Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamander (2019)
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/14428...
youtube-dl https://youtu.be/SEejivHRIbEI dealt with the page for as long as I could, scrolled, saw no video and came back here for someone to surely give the direct link. I think someone has trained me, but for what purpose I am not sure.
I had already disabled adblocker at the time, and was even using other browsers. Turned out i also had DNS[0] ad blockers I forgot about.
This story always make me think the kinda of experience we are building for our own families and children online. sigh.
And yet there it is, and what's more the finished product comes fully loaded with all sorts of instinct about the physical world, plus an ability to learn as it goes that our AI can't hold a candle to.
And that's just the Salamander version. Feed in a different strip of ticker tape and now you're looking at your very self emerge.
It's utterly unnerving to behold.
One of the best arguments that there is no God is exactly that beauty and complexity. It's only complex in a certain type of way, an evolutionary type of way.
No animal has jet boots, or fusion power, or laser beam eyes, or the billions of really useful, but impossible/really, really hard to evolve features. There's no design. There's no plan. There's only evolution baby!
You'll have to make do with some generalizations though, trying to go into the detail of every single thing is probably beyond what can be read in a single human's life time now.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is pretty good start, or Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins, which is a book about how science makes nature even more beautiful by explaining it, not less.
It doesn’t matter whether I’m atheist or not, but to state that you can fully explain - well - any process of the universe is simply naive. There are areas we know many things about, but biology itself has an enormous amount of accidental complexity, (which is often brought up by atheists as a criticism of design) for example many many signal path ways that do fundamentally the same thing, but differently. Compared to that, spaghetti codes have good architecture.
Whether God exists or not is imo orthogonal to the complexity of the world around us.
No, starting from beetle eggs does not count. They point is no one knows how to start from the inert chemicals that make up a beetle and cause them to assemble into a living beetle. More generally, abiogenesis has not been cracked.
We do, however, know pretty much roughly how a beetle grows, how cells and DNA work, cell division, hell, even atoms, and their constituents. Even if we can't replicate it 100% yet.
Is your God one of hundreds of thousands that have been forgotten? Or do you just happen to follow one of the modern trendy ones? Is it Thor? Athena? Xerxes? Why is yours so special compared to the 99,999 that have been discarded?
There have been succesfull experiments with xeno-pregnancies aka interspecific pregnancy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_pregnancy#:~:tex....
With current technology, we very much do indeed experiment with DNA of animals.
As for making DNA from raw materials, that is what DNA printers to. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gene_synthesis
Second, have you ever heard of this thing called philosophy? It is not useless to think about the word in an abstract way - without necessary relevance to the physical world. Like, what IS math?
By the way, I do not approve of those believer that go against science, since I think belief and actual reality can go hand-in-hand, and even with God, or perhaps because of Him, one can appreciate the beauty of sciences.
I'll respect you, not your beliefs.
>what IS math?
Relations between proportions. There's no magic.
Also, Science never can't go side by side with superstition. Ever.
Math is not that easy. How does something like eg. Group Theory fits into this “definition”? And yet, it is useful to the real world.
Superstition is not religion.
I usually try avoid religious debates on HN though.
And sure, I get your overall point. I was Christian until age 26. I worked two years as a missionary in a foreign country, 90hr weeks, no pay, for my Christian beliefs. What "God" meant to everyone I encountered throughout that time, before, and after, is/was always a bit different. Ultimately we create our own personal God, and what that means can be compatible with honest and rigorous scientific inquiry. But you have to throw out large portions of the bible and accept that it's largely a work of art and useful fiction, and I will place $1000 down on a bet that the vast majority of "Christians" would bristle at such ideas.
But yeah, best to stay away from discussions of religion with anyone except your closest friends. Even then it's usually ill advised unless you have hours to sift through the nuance and are very good communicators.
"Believe" is absolutely the right word; most of us don't have the time, inclination, or ability to perform the scientific method required to demonstrate evolution, big bang, or old earth. Outside of a very small number of people, the overwhelming majority of us are taking it on faith that these theories are correct.
We all are able to take that little step inside our consciousness, trusting our innermost ancestral intuition and logic... to be grateful and humble in front of whatever is behind this universe.
I've read some books on evolution, many about philosophy and religion, and I find it all fascinating, but I didn't completely escape that feeling that it's not enough...
But, instead of saying "these explanations aren't satisfying, there must be a god behind these misteries", my position is "these beautiful explanations aren't completely satisfying, I'm left with some uncomfortable questions, and that's just part of being a human being".
