Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life | Hacker News Reader

Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

nationalgeographic.com

205 pointsBlanketLogic139 comments

Considering that the first proto-computers were not programmable, I can't help but be skeptical that the first life needed genetic material.

Certainly there were lipid membranes. Maybe there were spontaneous proteins, maybe there was purely-catalytic RNA.

I guess it's also a matter of line drawing. I'm OK with calling crystals life, for example. One should feel bad about breaking up big ones the same as one should feel bad about killing 150 year old lobsters.

I think you've got a minority opinion calling crystals "alive," although it does jibe with one definition of life that I heard: "any self-sustaining system that reduces internal entropy."

Dawkins doesn't call crystal structures alive, but he does mention them as a potential hypothetical source for life.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160823-the-idea-that-life...

> Cairns-Smith found a more eager audience in science journalists and the popular press. Other scientists showed interest, too: the evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins discussed the crystals-as-genes hypothesis in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker.

[...]

> His aim was to find a system much simpler than modern life, but which had some of the crucial properties of a living system. He found an answer in an unlikely place: clays.

That's one place where my "What is Life?" college class landed.

While obviously crystals are not alive, they satisfy more careless definitions of life that were sometimes encountered, i.e., when put in a "nutritive" solution, they are able to grow and reproduce themselves.

I think even under that definition they don't truly reproduce and still aren't really life -- they don't create the same material they arise from for example (so not allowing for additional crystals to form). A non-renewing source of the material has a maximum amount of crystal that can grow, I would imagine. This is different than something like a virus, which carries the instructs to replicate itself and the ability to travel to new hosts to create more of itself (and still isn't really considered alive).

> A non-renewing source of the material has a maximum amount of crystal that can grow

So any biosphere that fails to escape its looming red giant was never alive?

I'm not a "all abstractions leak" type of person, so I will choose my definitions very carefully, with funny choices about clays, crystals, virus, etc. as an acceptable causality.

This is just wrong (as you say, careless). The criteria is "metabolism", not growth and reproduction. Similarly, viruses are not alive although they can reproduce. Interestingly, there are some highly parasitic organisms with limited ability to metabolize, that is, they have lost their genes and instead depend on their host organism (but I think all those examples still have some level of metabolic capability).

I don't really know what "metabolism" means, abstractly. I am deader than a virus without chloroplasts existing elsewhere. Viruses need a host for the productive bit, I had food for the non-reproductive bit. Viruses don't break down fast enough compared to their abundance to cause extinction, so why fault them for optimizing?

People commonly theorize that virus came from rump parasitic cells. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point a huge virus with a membrane accidentally picked up enough stuff to become a cell again. To go back to chloroplasts again, it would be like how brown algae is an ex-heterotroph.

Metabolism has two parts: Catabolism breaks down complex molecules into smaller building block molecules - think proteins -> amino acids. Then anabolism uses those building blocks to build up larger molecules for growth and maintenance. Crystals don't do the catabolism part.

Nah, this seems more like an implementation detail than an actual core of life's "functionality".

Looks like cell's phospholipid bilayer is anabolized just like an "endothermic" crystal : no need to cross a potential barrier (and releases energy instead of consuming it)?

On the other hand, other forms of anabolism require crossing an energy barrier (and consumes energy) ?

While catabolysm is the inverse operation : crosses a barrier, but releases energy?

The formation/destruction of "exothermic" crystals like dissolution of Sodium Hydroxide if put in contact with water is I guess similar to above two reactions ? (Or better example: explosives)

While I don't think it's a good definition for life, I do think it's a good definition for metabolism.

That simply means "metabolism" isn't the concept to generalize further, and I'm OK with that.

> People commonly theorize that virus came from rump parasitic cells.

I have an alternate theory, that I've never seen articulated elsewhere: Viruses might be inter-microbial biochemical warfare gone wild; Among primitive and not-particularly robust cells, one competitive strategy might be to package toxins or other disruptive molecules into capsids that cleverly get past the 'enemy' cell membrane, perhaps aimed simply at disrupting the initially brittle reproductive process. Packaging random genes in with these capsids would be the beginning of the Horizontal Gene Transfer function that viruses perform in the ecosystem. A refinement would be to add in the specific genes for producing capsids as a deliverable so a subverted 'enemy' then takes out several neighbors (but 2nd gen capsids don't have to necessarily contain the same genes in order to accomplish their 'mission', or even be entirely identical to the 1st gen, as long as they work). A further refinement would be increasing fidelity, and packaging the responsible genes into the 2nd gen capsids produced by subverted cells so the 'weapon' can spread exponentially.

