Not exactly. If you want life to evolve, don't start with a pile of TTL gates.
Actually it does. John Larkin couldn't understand the explanations even if he knew where to look for them, but they do exist.
Example?
By analogy with the evolution of the eye, one step at a time. Once the final version has got itself optimised the intervening versions can be hard to imagine.
If you study enough species, you can often find earlier, or at least difference versions, and deduce some of the history, but John Larkin reads inteligent design propganda which rather ignores that kind of evidence.
Unlike steak sauce, there aren't any superior alternatives.
Only John Larkin could be silly enough to call proteins simple.
It's certainly possible to have complex assemblies without intelligence - Darwinian evolution explains how that happens. John Larkin can't follow the explanation, but that doesn't invalidate it.
The intelligence we have looks impressive to us, but there may be a higher level of comprehension which makes us looks like an ant colony with faster communications.
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He was objecting to statistical mechanics, and he does seem to have been wrong.
Actually, information is more like entropy than energy. That got spelled ou t in the second year of my undergraduate science course when we got onto th ermodynamics (which isn't an easy subject).
Intelligence uses information to understand its environment and consequentl y optimise action within that environment. The actual level of optimality a ttained depends both on the quality and quantity of the information availab le and the quality of the intelligence processing it.
Organism that can acquire more and better information tend to evolve better quality data processors to exploit it as effectively as possible.
Not mystical at all, if you've done enough physics to know what you are tal king about.
All known methods of photosynthesis rely on copper or iron atoms, that have a high enough valency to they react with oxygen in reactions that are reversible at reasonable energies. The potential wells of lower-numbered elements take more than just photons to catalyze.
John Larkin might be being sarcastic, but he's gullible enough that one can 't be sure.
Clifford Heath's point isn't entirely persuasive. If you string enough conj ugated double bonds together in a hydrocarbon - carotenes comes to mind
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you can get low enough energy excited states for visible light to excite el ectrons, whence their popularity in biological photosensors and photosynthe sis.
On the other hand, bunging in transition metal elements does seem equally p opular.
If terrestrial life forms could get by without the transition metal element s, they probably would - these elements aren't all that common or readily a vailable.
Life on planets of population one stars (no transition metals or very littl e) might have to stick with pure carotenes, but they might have to spend so much longer evolving molecules that would work that their couple of billio ns years earlier start might get wiped out.
Nobody says that life evolves all that quickly, even on the metal rich plan ets orbiting population two stars (like the sun).
There are lots of fascinating things that are analogous to electronic systems. Control dynamics and signals-and-systems aren't always electrical.
And the people here who know nothing about electronics need something to have an opinion about. I guess they haven't figured out how to use Facebook. The longest threads in sed have nothing to do with electronics. The on-topic threads have few participants and fewer intelligent contributors.
I spent the entire long day yesterday tuning trace impedances and crosstalk on a giant 6-layer board. That sort of thing leaves most of my brain free to think about other stuff.
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My discovery here is to fan out most everything with BUF602s so I can ignore a lot of ugly termination issues. (I will now be accused of posting on-topic.)
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
We have been trying to detect electromagntically active extraterrestial forms of life since the beginning of the radio epoch, but often refuse to notice that our own activity window is closing quickly. The era of huge transmitters emitting easily detectable periodic signals is mostly over, the quest for optimal bandwidth utilization makes our signals indistinguishable from noise and they are mosty of localnature (WiFi, cellular telephony). On top of that, the signal is scrambled for security reasons. What's left? The over the horizon radars like Duga and LORAN? Soon to be extinct.
Start with the technology. They didn't have to go the long and hard way we followed. If they had brilliant mathematicians and were of the hardcore "think first" nature, their way could have been like "Sunday: we have realized that EM waves exist. Monday: started implementing a
1024 QAM global communication network". Not that implausible as it may sound.
From their side: "those funny humans were sending a lot of clear signals, but recently most of it is noise. They most likely had a global disaster and their communication network is deteriorating due to the lack of maintenance. No sane civilization would emit so much noise, it's obvious. Let's move to the next point of the agenda..."
One horse. A 150-year long RF window, empty on both ends.