I've been a devout catholic, I've been a kinda-skeptical non-denominational christian, I've been a staunch atheist and a buddhist-leaning agnostic... and I've never felt that I could find perfect answers. Some uncomfortable questioning will always be there, and it's better to try to make your peace with it before trying to solve it.
Trying to solve it is also fine, but not the complete answer.
Everything else is babblery and charlatanery.
I agree that explaining what we don’t know with God is, well.. not explaining it. But if the said believer is not blinded by the charlatany branch of his/her religion (in case of Christianity there are many such, and many are absolutely fine with sciences), then I don’t see no evil. For some people it is calming to know that their loved ones “can’t” inexplicably die in every moment in an accident, that perhaps someone is watching over them - and many other, fundamental human innate cravings that want a God. (Which of course begs the question of isn’t God just a projection)
Yet that clause won't make any religion correct.
>For some people it is calming to know that their loved ones “can’t” inexplicably die in every moment.
Same issue. Life is neither fair or unfair, it just is. There's no good or back luck per se, just events ongoing.
It sucks, I know, but thanks to science and trying to understand how the Universe works, we invented the seat belt, for example. Or automatic braking systems for car. And yet, no magic or praying involved. Just lots of hard work. You can stay quiet and do nothing, or you can have a better understanding of your surrondings to avoid the less accidents, the better.
Also, many scientists were/is religious, so let it be a personal choice, up until it doesn’t hurt others.
That's a fallacy, that won't make a religion real. Neither a paper. Just proofs and replication.
Also, nitpick but it would be absurd to call ‘religion’ not real. Like, one of the most fundamental organizations in the previous centuries is something I would not call non-existent. Whether God exists or not is a different, philosophical question - and to a degree it is similar to the how did life start on Earth question, with hypotheses that can’t necessarily be verified.
How does that logically follow? To me that is clearly just a projection of the human concept of a "creator", a person who makes things (like a house, a fire, or a website), onto the universe. I see no reason to project my human experiences and ideas onto something as vast as the universe. Whatever is "out there" or "beyond" is by definition something that far exceeds our comprehension, our human concepts. If you want to call that "god", so be it, but I don't see how that's anything more than just a placeholder for something we can't reach.
We can, on the other hand, gradually understand more and more of the laws and properties of the universe itself, and how those work together to create the phenomena we find in the universe. All those gaps in the subset of phenomena that we can observe, I am confident that we are at least theoretically capable of understanding.
As an aside, we can't communicate very well with the smartest animals, so we don't know how much they can understand. It could be more than most of us think.
I conclude that God is the origin of everything. this is something you can't prove or disprove with Science. Some might argue it's not worth thinking about, but it comes down to the individual whether they want to think about it or not.
If God is a 'being', an entity, it can be more than one, and has to have it's own origin story.
But man, our universe sure is weird. On a fundamental level. I think people under-model just how strange our universe is. Even things like Pi. Why does Pi equal Pi? What an unlikely number to define something fundamental about the universe itself. Or take the logistic map [0]. I mean, what? Why is our universe this way? Or Euler's Identity (e^(pi*i) = -1). Why e? Why pi? I get that the math works, why does the universe need those values for the math to work?
Pi is just the ratio between the diameter and all the points to the same distance from another point, in base 10.
As simple as it gets. Circle = infinite points, thus Pi = infinite decimals.
There's no magic.
Well, it has to be equal to something, right?
Why would it be the case? 1+1=3 because God exists? And thus your conclusion is false.
Those can explain how life evolves once it already exists. And there's no argument about that, we know many laws governing those processes, from molecular to population-scale models.
However, nobody was able to show that life can emerge from non-living matter.
4.5B years of evolution vs silicon monkeys pretending to be gods
You may think humans are more amazing than salamanders, but no other species agrees with you.
I really wonder, too - does a dog care as much about a salamander as a human? How about a crow? Do crows think we're interesting at all? It's impossible to say.
Ultimately you're right though, we're just creatures trying to survive in various ways. Humans have very sophisticated ways of doing it, but they aren't inherently more amazing outside of the human lens.
I'd suggest as individuals of our species, we're not much more interesting than ribosomes -- one could say that ribosomes execute all the stuff in the salamander video (hey, they print the DNA into proteins).
Humans are maybe just biological machinery in the organism of culture, like ribosomes are the molecular machinery in the organism of biology. Culture does all those amazing things, and humans just skim along the unfathomably long and multi-dimensional ticker tape of language/culture :)
Just my 2c, of course, and the way I stay humble about humanity
You would say it's not humans, but human culture that is causing global extinction event?
Well, okay.
In any case, you may find the book 'Sapiens' interesting. It argues that the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life is our ability to abstract and conceptualize.