And voila, the 'weapon' has now escaped the originating organism and can evolve independently parasitizing the target. Each incremental step can at least hypothetically provide an evolutionary advantage so the whole thing doesn't have to spring forth fully formed.

Depending on how widespread variants of the original strategy were, viruses might have independently emerged more than once.

If I'm right, we ought to still be able to find cells that attack or suppress competitors with capsid-like molecules that don't particularly resemble existing virus lineages, possibly containing non-genetic payloads of various sorts.

We might also find bacteriophage endoviruses that as their 2nd stage only produce capsids sans-genes or that otherwise aren't identical to the endovirus, or ones that aren't very good at packaging up the correct genes, or that are much better at disrupting cell reproduction than hijacking it, or that the subsequent copies are only low-fidelity ones that can similarly penetrate the host but not spread any further; basically any indicators that the mechanisms for penetration of the membrane, attacking the cell, and even for making poor 2nd gen copies, have been evolving longer than capabilities only needed for indefinitely repeated copying, retransmission, and reinfection.

I suspect though that the oldest reconstructible endoviruses will no longer be capable of penetrating current members of their host cohort, which tells us little about the virus itself, but may offer clues about whatever ancestral cells were still prone to infection were like.

Neato!

There used to be a hypothesis that DNA originated in viruses and that the three branches of life (archea, bacteria and eukaryota) evolved when three different DNA viruses encountered preexisting RNA-based cells. (https://www.pnas.org/content/103/10/3669)

Nowadays however it is more widely believed that eukaryota descend from archea, but anyway it's pretty much a given that viruses are not and have never been alive. And while the opposite has happened, gene transfer usually goes from viruses to cells, endowing them with new abilities, more than the opposite direction.

Viruses need a host environment to replicate. Fish need water and plant life or other fish to replicate. Algae needs nutrients to replicate. Every lifeform can only exist in some host environment. Viruses simply happen to have biological host environments, right?

this is certainly not the mainstream way of thinking; it's certainly not specific enough.

You're equivocating environments and hosts.

Hosts do the replication for the viruses.

Environments do NOT do the replication for the fish.

In fact, for quite a few fish they do, ditto amphibians and insects too.

Mammals are the exception here, there the environment for replication is an integral part of the body of the parent. But in all those other cases, including, technically, marsupials it isn't.

Just because it happens outside the ‘parents’ body doesn’t mean the environment does it anymore than a mother being only a filter around the womb and the environment.

An egg is a complex life that can reproduce the whole organism (and actually with energy stored INSIDE, that’s why they are great nutritios value for others)

The distinction between environment and organism here seems a little arbitrary. The organism’s cells have membranes, but they’re permeable and the organism can’t do its job without an interaction between itself and the environment. Even with the energy stored inside, it requires warmth and atmospheric pressure. I suspect there are any number of counter examples of life forms that challenge the simplicity of this formulation. You could just as easily argue that each cell is a life form unto itself, right?

Isn’t each cell a life form unto itself? Like there are cell lines from cancer cells that has been living outside their ‘host’ long after the human they were aquired from died (HeLa) They just specialize in an specific environment created and maintained by cells with the same genetic material

Single-cell organisms replicate.

Single cells of multi-cellular organisms replicate.

Shoot me in the head and all my cells will eventually stop replicating.

To a cell in my body, is the body a host or an environment? Is the distinction useful?

I would say neither. Your body is a colony, like an ant colony or bee colony. In all instances, most individuals can't start a colony of their own but it's limited to a set of queens/gametic cells.

As for shooting into the head, some multicellular life forms can actually heal from that. From planaria you can remove any part of their bodies, it will grow back. Shooting into an ant colony won't do much harm to them either, nor is removing the branch of a tree. It's only a property of animals I'd say who have given up this property (for the most part) in exchange for more complex metabolic systems. (heart, nervous system, etc)

You've not understood the depth of the original comment's thinking.

We are all just environments for ribosomes.

> obviously crystals are not alive

Very few things are obvious. Is this?

> "any self-sustaining system that reduces internal entropy."

Planet Earth would/should definitely count as alive, especially if it "reproduces" via us terraforming other planets to become like Earth.

There are plenty of conceptualizations of planet-as-organism, e.g., Gaia Hypothesis.

Ultimately, this is a semantic debate trying to apply human linguistic constructions to physical processes.

