An arbitrary distinction. You want to "see" the virus as the object that c arries the seed of viral life then I get that. But I look at the life cycl e and a virus has one, so clearly it is alive. The fact that it has cast o ff loaded it's excess baggage and uses the nest of another like a Cuckoo do esn't mean it isn't alive.
You mean like many bacteria can only infect a specific host or many plants can only grow in a specific micro ecosystem, etc., etc., etc.
You are probably lucky. I donated platelets so much my veins are damaged a nd they can no longer get a needle in my arm. You can donate too much whic h they won't tell you and never even keep track of.
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Rick C.
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If it were true. You are suggesting that any tiny lesser step would make DNA reproduction unviable? Can you prove that in any way? Just your gut feeling, eh? Ok, good enough for me.
Yes, I'm happy to agree that this is your gut feeling and not based on any facts.
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Rick C.
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They would have had to invent a time machine as well then. The universe has only fairly recently become cool enough for the microwave background radiation to permit superfluid helium to condense naturally.
He is still a decent engineer and obviously intelligent. I cannot understand why he has such a preference for "just so" stories.
Depends what you mean by significantly different. We are on average about 4" taller than we were in the Victorian and Elizabethan era - something I have to bear in mind when I visit older buildings.
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That is down to better nutrition rather than genetics. Although the proportion of overweight obese people has also increased as well.
We are on the cusp of being able to rewrite the genome and edit out certain really horrible inherited diseases. How we use that new knowledge could radically alter future evolution for good or ill.
I think he might well have a point iff ethics committees eventually permit germ line editing for certain inherited conditions. Where it gets very dodgy is when people start modifying to generate designer babies.
More statement of incomprehension. It's fairly clear that DNA-based life ev olved from RNA-based life, because there are still some RNA-based enzymes a round. Tom Gardener seems to know of some speculations that therose-nucleic acid compounds
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preceded ribose nucleic acid (RNA).
Your most-likely opinion is based on remarkably inadequate information. Som ebody with more sense would get better informed before spreadign his opinio ns around,
Jeering at your intellectual pretensions is mildly amusing, but you'd make most of a lot happier if you took some time off from posting fatuous nonsen se and learned a bit about the stuff you pontificate about - preferably not from creationist and climate change propaganda.
Perhaps your first project ought to be to learn how to distinguish between propaganda and reliable information. Most of us seem to be able to manage t his.
Don't generate heat in the first place. Perhaps easier in a sense with molecular machines, but transistor circuits are known which behave in a similar way.
Has anything become of "lossless" logic, anyway? I remember reading an article where they fabbed some logic (adders or something) at MOSIS and measured flea-fart power consumption (but, from their methodology, it wasn't obvious if they'd have noticed anything anyway -- that is, they should've measured the clock power consumption as an RF port, and in turn, a capacitance of some Q).
I kind of suspect that the downside is much larger gate size (more transistors to do the same work; quadrature clocks have to be distributed everywhere) and much slower computation (to get a reasonable Q, Fclk must be much less than Rds(on) * Coss). And that, in terms of computing power per lifetime cost (i.e., including die, fab, assembly and operating costs), we still have a few generations left on present course (smaller and smaller transistors, clock speed still asymptotic to the low GHz), before we're forced to figure out something better.
But it would be nice to see an article illustrating that.
Nice thing at least, about neural net stuff, is it doesn't need to be fast if it's massively parallel, and it greatly benefits from 3D construction, if, as you note, power can be dealt with.
For perspective, the human brain arguably has about as much computational power as we have today (ranging from top supercomputers for the low estimates, to total computation at the highest estimates?), but burns about
10W, many orders of magnitude less than our computers do. And at an approximate clock rate (more of a stochastic bandwidth, as far as I know) in the kHz.
And it's still only a lossy molecular machine, many orders of magnitude removed from the information-theoretic (quantum computing) limit. (So, again, room at the bottom and all that?..)
Debugging? Hopeless. Error recovery? Mandatory. The only way such a system could possibly be created is with constant error protection and correction (immune system, liver detox, etc.? sure, why not?), and with rolling live patches, and...
What you think about it is totally irrelevant. It is what the laws of nature permit to happen that matters.
Which came first? The chicken or the egg?
It still leaves you with the big problem of "who designed the designer".