Respectfully, it doesn't feel like splitting hairs to me... but quite a significant frame-shift. (Defensive credentializing: I'm a former biochemist and now technologist and event facilitator, with a fascination for the always-evolving fields of social physics & complexity science.)
I'm increasingly a believer in something called the Leiden Theory of Language, or Symbiosism: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316665359_Symbiosis...
This theory proposes that language is a separate strata of organism/information that co-evolved with the host biology of the human mind. i.e. We're unique not because we're simply "the smartest biology", but rather, we're more like a cyborg of two organisms, one biological and one semiotic. As a assemblage, we have vastly overrepresented dominance of the semiotic organism compared to other creatures who host very primitive semiotic organisms.
In this frame, humans can be conceptualized as individuals, but alternatively as simply hosts to the mind, which functions as the replication machinery of the larger social organism that takes shape between minds in the strata above (organizations, nations, culture).
I'm still chewing on all this stuff, mind you :) And thank you for the recommendation -- I really need to pick up that book!
Cat's and dogs abstract and conceptualise. So do crows and whales. But more than that, before you get too carried away with the importance of this "fundamental change", consider the possibility that the ability to "abstract and conceptualise" doesn't yield a "fundamental change" at all.
How can that be?
Consider the ends to which all this abstract thought is being applied.
Why do humans spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours buying and applying makeup to their faces?
Why do humans spend thousands of hours in the studio creating the latest dance music hits?
Why do humans buy the biggest, fastest cars?
Why do humans spend weeks comparing and assessing home insulation materials from multiple vendors?
Why do humans spend thousands of years developing steel making traditions that result in the finest weaponry?
Why do humans use google maps navigation?
Are humans, with all their advanced skills at abstraction and conceptualisation, and vocabulary and communication sophistication, doing anything that birds and bees and whales and cows aren't already doing?
All us animals are just waking up every day, checking on the kids, going to work, getting hungry, fixing lunch, getting horny, feeling frustrated, lashing out, seeking to impress, preening our feathers, and, from time to time, thanking our lucky stars.
What else can we do? Technology doesn't change that. It just gives us different ways to do the same things we and other animals have been doing since the dawn of life on earth.
I like your questions.
I'm not disagreeing (unsure myself), but this talk of what "the fundamental" is, it makes me want to share about another hypothesis: that the mind's ability to operate via "recursion" is the feature from which a bunch of other things emerged. A good book that lays the case, still reading, but very thought-provoking: https://www.amazon.ca/Recursive-Mind-Origins-Language-Civili...
So if that's true, it's less about there being some fundamental core difference between us and animals. I think I agree that the same underlying drives motivate. I understand that the core drive of all life (below the particulars of our biological strata) are perhaps seeking the right alchemical mix of (1) entropy/micro-diversity and (2) cycles/periodicity and (3) compartmentalization [1]. These drive information-creation about the environment -- mapping information of the environment into the structures "trying" to buffer themselves from change in a chaotic environment. But "trying" is anthropomorphizing (and applying false agency), and in essence, this simply allows a structure of any scale or medium to "persist" better into the next tick of the engine ;) And a structure that persists tends to have information about the environment (and the environment's future) encoded within itself. This encoding in persistent structures is what we tend to read as free-will and agency.
But anyhow, in a round-about way, I'm just proposing that perhaps "recursion" was the "new innovation" that biology of human mind stumbled upon, that really expanded the capacity to persist. And language, which not a result of new drives, fell out of that new ability of minds :)
[1]: https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/j.cocis.2007.08.008
ps, sorry for rant, i get excited about this stuff! sorry if overload, and apologies for not citing the web of readings that led me here. Happy to linkshare, if you're interested, as I certainly have sources and go back to them often! e.g., [2] [3] :)
[2]: https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ [3]: https://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime
I agree about recursion. When I first heard about it in CS101 a lightbulb lit up. It's an elegant computational mechanism to resolve complexity, given enough stack space.
When I later heard the theory that the human neocortex is so large so as to accomodate data structures to manage social contexts of communities of 150 people, it made more sense.
Our social reckoning depends on knowing or anticipating or game theorising what other people are thinking, so as to be able to assess group dynamics. But these assessments are contingent. A might support us, but only if she doesn't know what happened with B, which only C knows about, and I trust C. But I'm not sure where D stands in all of this, and I haven't seen E for a while, but she has a connection to both C and A.