Amen! This is about as useful as debating whether Pluto is a planet.

Good plot for Rick and Morty. Wait, they already did it.

It seems nonsensical in any case to claim something that contains life among its constituent parts is not itself alive. Plenty of organisms have 'dead' tissue as part of their gestalt and no one thinks of them as 'mostly' alive.

Life isn't a constituent part of the Earth. It's a coating.

That statement is such a gross oversimplification of a tiny fraction of the whole picture.

Life permeates deep into Earth and even influences its geology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole#Resear...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum

> It seems nonsensical in any case to claim something that contains life among its constituent parts is not itself alive.

Parts of yogurt are alive. Yogurt is not alive. I have no problem with this.

By this argument houses would also count as alive because they “reproduce” via humans building more houses.

(When you feel compelled to “air quote” a key term in your argument, that’s a clue you probably don’t have a good argument.)

You know that kind of reduction isn't the same thing.

Earth+Life is a different entity than Earth on its own, or any other planet.

Earth allows and protects life, and life in turn influences Earth. That kind of symbiosis on such a scale is in a class of its own, with no other equivalent or analogy that we know of. It deserves a special classification.

My favorite version of this classifies life as an exotic phase of matter in the sense of other exotic phases like Bose-Einstein condensates, etc.

Life is a phase of matter in which the dynamics of information and Turing-complete computation overcome the ordinary dynamics of matter and energy. I am not aware of who originated this idea, but I heard it from Christoph Adami (a researcher in evolutionary information theory). I also recall someone at a conference proposing the term "Turium," for "Turing-complete phase of matter."

Earth just happens to have an environment that contains a large abundance of this phase of matter, much like how stars are full of plasma etc.

How is this model useful? It certainly moves away from our domain knowledge and paints a new picture that is considerably more fuzzy than the old one. What do you gain by considering life in such way?

Side note: computation seems like a wrong term, because it's not about counting/calculating/determining any abstract value, is it? A Turing-complete mechanism maybe?

I find the idea of it as a phase of matter very conceptually elegant in that it neatly classifies life as a unique but still physical phenomenon. Nevertheless I agree with you that the details of the definition are hard to pin down.

Of course I have yet to see an attempted definition of life that isn’t a little squirrely or that isn’t just a list of criteria taken from the one example we have.

Crystals don’t reduce their internal entropy. They grow only on the interface with the media, and the portions of the crystal that become internal during this process do not change after crystallization if kept at constant temp and pressure.

In contrast, if you put a plant and its media (soil, air, water) into constant temp and pressure, the plant will continue to grow and change until it exhausts the media. (assuming the temp and pressure are conducive to life) Ultimately plants become their own media by decomposing into soil.

If an external disturbance scatters the atoms inside the crystal, they will snap back to the lattice again. In a way similar (up to a point) to "normal" living organism's homeostasis.

How would you define genetic material? I think some kind of movement and a metabolism can already be called alive. It's not so much about the material but rather the interaction between the materials that gives rise to behavior and then natural selection.

"Genetic material" is memory. Therefore it must have the following properties:

1. It must be able to store any random sequence of symbols belonging to a certain set (e.g. any possible sequence of bases in the case of nucleic acids).

2. There must be a way to make identical copies of it (e.g. nucleic acid replication).

(the previous 2 properties are true both for its own genetic material and for a foreign virus that does not have any use for a living being)

3. There must be a way to use the stored sequence of symbols to direct some process that is useful for a living being.

(for nucleic acids, the better known useful processes are protein synthesis and the synthesis of certain kinds of useful by itself RNA, but there are also some other poorly understood functions of most of the "junk" DNA)

I'm not sure defining requirements by analogy is a valid process.

I do not understand what you have meant by "analogy".

The 3 requirements that I have listed do not contain any analogy, they just give a precise expression of the conventional meaning of the words "genetic material" as applied to a component of the living beings, now known to consist of nucleic acids for the life on Earth.

While not all biologists would be able to define precisely what they mean by "genetic material", the listed requirements correspond to the actual use of the word, in the most general sense.

The actual requirements you listed were beyond my point. You said:

> "Genetic material" is memory. Therefore it must have the following properties:

A more precise wording of my understanding of this line would be:

> "Genetic material" is loosely analogous to memory. Therefore, we can derive what properties it has in physical reality by declaring what properties memory must logically have.

This makes it clearer what I was disagreeing with, I hope.

It is pretty certain that the first life did not use any kind of genetic material, because that is impossible.

