A video of the transformation of a single cell into a salamander
pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com
pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com
Science has learned so much about biology, but whatever knowledge I’ve gained is dwarfed by the sheer awe and wonder I feel when trying to contemplate what it is that I just saw here.
The forces of nature converging to bring forth life from the energy released by the Big Bang billions of years ago.
It boggles the mind - this mind that is somehow conscious of itself and which came into existence by an even more mind bendingly complex process.
Being alive is unspeakably amazing.
I highly recommend Steven Pinker's book "How the Mind Works" as it has a great section on how natural selection works (and how it can be confusing even to many scientists), and how it can create complex structures (like the eye) generation-by-generation. I think it helped me understand natural selection as less of a biological "force" than as more of a mathematical outcome due to the statistics of non-perfect replicators.
probably thats why Life is not abundant in the universe, as far as we can see even in the Solar system.
1. We know that evolution of life requires a degree of stability for long periods of time, and most likely conditions favorable to having a liquid solvent for chemical reactions to occur (probably water but possibly things like methane). Those conditions are relatively rare, which is why scientists talk about the "habitable zone" of planets around stars.
2. Given the requirements of a habitable zone and long periods of environmental stability, that knocks out pretty much the entire rest of our solar system, with the possible exception of some of the gas giant moons.
3. It hasn't really been proven that life is not abundant in the universe. There is a really good section in How the Mind Works that talks about some faulty assumptions in the Drake Equation (primarily that evolution "drives" towards more complex, intelligent life forms over time), but AFAIK we haven't ruled out the possibility of life in many of the planetary systems we've discovered. On the contrary, we've recently discovered many extra solar planets in the habitable zone of their stars, with signatures of water.
The genetic material which describes life and the organism which executes that code are one and the same.
We don't look for minecraft mobs by pointing a microscope at a cpu, right?
But at the bottom of it all, we have no idea what any of it is. The map is not the territory, and primordial existence has no current explanation.
This isn’t synonymous with endorsing untenable metaphysical beliefs, but points to the fact that we still have enormous gaps in our understanding.
If you came into being inside of, say, a rock instead of a human, you'd probably have less awe for creation.
So I guess there is some survivorship bias in play. To most entities, the universe might be pretty boring.
There's some food for thought :)
The rock doesn’t know it’s amazing, but we know the rock is amazing.
I guess you could say the universe is very impressed with itself.
Amazing video still.
Some proteins might act as a sensor, binding to some other protein when triggered, in turn causing some action to occur.
Hand-wavey comments such as yours evidence a profound lack of appreciation for what such videos signify.
We are very, very far from really understanding how everything actually works, though.
Whence comes this assumption that life may be reduced to a set of Boolean logic rules?
Such people either have no clue how computers work or no clue how biology works. (Or both.)
“Some proteins act kinda like if/then statements, so therefore the transformation of a single cell into a salamander is basically just a computer program.” You might as well say “My computer has a water-cooled processor, so it’s basically a salamander.”
Your comment only makes sense if you postulate that life cannot be understood.
Your counter to life being machines is just baselessly discrediting those of the opinion. Ad-hominem.
Considering a cell to be a single machine does not make it equivalent to another machine (a computer), and certainly doesn't make that other machine equivalent to the millions of cells we just saw divide. "A is a machine, B is a machine, therefore A is B" - a false equivalence.
Cells are conclusively machines, by the definition that they execute a fixed purpose dictated in whole by the parts it was made of - parts that we can change to modify the operation of the machine, a well studied subject used extensively in e.g. pharma (reprogrammed bacteria is how people get insulin).
That conscious life is poorly understood does not somehow change the fact that the only building block used to make it in nature is a small biomechanical automaton.
While we love to glorify our own existence and capabilities, our recent advances in LLMs also show how simple machines - even if significantly flawed due to practical resource limitations and intentional design limitations - can end projecting a convincing mimicry of our conscious behavior, despite having a simple, phrase-completing nature. It might make you wonder what simple initial purpose might dictate our behavior.
The idea that this should be backed up by simulating a large and complicated multi-cellular organism is a bit ridiculous. Even complete understanding would not imply that something is easy to simulate.
Incredible, almost DIVINE..
The terraforming script behind this mechanism, is one of the most complex and most beautiful mechanism that exists in this universe.
At least that's the explanation as I've understood it.
The tree of life has been re-arranged many times already and as more genomes are sequenced we discover more and more non-obvious mistakes. For instance 'Comb jellyfish' have caused a major stir amongst evolutionary biologists.
It's interesting how we needed taxonomy to figure out that there is such a thing as a tree of life and the basis for genomics and then, once we had that we had to go back and do (multiple) fairly major revisions to fix stuff that turned out to be wrong. The interesting thing is that the overall picture is still subject to such major changes.
Is the acorn that drops on the ground and grows in the soil the same organism as the oak tree into which it develops, living for hundreds of years?
At 2:30 it looks like conway's game of life, as an aside.
Hurt my jaw while brushing my teeth.
sharing it on ios is proving hard because even the preview goes full screen preventing copying the url, lol. if anyone else hits this, turn on airplane mode then you can successfully long press to copy/share
https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/14428...
- the cells communicate and share the plan
- each cell has the plan of the whole body
- the plan is not stored in genes
Cells in different locations produce different chemical markers. These markers spread out through the tissue and create a sort of gradient. By observing the gradient, a cell can know where it is (or at least what it's supposed to do). At least that's the explanation as I've understood it.