Your last paragraph describes exactly what motivates me to work on an open source platform called https://pol.is/home . Or rather, the loss of the ability to navigate those dynamics in high-volume, low-empathy digital spaces we've created, that's what motivates. The platform is big in Taiwan, and is being used to crowdsource national legislation. It allows the opinion landscape of thousands to be made legible in aggregate to all participants so that everyone can build the nuanced and deep stories around complex issues, instead of collapsing into emotional tribalism. We lose all that good stuff in online spaces, that our wetwares gives us for free in meatspace :)
Anyhow, take care, fellow traveller
Are you sure that has happened?
Do humans dominate insects, fungi, and bacteria?
Do humans dominate the biomass of Earth?
If you limited the scope of your remark to mammals, fish, reptile and birds, I would understand what you are saying. Humans have excelled at habitat destruction. Still, I would point out that the "domination" of which you speak is less than 300 years in duration, with no certainty to last beyond 500 years.
Yes, we do.
https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/when-it-comes-to-climat...
https://nautil.us/issue/95/escape/we-crush-poison-and-destro...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2021/01/we-havent...
>Do humans dominate the biomass of Earth?
Yes, we do. https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 "the total plant biomass (and, by proxy, the total biomass on Earth) has declined approximately twofold relative to its value before the start of human civilization. "
>Still, I would point out that the "domination" of which you speak is less than 300 years in duration, with no certainty to last beyond 500 years.
The Cambrian explosion happened 500 million years ago. Photosynthesis is projected to last another 600. We've used all easily available complex elements, and extracted much more. It will all oxidize once were are gone, and it will not regenerate in this time period. Even if we are gone, our impact and legacy will outlive us, likely ensuring we are the last advanced civilization this world will produce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#:~:text=Howeve....
We dominate. Arguments to the contrary seem to be an attempt to avoid responsibility.
Avoid responsibility? For what?
I understand what you are feeling when you contemplate the wonder of humankind's technological achievements, which, by some measures, necessarily narrow, far surpass the capabilities of any other species. It's worth reflecting on this feeling, which comes reflexively to anyone who is presented with the intellectual challenge that you answered with your complete response above.
When Darwin first published his theory of evolution, he got a lot of pushback from people because of this exact feeling.
19th century British humans resented being "relegated" to the relations of apes. They scorned Darwin for saying it.
Why?
I personally think humans are largely pro-social, and this reflex is partially an extension of the human tendency to innately cheer for humanity. It seems literally in our nature to promote ourselves in this way.
At the end of the day, I’m largely vegetarian (I eat some fish) because rationally I know that I can’t really differentiate my human experience from that of a cow or chicken, and I’d rather not risk that killing and eating a cow would be no different from a cow killing and eating me. Space exploration isn’t enough for me to justify killing an animal that’s ultimately not much different from me.
Perhaps somehow we could learn that that’s ridiculous and all animals are basically robots and humans are the only conscience on the universe. Until then I’d rather assume some cow out there is wondering about humans and wondering why we aren’t as clever as they are.
Just wondering ;-)
My intuition is that most animals can’t or don’t distinguish much in what life they feed on and so if they eat humans, it’s simply according to nature and not problematic in the least.
I agree with the second part of your statement, and also much of the first part, sort of... but what I'm about to write may at first glance sound like a snarky gotcha. That's not my intention at all. It is an informed, educated view, and I don't like it any more than you might, because it bursts an illusion, at least for now.
Firstly, I think animals can distinguish what they eat in a very sophisticated way. At least as sophisticated as humans. Animals, after all, feed themselves with their own energy, guile and knowledge. They don't rely on supermarkets like many humans do, so they know exactly what is going on.
I am mostly vegan, because I prefer vegan food. When I eat animals on occasion, I do it in the same spirit you described in your consideration of animals who kill humans and other animals for food. It is part of nature, and I can embrace that.
You also said this is "a choice". Ethically, morally, spiritually, and out of shared interest, I can agree with you. However, I learned something recently from a radio show that followed a group of people who set up on virgin land, trying to be self-sufficient. What they found is important for our discussion.
It isn't possible for everyone who wants to live self-sufficiently to grow enough protein to survive. The soil in most places, and the climate won't support it. In order to live as a pure vegan, we need supermarkets and globalism, or at the very least, food transit on a global scale. Those giant South American soy plantations are built on destroyed forest habitat. :-(
The people in the radio documentary had to grow animals in order to obtain protein to survive. When they ate those animals, they did it with profound respect and understanding for the value of life, having raised the animals themselves. I've heard conventional farmers speak this way about animal lives too. It's something I think we need to understand and come to grips with intellectually, because the pure choice some people have of going vegan, is not a choice for everyone on the planet, at least, not with current technology and environmental constraints.
Which yet has to be proven they are really working in the long way, because we are still on trial. Also let's see if we can retain our humanity whilst surviving as a species.