When RNA or any other kind of genetic material first appeared, the first thing that must have been possible to do with it was to copy it, a.k.a. to replicate it.

If the genetic material was used first to do anything useful, e.g. to control protein synthesis or to catalyze directly any useful reaction, that genetic material would have disappeared immediately, because it could not be replicated.

So the first genetic material must have been able of being replicated without doing any useful function, therefore is was actually an RNA virus.

The useful functions must have appeared later and then the genetic material was integrated as an essential part of the living beings, allowing a much faster evolution towards levels of complexity that would have been impossible to reach without having a genetic material.

To be able to replicate the first genetic material, there must have already existed some life forms able to exploit an energy source to reproduce themselves.

You have noticed a correct analogy, exactly like the control automaton of a CPU, which can be either hard-wired, having a dedicated structure that cannot be easily changed to perform other functions, or it can be microprogrammed, using a control memory, whose content can be easily rewritten to implement a very different CPU, a self-reproducing living being can use genetic material, in which case it can easily evolve into a different living being, or it may use no genetic material, but consist, like how it seems to be said in Gánti's work, of which I was not aware until now, by a cycle of reactions, where in each reaction some cell component assembles another cell component, until the last component, which assembles the first component.

Such a living being, without a genetic material, could not evolve easily, because almost any change would have damaged the cycle of reactions, most likely stopping the reproduction.

Regarding RNA, before the first RNA molecule was ever assembled, the existing life forms must have been using ATP and the other nucleotides as dehydrating agents able to condense smaller molecules into larger molecules, e.g. for creating peptide bonds.

Therefore ATP (with some of it current uses) is certainly older than RNA.

The polymerization of nucleotides into RNA must have been initially an undesirable side reaction consuming the useful nucleotides.

Have you seen the research of Ribosomes being quine-like? (the structural nucleic acids and genes for the protein parts are related).

I haven't seen that research but I find the idea fascinating. Where can I read more about this?

While that is an interesting fact about the evolution of ribosomes, no kind of ribosome could have ever appeared, except after the process of RNA replication was already a perfected process.

Otherwise the first ribosome would have disappeared soon after it was first assembled, without leaving any descendants.

The first ribosome was probably made only of RNA, as there were no other ribosomes to assemble the ribosomal proteins, so it is not surprising that at some point some of the ribosomal RNA segments were replaced by proteins transcripted also from some ribosomal RNA segments, if that happened to improve the ribosome structure.

Many statements made with certainty about an era about which we know absolutely nothing for sure.

While there are many things that we do not know about that era, there are also many other things about which we are completely sure.

For example we know for sure that all the chemical reactions required to assemble the components of a living being required the same amount of energy then as they require now, so either there was a source of energy large enough to enable them, or they were impossible.

Other things may not be completely certain, but they are overwhelmingly plausible, for example if we know that the transition from a more primitive structure to a more complex structure required 5 improbable mutations, we can be pretty sure that there is no chance that all those changes happened simultaneously, but they must have happened in a certain sequence, one by one.

If moreover, there are some causal links between those events, so that some of them cannot happen unless others already happened, then we may be able to determine which was the sequence of those 5 events, with considerable certainty.

While we are unable yet to estimate confidently which of many possible things really happened in the distant past, we can actually exclude with great certainty many other things, about which we can say for sure that they did not happen, because they contradict fundamental laws, like the conservation of energy.

Among these things that certainly did not happen are some previously popular theories about the origin of life, whose authors did not attempt to analyze them in enough detail to see if they are compatible with the known chemistry and physics, e.g. the ancient theory of the "organic soup" or the more recent theory of the "RNA world".

It's good to make bold statements, because if anything it enables clear and convincing counter-arguments to show up.

Couldn’t one take the view point that the formation of a transient ribosome could have created the conditions to solve replication?

This route would be much more of a dance than what you’ve implied. A transient ribosome makes a protein-based RNA replicase, replicase copies all local the RNAs including the RNA ribosomes. This process would eventually result in a large number of ribosome RNAs and replicase proteins without the need to have a “perfected process” prior to either step.

The whole process would be much messier than what we see today after millions of years of refinement, of course. The stability of an arbitrary RNA polymer is also increased by the presumed lack of RNases as well.

It has been a few years since I took a grad course covering the ribosome, so excuse my lack of currentness if new research has discounted this.

I think it's likely that the first life like our kind was only composed of genetic material.

