Even Synthetic Life Forms with a Tiny Genome Can Evolve | Hacker News Reader

Even Synthetic Life Forms with a Tiny Genome Can Evolve

quantamagazine.org

40 pointswebmaven19 comments

Slightly off-topic, but the illustrations in this article are gorgeous!

I found the illustrator's website here: https://ccsb.scripps.edu/goodsell/

I can heartily recommend his "The Machinery of Life" book. It's one of these gorgeous illustrations next to a page of text explaining things for many pages. It really gives you a good sense of how things work at these scales, as well as being absolutely gorgeous.

This is reductionist science at its best, and I mean that very much in a good sense. Evolution is one of the most foundational theories in all of science outside of Physics, and now we can see it at work in a most stripped-down case. Phantastically fascinating.

IMHO, evolution works on inanimate objects. Otherwise life wouldn’t evolve from lifeless beginnings. Similarly, I like to think of all sorts of natural lifeless features of this world that “evolve” over longer periods of times (eg glacier carving valleys, tectonic plates creating mountains, etc). Evolution in my book is just energy + interaction + time and the materials involved in this determine the outcome. Life is just a more complicated chemical reaction that forms out of this and eventually develops more and more self-directed agency in terms of how to capture energy.

Another stake into the heart of biblical creationism--I mean, "intelligent design"--although proponents will simply move the goalposts to declare something else as "irreducible complexity".

Nice, you got a massive stick to beat them with…beat those fools with your superior intellect.

> Nice, you got a massive stick to beat them with…beat those fools with your superior intellect.

I see a snide personal insult, however it seems to be missing any potentially redeeming point/argument about biology or the philosophy of science.

What's the end goal of the belief that everything is a mechanism, blindly following some rules? Say, you've convinced yourself that you're an organic mechanism driven by dna mutations or whatever, and then what?

Why does it need an "and then what"?

Personally, I prefer to know and believe things that are true rather than false, when possible.

> What's the end goal of the belief

So you will "believe" something is true... based on whether it gets you something that you want?

I really don't think that's how it's supposed to work. In fact in many cases it's called "lying."

You ought to be believing something because it seems to fit the evidence that exists without involving stuff that's absent. Not because it advances your goal or agenda.

> and then what?

And then what... what? Exactly what are you saying ought to be next? In fact, why does anything need to be next?

Suppose you've convinced yourself that you're being pulled down by "gravity", a completely impersonal effect driven by the nature of bulk raw materials... "And then what?"

Is the theory of "Gravity" inferior to the theory of "Earth Is Hugging You From Love", simply because the latter leaves you with residual good feelings or the promise of affection?

I am not a religious, but being happy seems more important than being right. I do not know what battle you are fighting.

It's a discussion about motivated reasoning. Whether being happy is more important depends on your motive for what you're trying to reason out.

If you're trying to reason out how a biological system works, your emotional context seems orthogonal to achieving a useful conclusion.

If you're a mechanism, which part of you makes a choice to do something vs something else?

What a strange question. The truth is the truth, what one makes of it is a separate matter.

How exactly? They still had the code included. When the code gets randomly generated, compiles and still compiles after every further evolution I'll be convinced.

So just how small is that minimal genome?

Clicking through to the original paper...

JCV-syn3.0 has 531 kilobases (kbp) with 473 genes.

That's 531 kb, which is about 66 kB, equivalent to a 256x256 8-level greyscale image, or 22 QR codes.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aad6253

> they drew up a list of genes known to be essential, assembled them in a yeast cell and then transferred that new genome into a closely related bacterial cell that was emptied of its original DNA

> Afterward, Lennon asked him, “What happens when you let this organism loose?”

"we were so obsessed with what we can do, that it never occured to us if we should do it"

While a tiny genome device is less likely to be problematic than autoemergentt cells, it still seems like the opener for a black swan narrative lol.

We are the species of FA/FO.

People are always terrified of these microbes that are millions or billions of years out of context.

It's like being scared that a trout is going to beat you in a foot race, when you're racing tigers every day.

The things to be scared of aren't those that haven't ever seen you before. It's the ones that have spent every second of every day, for hundreds/thousands/millions of years perfecting their ability to eat you that you should worry about.

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