imply absolute certainty. Again, this is a science forum. Absolute certainty only exits in religious texts and falsely at its best.But I stray...Using the gross concept of life you are want to use let me ask this in response:Where else could it have come from?In the detail, however, in the reality of this universe there is no difference. The question answers itself. No. The science has progressed from the realm of reasoned speculation to the level of supported hypothesis. An excellent twist of syntax.There are several rational, non-wild, non-speculative, explanations for how chemistry became so complex as to produce sentient objects that look to the stars and contemplate there own existence. These’s that word again. I will assume you ask for absolute certainty.In scientific pursuits no body knows anything, ever.The science of Abiogenesis has progressed from reasoned speculation to supported hypothesis. Much needs yet to be learned before a compelling theory can be expressed. We may never reach that level until we have other life systems to study.But, compared to all other competing explanations, unreasoned and absurd speculations all, our level of confidence in the science continues to grow. You prove my point and don’t even know it. Your insistence on using an incomplete common dictionary to foist an absurd position in the face of easily understood principles is dishonest. Your continued insistence on your absurd rendering even after having been repeatedly corrected is willfully dishonest. A public forum, yes; a public science forum. And the totalitarian dictates of proper scientific terminology are expected to be used. Deal with it. I rise to the challenge. I do speak for all of science!
Until the community here disagrees with me, then I don’t.I shouldn’t have to do your honest research for you.But since you asked...Here is a short sweet one. hereDo note the conjunctive or after the first phrase.Maybe you do better with pictures. Try this. hereor this hereSomething a bit more rounded perhaps. hereThis one is more robust. Gotta love Wiki, the modern Library of Alexandria for the internet age. hereAnd, since you seem bereft of the most basic knowledge on the topic I provide for you a simple primer. Not overly technical yet comprehensive of the basics. You’ll need Acrobat for this one. It’s a .pdf file here

As far as a working definition of life goes I like to combine thislife is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded formLife - Wikipediawith the drive/ability for reproduction. Of course, this only works on a species wide scale, but I believe it works.

A quote from the movie "Fight Club" comes to mind."In the Tibetan philosophy, Sylvia Plath sense of the word, we're all dying. But you're not dying the way Chloe is dying."I suppose on some level that is a matter of philosophical interpretation, very similar to the abortion debate of when we begin to be human. Obviously at the moment of our inception, or conception as it were, we're constantly one second closer to our inevitable demise. But that muddles things considerably from a scientific approach.I take the clinical approach because it is a no nonsense approach. Death to me in the scientific realm would involve clinical death, that is, irreversible loss of circulation, respiration, and brain activity. But this is referring to the organism itself, in this case we'll use a human being as an example.As that occurs your cells do live on for some time which explains why corpses fingernails and hair continue to grow for about two days. Obviously the cells do need oxygen and with the host organism now unable to provide that, the cells ultimately succumb to the same fate.Now, one could obscure anything by asking philosophical questions about what constitutes life and what constitutes death and so on and so forth. For maximum clarification what needs to happen is not just one thing, or two things, or three, but several characteristics in conjunction with one another.Because as I said earlier, cells are a quick and easy way to distinguish between organic and inorganic. At the same time, it's not the sole qualifier for complex lifeforms. Because if it were, why stop at just cells? Why not reduce us to molecules or atoms and call it a day? I say it's because it does nothing to explain anything useful.A truck and a flower are both composed of tightly packed atoms. We could just leave it there and say that life and non-life are meaningless because ultimately all matter is composed of atoms. To me with this debate, noticing the similarities between things doesn't mean we have to forget about the dissimilarities.Of course I agree that on a very basic level there is a sense of life and non-life, at least on the organic side at the unicellular level, it would be very difficult if not impossible to figure out that pivotal transitional point. But there was a point, a finite point in time where that very first spark of life happened if the theory of abiogenesis is true.We say to ourselves that surely it must have happened at some point in time. There are no real answers to these kinds of questions I've come to find, or if there are they allude me. Because what seems impossible to some is hope for others. Some refuse to see something supernatural as a possibility. Some refuse to believe the panspermist doctrine that life was seeded from outer space and then life flourished on earth. Some refuse to believe that life could ever come from non-life because it defies every traditional notion.On a very fundamental level none of them have an iron clad, rock solid alibi. Neither of them have any indisputable evidence. And at some point it will ultimately fall back to the philosophical questions... none of which can be answered to the satisfaction of all. As I reflect on that grim and nihilistic outcome it sounds very sad and depressing. But I am comforted by the notion that we are actively trying to pursue the meaning of truth. Though we often reach different conclusions, that much at least seems to be universal.