RNA and DNA are prone to replicating themselves (with many errors and not efficiently) in a wide variety of situations. It's way more likely that evolution selected those molecules for efficiency than that some complex life appeared without some transferable data storage.

No they are not able to replicate themselves, in any circumstances.

Obviously, any RNA or DNA molecule can serve as a template for the polymerization of another nucleic acid molecule.

However the polymerization cannot proceed spontaneously. The nucleotides polymerize by condensation, i.e. by releasing water.

It should be obvious that such a reaction cannot be spontaneous when the molecules are already surrounded by water. You need some molecule able to extract the water from the nucleotides, for example an acid anhydride, like ATP.

That anhydride must have also been produced by water extraction and in the water environment you need an energy source for that.

So if you will complete the analysis you will reach the conclusion that you need an existing living being for the replication, no replication can occur otherwise.

Obviously, in a lab you can yourself substitute the role of that living being, by providing adequate supplies of monomers and of energy sources, so you can replicate nucleic acids in abiotic conditions. Nevertheless, that could not happen in natural conditions.

You seem to want life to appear in a likely condition, without some external power source.

Whatever condition there was, it could as well be some extremely rare one, and I really can't imagine how some molecules could start to reproduce without their environment being constantly changed by some external energy flux.

Besides, I'm no expert, but I don't think there were huge amounts of pure water running around on the early Earth. There were so much more stuff to use those hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and Earth's water wasn't all here since the beginning.

The crystal thing is throwing me (a geologist) off. Basically all Earth materials are crystalline. So rocks are alive (colonial organisms I guess since they are aggregates of crystalline minerals) but the magma that they crystallize from is not alive? Or is magma alive too? What about obsidian, which is glass but compositionally identical to a crystalline igneous rock. No crystals! The Earth's crust and mantle: Crystalline. Alive. The Earth's outer core: liquid iron and nickel. Non-living. The inner core: crystalline iron and nickel. Alive.

Crystallization is reversible in a thermodynamic sense. You take some granite, melt it, and then cool it (slowly, under pressure), and you have granite again. Is this a phoenix/Jesus-like life and death cycle? Or does life only change forms?

I agree with you generally that 'life' may be gradational. However I think calling crystals 'life' actually removes any meaning whatsoever from the term. If the line isn't somewhere in the neighborhood of viruses and prions then it kinda has to expand to include anything made of matter (and then energy etc.).

While we don't (and don't have to) have a precise definition of 'life', the 'life' gradation needs to branch like a Bezier curve off the x axis at some point for it to be a functional term.

Is key word "alive" or is it "conscious"? Or at least "sentient"?

Crystals are mostly not sentient, except for quartz. The high prevalence of quartz in the Earth's crust can be explained by the anthropic principle.

As the ancients knew: All facts require an observer so life is what can be convincingly be identified as life by a human being.

Playing devil's advocate: "crystalline" in bulk is different from "a crystal". I think the idea is that individual crystals are "alive" in that sense, and the bulk is maybe a colonial organism. Maybe quartz crystals forming in a chunk of what will soon be granite are only "alive" in the brief period where they are still growing. When the rock solidifies, the crystal "starves" and "dies", leaving only a corpse. Melting and refreezing granite would basically be composting, using formerly alive material to foster new life.

On a similar note, a dead human is "compositionally identical" to a living one, at least for a little while, so I think that's entirely a red herring. :)

Interesting parallel, after all crystals release energy in the form of heat while forming!

Edit : forgot about crystals that absorb energy while forming:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25516072

> the 'life' gradation needs to branch like a Bezier curve off the x axis at some point for it to be a functional term.

What do you mean? Bezier curves are 2d parametric curves, the x and y axes are completely arbitrary...

I am not sure we have colonized the minerals, but I am pretty sure we have been relying on fossil fuels as so-called "energy slaves."

Isn’t the question of just-what-is-life-anyway more of a worry for linguists and philosophers rather than scientists?

“Life” as it were, is a concept invented with either the intention of distinguishing “us” from the rocks around ourselves, or, if you’re being slightly less charitable, giving “us” a way to insult the, um, others.

Sure, drawing some line in the sand between mice and boulders is a great idea, but it’s a pretty arbitrary one, especially if you have to strap a bunch of historical baggage on it.

This grand debate is almost as fun as what-constitutes-a-planet. We should do that one again.

This seems like just another way of saying we don’t understand life scientifically yet.

When we do finally agree on a mathematically rigorous definition of life, it will seem obvious in retrospect and scientists will kick philosophers off the field, just like they did with previous subjects like the composition of matter, the movement of heavenly bodies, etc.

