AL (Artificial Life) and the people who love it

It's just a particularly complicated kind of chemistry, and it's more of a deep technical problem than anything else.

Every day millions of children are aborted and disposed of, their tiny neurological and immune systems forever lost to the universe. Man preoccupies himself with tinker-tots while daily disposing of healthy, fully developed systems.

"See? It takes an intelligent agent to make life!"

They are only combining existing compounds, and making a biological machine.

The only thing I am worried about is if their so called "life" is successful, will it run amok?

Tell me something, if this life made in a petri dish, never reproduces, or evolves, is it life?

Evolve can be a relative term, so you mean to tell me you haven't changed at all since you were young?

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

... 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.

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

We've been over this before, riVeRraT. We can create self-replicating, homochiral, autocatalysing molecules that evolve. Why doesn't that fit your definition?

rat writes:When I first heard of creating molecules, giving them the benifit of the doubt, and not saying they are creating something from nothing, they aren't even combining atoms to make molecules, they are only combining other molecules.

Taz writes:The point is to take one step at a time to see if life can come about through natural processes.

rat writes:They are only combining existing compounds, and making a biological machine.

molbiogirl writes:No. We start from elements. You know. The periodic chart?

molbiogirl writes: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.

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

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

rat writes:Look, they are designing life, they are not randomly putting together life.

Dr. Frank Schmidt writes: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.

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

molbiogirl writes:What might that difference be?

I would like science to answer the question, why can't matter be created or destroyed.

Biology came from cosmology, why aren't the two linked?

I don't need rrhain pretending to know where life came from...

Abiogenesis is about creating life from non-biotic reagents, not creating those non-biotic reagents in the first place.