It depends a bit on how hard line you want to be. They don't do quite a few of the things we normally describe as life until they infect a host cell and manipulate its genome to reproduce. Even then they subvert the cell to do these things they do not have their own metabolism as such.
In a strict sense they don't fit the usual definition of "Life".
But where do you draw the line? Are incorrectly folded protein autocatalytic infectious agents like prions which cause scrapie in sheep, CDJ and the insidious nvCJD aka BSE "alive". They need a host to survive but are to all intents and purposes a catalyst that converts a correctly folded protein into one which is a copy of the prion form.
They were given the opportunity in the UK to spread like wildfire because someone thought that ground up abattoir waste would make a very profitable cannibalistic addition to herbivore feed.
It is you who fail to understand the meaning of "fittest". It does not mean the global optimum of efficiency. If it did then nature would have already fixed the defects in photosynthesis. It means gets to reproduce and form a gradually increasing proportion of the population.
If the system is resource constrained then "fittest" pretty much is determined by ability to get enough food, not get predated and find a mate. This usually leads to comparatively simple camouflage.
But in the tropics particularly where the system is not resource limited and food is abundant there is scope for more complex behaviour with what are essentially arbitrary preferences of the usually drab female birds being selected for in the males. These include bright colours, silly tail feathers, collecting pretty things and beautiful songs.
The male peacocks tail and brilliant blue colour is a pretty good example. If you think that 6' tail helps it to fly then you must be completely mad! But without one he will never get a mate...
It is self limiting in that the ones that have tails too heavy to fly cannot evade snakes or go up into the trees to proclaim their patch.
Amazingly they can fly just about gaining about 10' each time climbing a tree from branch to branch until they are high enough to make their big screeching call. First time I saw one I though it was a bin bag!
If there is no competition for the niche then something will eventually exploit it. Put another way with the same constraints and boundary conditions approximately the same physical solution has been found more than once by entirely different plants and animals isolated from each other.
Most recently in the news the flightless rail bird has re-evolved about
140ky after it was last known. Same environment same constraints without ground predators on an isolated island. It is out of luck too since it will probably go extinct again due to sea level rise.
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It exactly proves my point. You fail to understand.
It doesn't cause enough harm to die out though. And at present we are still struggling with getting malaria beaten so it may never die out.
Nature can be very capricious. There are plenty of female spiders that eat their mate immediately after sex (or before if the males courtship dance isn't up to snuff). It has evolutionary advantage for the species (though it is a bit tough on individual males).
I think you are being rather arbitrary about judging viruses. There are nu merous bacteria which do very little or nothing at all in a spore state. I t is only when they are in a hospitable environment that they "come alive" and begin to reproduce. Same with many plant seeds.
Your point seems to fixate on the fact that the virus requires a host not j ust as food, but the means of reproduction. I don't see where that makes i t any less alive. It reproduces, has motion, feeds and most importantly - the one essential thing left out of MRS GREN - mutates to allow for evoluti on.
In fact, that they reproduce in very large numbers and depend on mutation f or their ability to survive clearly shows how well evolution provides for a daptation and survival enhancement. JL can't understand how replicating DN A could have evolved, but is that really so much more complex than resistan ce to medication which can happen relatively quickly to most evolution. It demonstrates the power of natural selection combined with mutation.
I'm not aware that they have definitively shown scrapie is caused by prions . But even if so, that lacks every other aspect of live other than reprodu ction.
Like here in the US? We only stopped using mechanically separated beef in
2004. This contains parts of the spinal cord and ganglia which might sprea d BSE as well as actual brain tissue does. We just got lucky.
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Rick C.
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That is simply not true. For example, there are no creatures that absorb c osmic rays as their food source. Perhaps and extreme case, but it illustra tes that not all niches can be filled. Evolution has to take a path of con sistent survival. If there is no way to bridge a gap, a niche on the other side can't be filled.
fend-off-malaria/
It has been less than 100 years since we have been able to battle malaria? So in Africa the pressure has been for the gene to remain. Give it a few thousand generations and see if the gene is still around. Also consider th at sickle cell anemia is does not strongly prevent reproduction with an ave rage age of death in the 40's.
I'm glad I'm not a spider although some days I feel like one.
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Rick C.
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