Every scientific topic has to go through a messy definition phase before its study can be properly organized. People studied heat and cold for a long time before they really knew what they were, for example.

Both geocentrism with epicycles and phlogiston were clearly defined as theories. We have just changed paradigms.

(Also by phlogiston's time, philosophers and natural philosophers = physicists had already pretty much split.)

Each scientific paradigm works better when boundaries are clear and scientists don't misunderstand each other.

Hence the current astrophysical paradigm where we now have planets and dwarf planets (which aren't planets).

I wrote a paper to prove something like this is possible, here's a video and paper link in the description

https://youtu.be/UVyTu3o2A9U

Has anyone seen a visual tree of life that starts before life on earth?

Or in other words, say at some point we discover aliens in a distance galaxy. Would we be cousins? Are there visualizations that show what that kind of family tree would look like?

I am a neophyte in this area but I'm sure there's a lot of good research out there.

Without seeing what's out there I don't think any such trees would make sense to draw. There's too many possible ones, and the branches would just be "?". We could be cousins of several sorts, convergently evolved to have some similarities, be completely unrelated in any way to other life, or any of several combinations of those.

And that's just the broad strokes, trees would be the details.

It's worth noting also that even only considering life on Earth that we already know about, the "tree of life" is already kind of a broken abstraction. Consider bacteria that are able to share genetic material without an ancestor relationship for instance, or closer to home even viruses that infect humans or any other kind of mammals. They affect our genetics in ways the tree doesn't/can't capture.

It’s true, in a way the tree of life runs in the opposite direction.

“Panspermia” is the keyword to get you started.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

Bingo!

But isn't there a major flaw here? If you require all 3 components (proteins, RNA, and lipid bilayers) as what classifies "life", then what necessarily created _those_ components? Aren't only basic compounds and elements the only thing naturally occuring in the universe? So where did the amino acids and fats come from? It's back to the chicken or the egg problem.

The common theory is of the RNA world. In theory, if the entire organism is just a long RNA strand, there is no need for proteins or lipid bilayers. How such an organism emerged in the first place is already quite hard to know.

Actually lipid bilayers are extremely complicated as they have to filter what gets into the cell and what doesn't, as well as what might leave it. Earlier systems might have done without them and instead attached everything onto long chain like structures... You know like a keychain. Both RNA and Proteins are long chains so maybe that's how they evolved.

The article points out that it's not clear whether RNA-only can work, and that all 3 components might have been required.

All of these components can form through nonbiological means. For example, amino acids[0] and nucleobases[2] can be found in interstellar gas clouds.[0] Lipid membranes form simply because of their polar properties.[1]

[0] https://physicsworld.com/a/amino-acid-detected-in-space/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9928/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12404-1

oh wow, i didn't realize this. i had figured that these structures would be forbidden on an energy based standing. clearly not the case!

You can watch about this "membranes" concept in Netflix's "Photon" documentary.

This template replication reminds me of von neumann cellular automata:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_cellular_automat...

Can I get a ELI5 version of this theory?

dunno about LI5 but wikipedia's summary:

> According to the chemoton model, life should basically, but of necessity, have an autocatalytic subsystem consisting of metabolism and a replication process, and a membrane enclosing these functions.

also

>A single chemical reaction is said to be autocatalytic if one of the reaction products is also a catalyst for the same or a coupled reaction

Probably because news articles don't use his name in their headlines

Still laughing. Thanks!

Looks like the title was changed to add it.

I was also going to point out the irony that the news article cares more about the man rather than the discovery of the origins of life.

The headline oversells what this guy actually did and was probably penned by an editor interested in views and not the author. The HN admins seem to have agreed with me that the headline is bad and came up with their own much more accurate one.

> many biological molecules can be constructed from just six simple molecules, including water, methane...

There is no news here. This is just the same speculation that has been made thousands of times before for decades. Of course we can make big molecules from small ones in a lab. Of course life has to reproduce, metabolize and have a boundary from the environment. Pointing this out is not "the key to the origins of life". It is still an interesting topic, but why cant national geographic discuss these things honestly?

> and have a boundary from the environment

This is not self evident. Maybe this is the news?

I am not sure, what are you saying?

Not the person you're replying to, but: That the processes inside the boundary and those outside the boundary only interact through relatively narrow-bandwidth channels across that boundary, and that it maintains the high level of internal organization, the boundary, and the input/output channels through self-sustaining internal processes.