> The very existence of a salamander... says very clearly a few points.
What does the existence of a salamander "say"?
I made a program to implement some of my theories.
You’re welcome to try it. cycell2d.com
My pet theory — morphogenic fields — is described in their on one of the pages.
(Caveat: I’m neither a biologist nor a ‘real’ programmer. But, I was able to come up with a system to ‘grow’ certain animals and found it a fun way to spend the lockdown... almost as much fun as posting ‘Covid is a hoax’ comments on HackerNews... ahhh... those were the days.)
[1] https://www.the-scientist.com/features/how-groups-of-cells-c...
Neuronal Signaling and Sodium-Potassium Pump (from PDB-101)
Any specific examples of how it hindered our understanding? Like maybe some grants or something? Because as a synthetic biologist, I've never seen a heavy emphasis on genetics take away from other causes of cellular dynamics - in fact, exactly the opposite, because genetic engineering has allowed tinkering of those cellular dynamics (for example, cardio tissue surface physics).
I don't know of any serious biologist that (even historically) disregarded the importance of other physical factors in favor of DNA, but I would love to know compelling counter examples.
I doubt many people would agree that computer hardware is a small part of the picture of modern computation.
They're the foundations that everything else is built on, and with.
I'm not sure what the conclusion of biologists is today, but I have a feeling a lot of important mechanisms aren't encoded in the DNA - or, at least, not anymore. The key insight here is that cell reproduction doesn't happen out of nothing, it's always an existing mechanism working on a new mechanism.
The seminal paper of Ken Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" (1984)[0], demonstrates how you can encode a backdoor in a compiler in such a way that the compiler embeds this backdoor in every program it builds, and embeds the backdoor-embedding machinery in every new compiler binary it builds. You can use it to build a "vanilla" compiler and make it backdoor-embedding, even though the source code doesn't have backdoor-embedding instructions in it.
I suspect similar things happen in biology - there is computationally relevant information embedded in the runtime state, that's not explicitly encoded in the DNA - but it carries on, because every new living cell is built by a previous living cell.
--
[0] - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
I would suspect really basic things like replication would be stored somehow in DNA (nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA, etc) as they must be highly conserved and mutation resistant in order for organisms to survive and reproduce.
My point was that there is only so much information capacity in the cell if you exclude DNA, surely much less than needed to store electrical fields patterns for a whole embryo.
https://asunow.asu.edu/20200806-dragon-dna-sequencing-genome...
https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dinosaur-relative-genome-linke...
I really recommend Anton's segment on the Tuatara, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWywZyzmBDE MindBlown!
Those blocks are very small, less than 20 Atoms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenine
They’re working on using it for storage. (very slow read write times). Duplicating shouldn’t be a problem.
More realistically, the simplest atom- one proton, one electron- has 3 integer numbers associated with the state of the electron. You need more than a bit to describe the state of that system, so yeah.
In our more limited experience, certain levels of complexity mean unpredictable outcomes.
As for why-not-DNA, I think about it in terms of "If there were some way that was faster able to adapt organisms than DNA changes, wouldn't most organisms accumulate substantial functionality via that pathway over time?"
Is this true, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle ?
However it is not clear if quantum effects are relevant at a biomolecular scale. Some experts[1] suggest so but these ideas are considered fringe by the mainstream.
1. Sir Roger Penrose
However it seems to me the deterministic vs randomness debate is of the same order as the existence of god(s) : we will never be able to prove or disprove it and we aren't able to make useful predictions out of the information one way or the other so we might as well just agree to disagree and move on.
They definitely didn't get 100% of it right, buts its quite uncanny how the ancient texts were so accurate at predicting certain things that are only becoming evident in morphogensis research.
From something much simpler, and which has been iterating for approx 4 billion years.
Here's my best analogy: If you take one mole of "random" Rubik's Cubes (the number of molecules in a glass of water), then search for 'Solved' ones you'll find 512 are magically solved, merely by the power of large numbers. The ways molecules can 'snap together' are similarly 'finite', just like a puzzle.
Now think how many glasses of water are on earth. A replicating molecule would have existed probably on the FIRST DAY earth had cooled enough to form water.
If we knew what the shortest sequence if DNA is that can replicate, we'd be able to mathematically state the probability of it existing in any 'random' length of DNA of that length as 1/(4^N) where N is DNA length (number of AT/GC pairs).
Take it as 200 bases and you won't find another life in the observable universe. Avogadro's number is no match for exponential growth.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3943892/
"The present study describes the directed evolution of replicating RNA enzymes that operate with an exponential growth rate of 0.14 min−1, corresponding to a doubling time of 5 min. Each parental enzyme can give rise to thousands of copies per hour, and each of these copies in turn can do the same, all the while transmitting molecular information across the generations."