Science progresses by experimentation, observing and understanding the world around us. Conjecture is all very well but to be a scientific theory it *has* to make testable predictions about reality.
"Just so" stories might satisfy your intellectual curiosity but they merely move the problem of how did life get started to somewhere else.
I wonder. If you see how much we changed some animals and many plants, what might happen if we start applying those methods to ourselves? And that doesn't even take direct gene-editing into account. We don't know much about how DNA composition translates into traits, but we'll learn. I choose to believe we're on the eve of a revolution.
I know that our current ethical norms are against such things, but those norms evolve, too. Is it ethical to allow a serious hereditary disease to persist in a lineage if we know how to fix it? There will be accidents, but on the whole, those who embrace these methods are likely to ultimately out-compete those who don't. If we manage to avoid blowing ourselves up before, that is.
It hasn't. The microwave background radiation is currently at 2.725K and superpfluid He-4 needs to be cooler than 2.172K.
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We'll be able to throw in intelligent design. Whether we'll bother letting evolution continue to invent new and equally horrid inherited diseases is an interesting question. Most random variation is for the worse.
Once we start to get some idea of which genes do what, some psychiatric disorders are going to look very like inherited conditions. That's going to produce some interesting discussions.
Since no biochemist has synthesized a self-replicating RNA molecule that can reproduce and become DNA, they should work backwards. Just take some simple organism, e coli or something, and start removing/breaking things a step at a time to get simpler mechanisms that still work. Reverse evolution. Find out which if any parts can be removed and still have a functional reproducing cell.
I wonder if anyone has done this.
Of course it's a big problem. Big problems need big ideas.
Does anyone here ever do anything with ideas but attack them?
The soup conjecture is untested but widely accepted. Other ideas are untested but mocked.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
"There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Dodgy! That's really funny.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
It is still work in progress but here is their website:
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ISTR there is another group doing this sort of thing too.
Of course they have.
But your "idea" doesn't lead anywhere. Who designed the designer?
The soup conjecture has been quite widely tested and they have made partial progress. You get a fair proportion of the right ingredients from the Miller Urey experiment in a reducing atmosphere.
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I expect eventually they will be able to solve it by working from what we see now and sequencing the various oldest simple life forms around.
Abiogenesis has to happen somewhere along the line or else you are forced to invoke a deity and a "Just so" story. That we do not yet have all the details doesn't mean that it cannot happen. You are making an argument that is exactly analogous to the vitalism theory of old.
Poor fellow had a really hard time of it. No reputable journal would publish it and reviewers panned his ideas because the orthodoxy could not understand how it worked (and it was revolutionary). Non-equilibrium thermodynamics was in its infancy back then. He was ahead of his time.
It is very unusual only a few such systems are known. It's biggest claim to fame is that it is robust - if you throw the ingredients together in almost any proportion and avoid any chloride ions then it works!
It leaked out to the West around the 1970's when it became everybody's show reaction as a chemical clock that really goes tick-tock tick-tock again and again! And it does even weirder things in a thin layer.
Multiverse theory has a certain mathematical appeal to theoreticians and it does amazingly make some testable predictions.
I don't see it being that much different to the rules that allow a full quantum mechanical treatment of light propagation along the path of least time to be approximated by much simpler geometric optics.
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It should come as no great surprise that we find ourselves inside a universe that allows complex objects like us to exist. In a truly infinite universe all possible parameters can be explored.
I see it mentioned in comedy sometimes. It makes for some interesting sci- fi shows. I don't get the point otherwise. It's like the Seinfeld joke. "I wanted to talk to you about Dr. Whatley. I have a suspicion that he's co nverted to Judaism just for the jokes"
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Rick C.
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He should have taken pictures and smuggled them out. It's surprising Doctor Zhivago got published but not this, as if maybe they were more afraid of threats to the scientific basis for Socialism.
It was refused by several Western chemistry and science journals as well with scathing criticism. I think someone in the USSR did take pity on him and it was published in an obscure Russian conference proceedings radio-chemistry. You have encouraged me to look into the history and I found this old article in the Wayback machine. It is a very sad story.
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He was awarded a posthumous Lenin medal for it in 1980 about thirty years after his research was refuse for publication. He was right but so far ahead of his time and unable to explain it that he wasn't believed.
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