The fact that bacteria and archea have a chemically different cell membrane strongly suggest that it evolved twice, and therefore their original ancestor didn't have one at all.

Its part of the standard definition of life:

> organisms are open systems that maintain homeostasis, are composed of cells...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life

Cell by definition have a boundary called the cell membrane.

>Cells consist of cytoplasm enclosed within a membrane...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(biology)

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The NG doesn't pretend that it's news?

And of course that this is the key to the origins of life - how could we possibly make progress on this question without understanding this first?

And someone had to be the first to point this out. Which Tibor Gánti did in 1971 & 1974.

Understanding what? The basic functions of a cell have been understood since much longer ago than 1971.

>Some consider this model a significant contribution to origin of life as it provides a philosophy of evolutionary units.[4]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoton

Read the wiki. Its just describing what a cell is and putting the word "abstract" in front of everything. It makes no prediction, it produced no results. Evidently not everyone considers it a significant contribution.

If someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.

It would certainly be called reverse engineering.

I don't think so.

Primitive proto-life has little moral value, just as vegans eat plants, hypothetical super-vegans only eat blue-green bacteria, and hypothetical hyper-vegans have a 500 year deadline to be electrically powered.

I don't believe in a hard barrier between life and non life, so any discrete moral function would be non-computable, and therefore I reject it outright.

hypothetical hyper-vegans must always bootstrap from source, because vendored binaries that exceed the size of small small genomes is heterotrophy.

>I don't think so [...] and therefore I reject it outright

That's not a problem. There can be insane theological and ethical consequences for everyone else.

Not really. They'll just say a chemistry experiment isnt life.

Once the "chemical experiment" escapes its petri-dish and replicates in the laboratory's drain, taking over whole beach resorts and a third of the Pacific ocean, people will rethink!

I think it's pretty optimistic (? or pessimistic) to assume that the "chemical experiment" would have a chance in hell against the bacterial super-predators that have spent billions of years evolving to adapt to this environment.

I don't think there will be any consequences of importance, for a different, simple reason: people generally resist changing their worldview and will do mental gymnastics to preserve it.

Exactly.

Not really the same thing, but if alien life was found on Europe or Enceladus, religions would resist to change their theologies.

That's an argument I think is valid for a possible lack of consequences of importance.

Unlike thinking there won't be consequences of importance because of a belief that < 1% of humanity even thought of maybe possibly having

I don't believe in hard barrier between life and non life but interestingly the barrier between human and non human animal are seemingly very discrete.

Considering the radical diversity in the spectrum of human cognitive capabilities, I'm not so sure it's a discrete transition from non-human to human.

What is a human?

Along with gender, being human is a socially defined concept.

It might even be defined by social criteria, quite literally. Yet, Homo economicos is not the only social animal and not the only one with a social conscious either.

Actually, I think you want to talk about humanity as a whole, as an organism to draw a clear distinction, because the level of controlled organization is unparalleled.

In that sense I can agree with your sentiment, because I am not sure how much man's success is really controled and not just the result of sheer luck, despite horrible accidents and individual failure.

On another note, this isn't your websearch box. I went on to write an essay because I tried to take the question serious. This became invariably self centered and thus potentially dehumanizing to everyone else, trying to reclaim the terminus because failing to find an interesting definition which would rest on intricate topics in current research and traditional philosophy, I felt rather insecure, dumb and worried if a strong definition of humanhood would eventually exclude myself, whereas too weak a definition would have barely any utility to anyone. It is quite poetic, here's the climax:

"The collective memory greatly expands that capacify, so it can remain out of the question if an individual ape has a low mental capacity, if you won't ever find enough monkeys assembled around a typewriter as you can find humans in the market place trying to dictate the value of life."

To double down on that, let's say the appropriate question goes who is.... Whereas what rather goes along as relative pronoun to denote possession. What has a human, well, a typical human has many humans around them, above and below. Whereas a single human is practically dead, if not conserved in living memory.

Next up: Human rights for Artifical General intelligence and bionic hind brains for poor hackernews commentators, where to draw the line.

"Along with gender, being human is a socially defined concept"

This is priceless))

As much as I agree with the general spirit of your reply, I think there is some merit to think of posterboy.human() being a socially defined concept.

It's recently became a loaded term (much like gender) due to people in general using the term like that. See expressions like "humane" or "transhuman".

I would prefer if they used some other word instead of overloading the method, but oh well.

Maybe by 'human' they just meant 'sapient'?