According to my math 10 million moles of random sequence 50-base pair RNA segments would be required to ensure a correct 'Hit' on a replicator, assuming only one of those 50-long sequences can replicate. 4^50=10^30. 10^30/Avogadro=10^7. Assuming each enzyme is the size of a water molecule, that would be about one large swimming pool of water.
In actual evolution this number of RNA molecules can be thought of as 'diluted' across the entire oceans, and not magically sitting in single pond.
But do you? If elements A and B tend to form compound A-B, and compound A-B can attach a further set of A and B, forming B-A-B-A which under certain circumstances will split into A-B and A-B, you have basic reproduction, and perhaps the occasional presence of element C will expedite the process. Game of life. In my [very] layman's view of the world, given a billion years or two, some such infinitely simple process should be enough to get the ball rolling, as long as it can somehow produce an ever so slightly errorprone copy.
To make an analogy, what you describe would be only the electronic chips or the logic gates of a computer. There are a still the CPU, RAM, and the whole software stack from the OS that runs our bodies (and mind you, there is a different one for each species) to the yet unknown abstractions from which human general intelligence emerges.
I think people underestimate how difficult it is for all the above to get started by accident.
For molecules that are a linear chain of only 2 possible items in the chain, it becomes a 'brute force search' of a 'puzzle space' to find a chain that 'does something like computer code', and the earth has the computing power to solve that brute force problem in 30 seconds, not 30 million years.
Nature is statistically guaranteed to find the simplest patterns first and that's why our life is built on 'binary' (two kinds of 'cards' AT/GC). Life on all planets will likely use binary "information storage", especially because of it's modularity (i.e. it can be cut-n-pasted together in different patterns)
And since life was presumably started with RNA, we are still talking about 4 base elems
However there's always at least one stickler who wants to quibble that the orientation is also a "binary bit" of information. Congratulations, you're him today!!
A code with a 4 letter alphabet would be 2 letter, if it happened to use a parity “bit” or other error correction info?
However there may be slightly more requirements like the sequence has to be found in an oil film (bubble) up until it can form a skin/membrane, to protect itself, so even if it was happening on earth trillions of times every day no one would be there to discover it, and other life on the planet with a head start (bacteria, etc) would consume it before it made more 'progress' by evolution.
In the early planet there was nothing to "eat up" life as it was starting. Everything was on an equal footing.
For example, if I understand this correctly, a random jumble of DNA as you describe would have a 50/50 chance of twisting to the right or twisting to the left. And yet all life on earth uses DNA that is "right handed" twisting to the right.
It's already experimentally proven you can mix up N, H, and O and it spontaneously forms RNA. We've even found entire RNA and sugars on meteorites. It's not rare in nature, it's abundant and self-emergent from the raw atoms themselves.
Now, either there were some naturally formed impermeable areas with an abundance of base material (yet again, I’m not saying life emerged because the UFOs created it), or we are talking about many orders of magnitude less statistical chances. I am willing to believe that many, not individually extraordinary thing had to happen at the same time, that made life possible - but that pretty much makes their combined presence extraordinary, which is my claim.
(Some form of underwater volcanic caves or whatever could sound like a possibility, especially because last I checked, starting sticked to a surface with certain catalytic activities is a plausible theory. Especially due to the reduced statistical chances due to a 2D surface instead of a 3D one! What I have a bit of trouble seeing, is how did organic materials form - I am aware of the famous experiment with lightning bolts that created ammonia and some other chemicals, but it would only slowly increase their uniform distribution in the oceans. Perhaps some chemical reaction with gases that made them accumulate? )
That's well known. It is the key driver for the global contraceptives market, which generated revenue of $28,175 million in 2015 and is estimated to reach $43,812 million by 2022.
We are familiar with downs syndrome, 3 rather than the intended 2 copies of chromosome 21, only because it's comparatively viable.
Software programming or biological programming ?
These things have the same names but they're not really comparable
My understanding of Information Theory completely breaks down looking at this. It seems impossible that it works.
I have this feeling that we have not yet developed the theories that would make it possible for us to grasp how this truly works.
But it does not really explain certain phases of this process, in the beginning, where cells are dividing exponentially and suddenly a fold appears, and simultaneously many cells, many being far apart, start behaving differently from other cells just next to them.
So whatever chemistry or physics foundation helps achieve that, it has this capacity to be very selective (these cells far apart do it, but these ones next to them don't), i.e. it is not temperature, acidity/base concentration, pressure, or other basic physics, because these phenomena don't have this kind of selectivity.