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"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." Thomas Jefferson

This is a common myth. In truth the cells that grow finger nails and hair die along with the rest of the body in a matter of minutes after circulation stops. The mistake comes from the first stage of decomposition; as the body dries out the flesh shrivels and recedes exposing fingernail and hair that were below the skin.I get the point intended though, just because the heart and brain are dead does not mean that the other cells are instantly dead as well. Unfortunately this means that Bob, along with Bob's counterpart with a much faster life cycle, are considered alive by this new definition but dead by the previous. No, abiogenesis does not imply that. The research tends to indicate that there was no "spark of life" that happened, not in the form of a defined physical process. Hydrogen and oxygen combining to form water releases energy, and chemically behaves quite differently afterwards. The transition here is quite clear and easy to define. Abiogenesis is a much more complicated and gradual process, one where any dividing line that you choose to draw between unlife and life will be just that; a choice in definition.The reason this is so important is linked inextricably to the method of debate with which theists commonly criticize the field. They will stamp their feet and claim "At some point you say unliving matter turned into living matter! I say that isn't possible, it must have required magic!" The problem is, scientists cannot reasonably answer that criticism because their concept of "living" and "unliving" is fuzzy and ill-defined. The problem would be the same even were every chemical process along the way documented in great detail; the theists simply don't know and don't care to inform themselves about the particulars, they see two definitions with a transition and interpose magic between them.At the core this is an argument from incredulity, a classic logical fallacy. This is complicated by the theists arguing using terms they will not define even to themselves, lest they be shown those terms are not marking some monumental divide between the two. This behavior is the core of what religion is; not putting a name to "G-d" so they never have to examine it too closely. So it can continue to slip into the cracks in their knowledge, or provide justification for them existing in the first place.So no, I do not agree that we can dismiss the entire debate as some unsolvable philosophical question. Whether or not a glass of water is half full or half empty is a philosophical question, but science can tell you exactly how much water is in the glass. If that is unsatisfying to you, if it lacks the pomp and flair of a sharp transition... well, too bad.

The clinical approach to death is utterly useless, and irrelevant, in relation to the task at hand. Why? Because most life has neither brains not hearts and you can bet your bottom sock that the "very first life" didn't have either. What is this "spark of life" you keep talking about? Chemistry happens, more chemistry happens, still more chemistry happens - and you have life, which is still - tada - chemistry happening. There isn't a "spark of life" to appear at any point in time.Nor is there a "pivotal transitional point", but rather gradual increases in complexity of chemical systems until, blurrily, we pass the point where people start being willing to call it life, and - a few billion years late - we get birds which everyone thinks are life.

So what your saying is that because you think the concept of life is an arbitrary human conception to facilitate human communication, life therefore does not really exist?If so, then nothing exists. You don't need the concept for something in order for something to exist. I'm pretty sure planets existed independent of what humans thought about them. Perhaps it may be difficult to surmise or perhaps it is a convenient omission when wanting to support a theory that lacks credibility. No matter how you reword it the basic fact is that while what might have led up to the ability for non-life to become life, at a finite point there must have been a transition lest you think there was some prototype in limbo between living and non-living. You can't just be sort of alive and sort of non-living. But if you disagree I am open to hearing possible candidates. Yes, exactly, which is why it is difficult to believe that inorganic matter gave rise to organic matter. What was the precise little cocktail that even made this possible, because despite numerous theories it still remains a mystery. The word "know" does imply certainty. That's why we have words like "perhaps," "maybe," "possible" for things that "may" be certain. That's a reasonable and honest answer. You then can never use an internet dictionary (as if that immediately nullifies any credibility) in your life to prove a words meaning, because anyone could simply turn any word around on you and question the validity of the word. It is a fact that the word "abiogenesis" means life from non-life, that the study was endeavoring to figure out how life came from non-life. If some scientists furthered that pursuit under the name of abiogenesis, it still doesn't undermine what the root of the word means nor where it originated from. Is there a consensus within the scientific community that affirms equal agreement amongst them on a suitable definition? Or should one scientists arbitrary definition work for all uniformly? How is this vastly different from the [truncated, pop dictionary]?Here, compare:Encyclopedia.com - abiogenesis The development of living organisms from non-living matter, as in the origin of life on Earth, or in the concept of spontaneous generation which was once held to account for the origin of life but which modern understanding of evolutionary processes has rendered outdated.Dictionary.com - the now discredited theory that living organisms can arise spontaneously from inanimate matter; spontaneous generation.

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"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." Thomas Jefferson

If you really think this is what this sentence means why are you on a science debate forum?When does hot become cold? Edited by Larni, : DVD extras.

To debate.... Science.... on a forum.... Hot or cold is subjective. It's not beholden to only one opinion. Is living and non-living subjective? Because if it is then I guess all things are subjective.

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"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." Thomas Jefferson

Don't act like you don't understand the point here. The gravel in a pile of gravel and a gravel parking lot (yes, I am going back to this example) differ only in the terminology we apply to their physical arrangement. The gravel is just the same as it was before, and we simply assigned words to signify their arrangement.Saying that the distinction between a pile of gravel is arbitrary does not mean, or imply, that gravel itself has no objective existence. It simply means that the terms are arbitrary. At what point does the pile turn into a parking lot? And this is because the term is simply a label that you apply. The only reason something cannot be sort of alive and sort of non-living is because YOU DON'T LIKE IT. It is the SAME STUFF! The carbon is just the same, the oxygen is just the same, the hydrogen is just the same, it is all the same material! You don't seem to be ascribing some dramatic transition from pile to parking lot, but somehow jamming some carbon together makes you all holy in your pants. Why? If one of the first studies in an entire field is discredited does it invalidate the entire field? Does the name of the field become forever bound to that first experiment, so that other experiments need to make up their own names for the field? The entire concept is ludicrous! OR