Are they? Some primates have better working memory than we do, for example. Of course we would never confuse another species for a human, but I also think we would not confuse a domestic house cat for anything else despite them coming in many shapes, sizes and colors, so I assume you mean something more profound than just that we look visually different.

>Of course we would never confuse another species for a human

Yes, this is what I mean. There is seemingly no organism/species that I would confuse whether to classify it as human or not human but I'm pretty sure there are species/organism albeit is rare that I would be in hard time categorizing it as cat or not cat.

Another example is human male and human female, albeit is rare but there is some human population that I would have a hard time deciding which category to put.

It is highly likely that there once were intermediate species. When examined in sufficient detail, the line between ancestor and descendant species blurs.

Even if you might confuse a domestic house cat for some other creature, I'm pretty sure another domestic house cat would not, which is the relevant point of comparison here :)

That's why we should go clone some neanderthals.

Ideally we should clone enough to see if we can connect us and bonobos in a species complex (no hard boundaries of infertility).

I'm salivating over all the ethical choas that this would cause.

I don't think so either. We will likely be able to create something that self-replicates under similar circumtances what we think were in the primordial soup. And we will call this thing (or after some more research things) as possible first evolution steps.

What do you think the ethical consequences will be? Genuinely curious, because I don't really see what they would be, or why there would be any. At least not compared to something like e.g. creating an actual artificial intelligence, and then needing to decide if it has rights, and what kind and so on. Creating a novel type of microorganism out of non-living components doesn't really seem to come with the same kind of can of worms, but maybe I'm overlooking something?

Well, for those whose ethics are founded on their religious beliefs and whose religious beliefs are dependent on the premise that only God can create life, then there might be some adjustment to be made - but people are very good at dealing with inconvenient facts in ways both rational and irrational.

I think goal posts will rightly move towards creating a universe. I guess agnostics have already ”given up” with the thought that a creator was needed for biological life. A creator for a universe is a greater question.

I think that goal post has already been moved. Big bang theory created a perfect point to separate god the natural world.

As a Christian that has read the Bible probably a dozen times, I know of nothing in the book that says only God can create life.

Can you point me to a spot where it says that?

It depends. For me it would be incredibly interesting.

If we take that life plausibly "started" as as one single-celled individual who then "reproduced" through cell division (let's call him Luca), then he's effectively never died - in the same way that we consider ourselves to have not died despite regularly cycling tissues and cells.

All life as we know it, if viewed like that, is one organism whose chain of cell division has never been broken as he's grown over billions of years. Variation between those cells (kingdoms, species, plant / animal etc) become like skin, hair and brain / liver cells within the human body.

It would be like taking a runner grass or banana tree and trying to draw a line around true individuals.

If we created life outside of that unbroken chain of cell division, we would have created something which is definitely "other than Luca" and that feels philosophically significant.

> If we take that life plausibly "started" as as one single-celled individual

That's quite an assumption. I think there were 42 original proto-organisms spread over all the aeons. Creating a 43rd artificially is not a big deal.

Definitely. If I'm mistaken and we can point to an organism living right now which isn't directly related to / descendant from the Last Universal Common Ancestor then we're already dealing with multiple "individuals", and having another indeed would be no big deal.

Otherwise, I still think that it would be.

To clarify, though: I'm not at all against the creation of another individual.

Not much different than previous big discoveries that make us as human less special than we once thought.

But we already do know how, through means of reproduction, and that on it's own already has millions of philosophical, ethical, and theological debates

Every time we do genetic engineering, we're creating life. And the consequences have not been insane. We just accept and move on.

Theology is not based on facts. It's based on faith.

So no major consequences.

There are no consequences. We are already eating fish and chicken, which are pretty alive by any definition.

All lives are seeded. The bible is real. The moon is hollow

The Earth is a triangle.

Related to this; Check out the book The Revolutionary Phenotype.

"The Revolutionary Phenotype is a science book that brings us four billion years into the past, when the first living molecules showed up on Planet Earth. Unlike what was previously thought, we learn that DNA-based life did not emerge from random events in a primordial soup. Indeed, the first molecules of DNA were fabricated by a previous life form. By describing the fascinating events referred to as Phenotypic Revolutions, this book provides a dire warning to humanity: if humans continue to play with their own genes, we will be the next life form to fall to our own creation. "I am VERY impressed with this book—very important topic very well treated." - Robert Trivers"

https://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Phenotype-amazing-story...

fyi: I'm not the author

Thanks , purchased

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