But the big picture is that each cell has a decision tree, and local signal molecule concentration is the criteria on which they decide. And later each cell has the ability to express yet another signal molecule and so on. If we were to imagine a 2d plane and you could symmetrically place a secretion center of A and B signal in a left and right region respectively, than you can have a new type of cell in the middle if it changes based on “signal A and B is on”.
> Turing correctly predicted a mechanism of morphogenesis, the diffusion of two different chemical signals, one activating and one deactivating growth, to set up patterns of development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis
> cells move to be near other cells of similar adhesive strength in order to maximize the bonding strength between cells and produce a more thermodynamically stable structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_adhesion_hypothes...
I agree those can be very compact, and looks like a whole world is depicted in 4kb with music!
Demos are based on combining perfect geometrical structures in clever ways (planes, spheres, sinusoids, etc) because they all can be compactly expressed with the type of algebra/arithmetic/geometry that is exactly what our CPUs were built for.
If you watch many demos you tend to see certain symmetries, reflections, and other artifacts that make it all seem repetitive and plain (despite the number of moving objects, effects, etc.)
The process in this cell dividing feels very different to me, but it is hard to put my finger on it.
(1) In asexual reproduction, each successful offspring generates about 1 bit of useful information ("entropy")
(2) In sexual reproduction, each generation of offspring from population n can generate on the order of log(n) bits of information
Ref: Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms by David J. C. MacKay
<video class="vjs-tech" id="aem-lead-video_html5_api" tabindex="-1" preload="auto" muted="muted" poster="https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/becom..." src="http://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/BECOMI... itemprop="thumbnailUrl" content="https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/becom... itemprop="name" content="See a salamander grow from a single cell in this incredible time-lapse"><meta itemprop="uploadDate" content="2019-02-14T22:25:17.000Z"></video>
Where can you find the link that ends in "audio_eng_3.mp4"?
It's a really complex system navigating all these different regimes of stability and instability, with variations caused by internal/external forces, yet coming out almost exactly the same every time.
That's why so many people don't accept the evolutionary theory. It's just hard to think on evolutionary timescales, there's no difference for most of us between 1 million, 10 million or 1 billion years. Nevertheless, it took billions of years for life to evolve.
To be fair it sometimes does not work and we end up with deformed babies.
This sounds to me like engineers talking about a code base :)
I loved watching for the moment the topology of the creature changed from a sphere to a torus. Not exactly sure when it happened, but there was a point where it wrapped itself in half and seemed to fuse.
Generally, in development, it's the lineage of the cells that matters the most. Skin and neuronal cells have a closer lineage than the gut cells do.
Neural tube-like structures are pretty ancient. Hallucigenia, I believe, is the oldest fossil (-0.5 BYA) that shows the differentiation of a single neural tube-like structure [0], right back to the mid-Cambrian Explosion. We are the ancestors, likely, of that animal. It seems that bi-lateral symmetry is a highly advantageous body plan, as it's evolved a few times in separate clades that weren't that before. As to the reason why bilateral symmetry is good, it's a good question! As for the difference in why neural tubes are better, it seems that the ability to centralize the information exchange between the body and (what may pass for a) brain is a better fit with a single trunk. Other animals do have other arrangements, but the one we have has the most diversity of subsequent animals forms. It seems to be a more flexible arrangement and evolution seems to have preferred it. Granted, the neural tube idea has been through a few mass extinction events, so there is a considerable amount of luck involved too.
[0] For reference, the reason that arachnids are different than other 'insects' is because they have dual ganglia structures that run down the rostral(head)-ventral(tail) axis instead of a single neural tube. That divergence took place before Hallucigenia, I believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_newt#/media/File:Uhandr...
"And just as an organism in the embryonic stages seems to race through the aeons of evolutionary development, from single cell to ultimate complexity, in mere weeks or months; so the individual scientist in the course of their life repeats the history of science and loses themselves, by progressive stages, in the orchard [of science]."
Growing Neural Cellular Automata - Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis
The Fermi paradox asks, why haven't we found any alien probes? Why have we received no contact or evidence of aliens visiting Earth in the past? Why aren't there galactic-wide civilizations, or super advanced beings that have spread over the entire galaxy?
If there were such a being/civilization, perhaps their planning time horizon would be billions of years, instead of (optimistically) hundreds of years like for humans. With that magnitude of time horizon in mind, what might that civilization's colonization efforts or exploratory probes look like? What would their machines look like, if time was not a concern?
