The Origin of Life, waiting for Barth's comments

[bayonetbrant]

is this guy full of crap?

http://www.businessinsider.com/groundbreaking-idea-of-lifes-origin-2014-12

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

"You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant," England said.

England's theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. "I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong," he explained. "On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon."

His idea, detailed in a paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

more at the link

[Centurion40]

I read the story yesterday.  Seems as plausible as anything else, I suppose.

But I still can't get my head around abiogenesis.

[Barthheart]

 :o

I'm calling crap on this one. Why hasn't every rock become alive. What are the "certain conditions" that keep a lump of rock from becoming alive?
Sound like a creationist trying to use physics to prove God's hand in making all things.....

Just my opinion of course.

EDIT: I take back the creationist comment. He's not going that direction at all.... but it's still crap.

[LongBlade]

I'm with Bartheart on this.

Lots of carbon lying around on this planet. Why aren't everyone's diamond rings growing tentacles?

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Lots of carbon lying around on this planet. Why aren't everyone's diamond rings growing tentacles?

Uhh because the stars aren't right?   DUH!

Am I the only one who even paid attention in science class?

[bayonetbrant]

Why aren't everyone's diamond rings growing tentacles?

maybe they are and you can't see it











more evidence of the Groginati!

[GDS_Starfury]

So what Mirth has growing in his crotch is life?

[JasonPratt]

"You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant," England said.

That is literally one of the most reductively ignorant things I've ever heard in my life. 

Granted, he's leaving out a couple of important details from his theory of heat redistribution, but even then -- improved heat distribution cannot and is never going to automatically make what amounts to a city-full of biomechanical factories, much less billions of them operating in tandem for a composite organism and its behaviors.

(Then again, neither does random copy errors of already existent biomechanical factory cities, even with accidental improvements in the copy-errors afterward tending to propagate those copy-errors more efficiently in an environment than the previous arrangement, except when an absolute ton of details are conveniently slurred over.  ::) ;) )

It does however address the interesting conceptual question of the distinction between life (even non-rational life) and non-life at the level of physics. I suspect there are no relevant distinctions. It isn't like capturing-energy-and-dissipating-as-heat is in itself a signally different characteristic. Nuclear fission and fusion both do that at the level of physics far more energetically than anything biological does, so the distinction isn't a matter of degree either. The result of heat dissipation seems like the key distinction -- but are such results themselves describable at the level of physics per se?

At the level of chemistry, maybe...? Maybe not: organic chemistry is necessary for physical life (so far as we know, some alternate possibilities like silicone basing aside), but organic chemistry itself isn't life per se either. Is there a chemical distinction per se between what happens with organic (and inorganic) chemistry in life, and what happens in organic chemistry (with or without inorganic) in non-life?

Living things, even if they don't replicate themselves (are there any biological organisms that don't replicate themselves? -- but assuming there could be), gather energy and redirect it not primarily as heat but as structure. Heat's an important byproduct of the process, but not the main product of the process.

From that perspective, fusion would be an example of life in physics terms -- but fusion isn't alive. Ditto the capture of subatomic particles in creating and transitioning between atomic structures more broadly (fusion being an example of that). Solar systems and galaxies, broadly speaking, capture energy states and convert them to structures, but they aren't alive.


What else do living things do, converting energy to structure, that those examples of non-living processes (per se) don't involve? I'm pretty sure even Richard Dawkins would say the difference is information: "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL", yo.  ;)

Not only the passing on of information in structure, but more critically the reading of stored information and putting it into structural effect.

In that sense, maybe the only conceptual difference between computers and plants right now is that computers usually (for now) have a non-organic structure and don't self-sustain their own structures by reading and applying information. But conceptually we could build them to do that; come to think of it, that's a big goal we've been working on for a while with good hope we can get it done. Our main problem is that we don't yet have the tech to build cellular sized factory cities, or feasible city-sized factory cities, much less program information for doing so into a structure capable of automatically doing the task using the silicone or metallic equivalents of proteins (or actual proteins for that matter).


Mmmm, hungry -- off to eat dinner.  ;D