If 4 billion years is nothing to you, and assuming there really isn't a way around the speed of light, maybe sending self-assimilating, self-adapting machine "seeds" to all Earth-like planets is the most efficient way to expand or explore. Seeds that perfectly adapt to the environment they're exposed to, self-replicate, take over the planet, and then the solar system.
Sort of like the Protomolecule from The Expanse, instead of hijacking life, it hijacks raw materials, and was designed on a timescale of beings that think in terms of eons.
Like, why does it look so simple, like a ball of playdough, when it works more like a very complex machine...
My math is far too weak to even know where to start.
It may give a better sense of how much is lost when a species goes extinct.
And when you put it like that, it's particularly upsetting that we lose up to 150 species a day
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_tree
That being said changes are very slow and extinction is pretty tragic.
I heard this anecdote during homily in church and honestly it perfectly describes how I think about God.
Stop using God as a placeholder and be more humble.
The correct answer is "we don't know", but for sure today God is not a valid theory. No more than Spiderman, Batman or cosmic magical people from Andromeda.
That's right. And that is the moment when science has to give place to beliefs. Everyone can have different. Some poeple none at all. For a person who wants to find a bridge between science and religion, this model may be good.
Yeah, if everyone did that, we could be trying to fly the Ocean by praying. Or trying to cure plagues in the Middle Ages too, with the same bullshitery.
Hint: in didn't work. Once we threw that crap away, and began to properly was the hands, or develop the steam machine in the 1800s, with no "magic" in between, the progress and science development skyrocketed.
I can't wait until morality and governments will let us do the same with a human.
Could not find Reference for the electromagnetic radiation in time to do this reply sorry.
https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Deve...
https://www.statpearls.com/ArticleLibrary/viewarticle/20922
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14690282/
This man did a study showing how electromagnetc fields interfere with embryonic cell migration.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/W.+Ross+Adey%2c+M.D.-a0163395...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory
(unfortunately, the theory wasn't very useful, and is mainly a historical curiosity today.)
"If you have a powerful enough language, you can take control of reality. This is what magical languages, like in the late Renaissance, were about. The only thing which comes close to that today is code for computers. Essentially, these are languages which, when executed, something happens. They are languages of efficacy. They carry, not meaning, but motivation to activity. This Kabbalistic question is very interesting; someone showed me, recently, a sculptural object, which, when illuminated from various angles by a source of light behind it would cast, one after another, each of the Hebrew letters on a screen. In other words, this was a higher-dimensional object which had the entire Hebrew alphabet somehow embedded in it. When I mentioned this to Ralph Abraham, he said, 'Well, all you have to do is digitize and quantify that object, and we’ll be able to compute from that three-dimensional object to a 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, or 9-dimensional object, which would cast all letters of all alphabets into matter.' So one way of thinking of the 'transcendental object at the end of time' is as this kind of Ur-letter or Ur-word in hyperspace, from which, as it sheds the radiance of its syntactical numenosity into lower and lower dimensions, realities as literary functions of being constellate themselves."
All of this should be read with a very open mind however, nonetheless, the original video, the various "sacred" geometries (why are they even sacred to begin with?), inspire thinking that what if languages and symbols representing ideas are simply projections?
> more mechanical than magical.
This. As we learn more and more and our understanding expands, I don't see why not.
(I'm really pleased that we can have this thread on HN)
If entanglement or Einstein's "spooky magic" is possible at the building layers of reality then why do we balk at the idea of this not being possible in other levels of dimension?
Are we like the many "Random Novelty Generators" that is needed for the whole thing to work where each layer of complexity created (in our case our collective human experience consisting of many individual ones) a platform for which additional novelty is generated?
Very interesting ideas to "toy" with. Samsara, karma, reincarnation, Einstein's theory that "God doesn't play dice" all seem strangely possible as our understanding of reality advances. It is weirdly mechanical in its raw form but borderline "pure **ing magic".
(I would also point out how the Western thought rejects all forms of non-objective, impossible-to-prove-therefore-nil ideas in pursuit of its theory that all we see is all we get. We attack all ideas that remotely challenge the religion that has become Science. Seems to be built upon shaky grounds as we seem to slowly approach a convergence of religion, spiritualism, quantum theory especially at a very high elite academic level. Ironically the only people in the scientific community I can have these conversations is also quantum physicists, and some molecular biologists.)
Very nice discussions today I am very satisfied with HN as normally this kind of talk gets the boot and hostile reactions from co-workers.
HN is definitely a great place to find others who are intellectually curious about these topics. It's a shame that most people (in society at large) would rather discuss sports or entertainment, than the actual interesting scientific or philosophical things that matter more.
There are a few physics theories that use additional dimensions, but they are use quantum mechanics.