DNA animation

[Martin Brown]

On 10/05/2019 03:15, Clifford Heath wrote:

On 10/5/19 2:42 am, Martin Brown wrote:
On 09/05/2019 15:42, Rick C wrote:
On Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 12:31:11 AM UTC-4, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2019-05-08, John Larkin <jjlarkin@highland_snip_technology.com
wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 16:54:08 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
There is still a lot of hand waving. As in
"it is fruitful to consider the alternative possibility that RNA was
preceded by some other replicating, evolving molecule, just as DNA and
proteins were preceded by RNA."

Its entirely reasonable to try and find the simplest possible
canonical thing that can be said to meet the minimum requirements for
"life".

Life is a quine (a program that outputs itself), but a special kind of
quine; it also outputs the machine that runs the program. The name for
this kind of quine is simply "life".

That is actually a very nice way to describe it in terms that an
engineer ought to be able to understand.

There are also a hierarchy of quines depending on how pure you require
them to be. The purest will work on any computer system that compiles
the language irrespective of the machine representation of characters.

The next level uses some dodgy line counting tricks to decide how to
output itself but will still run anywhere.

The weakest ones will only work on the platform that they were coded for
with ASCII or EBCDIC of other explicit constants escaped in to the code.

They are all quines but some are more elegant than others. >

In Conway's "Life", a two-dimensional field where each cell contains
either 0 or 1, and in each new generation, the content of each cell is
determined by its direct adjacency. The rules give rise to "gliders"
made of groups of four 1's that move infinitely through empty (0) space.

A more complex structure of a type which was long thought to be
impossible, called a "glider gun". This is a structure that periodically
emits gliders, and continues forever unless its damaged.

So far, we have not yet found a "glider gun gun" that emits copies of
itself, but it is definitely possible, since it has been shown possible
to construct a universal Turing machine - which is capable of computing
any computable function; including one that emits itself.

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~welling/teaching/271fall09/Turing-Machine-Life.pdf

There are videos of such things on Youtube also.

It is certainly known how to make a glider gun by colliding together 8
gliders and gun designs are know for all periods >14.

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Categoryatterns_that_can_be_constructed_with_8_gliders

A glider gun gun might require a rather large universe to construct one.

Within the world of Conway's Life, such a structure would be "living"
because it reproduces itself completely. The machine that implements the
"rules of the game" is analogous to particle physics in the real world,
so it's ambient, it doesn't need to be emitted by the living structure.

I agree. It would be a rather large pattern though and still remains to
be found.

They can only reproduce by hijacking the cellular apparatus of a
suitable host. They sit in the DMZ between life and non-life.

Virii are quines, but not life, because they don't emit the machine
required to run their program.

I think it really depends on how strictly you interpret the definition
of life. I tend to think of them as not quite alive since they only
consist of a package of genetic information waiting for a host.

Perhaps we'll find something like a virus, but whose operation is
essential to the life cycle of its host. That would not be "life", but
merely a part of a "living" organism.

It may well be that some essential components of life are present in
almost everything alive. Gene sequencing will eventually tell us.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 14/05/19 04:54, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 00:16:36 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Tom Gardner wrote:

Many of John's points and questions indicate he can't
get past the concept that a creator isn't necessary.

Maybe he is right. But then he must accept that the creator
does require a creator too. By exactly the same reasoning.

Sure, but don't assume that they look like us.

Only people that get their science from Star Dreck
would think that. (And I use the word "think" loosly).

But I don't understand why John continues to think
punting the key (interesting) issue to another planet
answers anything.

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 14/05/19 09:37, Martin Brown wrote:

On 11/05/2019 15:50, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 08:49:19 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/05/2019 03:10, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Martin Brown wrote:

It may take a lot longer than 50 years. We may never know how the
universe, or life, started.

I expect us to get close enough to a workable solution within a few
decades now and possibly the same for simulating consciousness.

Since we know sparking primordial gasses makes amino acids, why did it
become common decades after that discovery to speculate about origins
from comets or something?

A lot of the liquid water now on the Earth arrived in a later cometary
bombardment after the crust had solidified and chemistry in dense star
forming nebulae is capable of making quite a lot of complex molecules.

It isn't that far fetched that at least some of the precursors were made
in a hard UV illuminated environment as the solar system was forming. A
lot of simple organic chemicals have been seen in star forming regions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_and_circumstellar_molecules

Glycine was first detected in 2003 (Wiki list is out of date):

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/375637/meta

Curious C60 and C70 "dust" spectra had mystified astronomers for many
decades before the pure carbon compounds were found on Earth.

Sure, but a pile of TTL gates on a table don't spontaneously orgainze
themselves into a computer running Jill of the Jungle under MS DOS.

I have never seen Jill of the Jungle - how does it compare with Zork?

Chemistry though can be self organising when the right conditions arise and
certain clay like minerals look like pretty good templates.

Abiogenisis is at about the same position now as the previous dichotomy in
chemistry of vital chemistry vs inorganic chemistry. It was once widely believed
that there was something special aka "vitalism" about organic chemicals that
could never be replicated by inorganic ones. That was until Wohler synthesised
ammonium cyanate and showed that it was identical to urea (the main component of
mammalian urine).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6hler_synthesis

Liebig and Pasteur never abandoned vitalism. Indeed almost none of the old guard
did it took almost a generation before it was generally accepted in the chemical
literature that you could make organic compounds from inorganic raw materials.

When I was a kid there were many references to
"protoplasm" being the ingredient that separated
non-living things from living thing.

I remember trying to find out what "protoplasm" actually
was, and never finding a definition other than that.
I.e. magick designed to allow "informed" people to let
listeners (cf thinkers) to think there was any understanding.

And, of course, the amino acids from soup+lightning thing

The big problem isn't evolution, it's the origin of the incredible
cellular mechanisms around DNA. People shout that they are the same
issue, to avoid dealing with the obvious problem of origin.

You would doubtless also insist that Stonehenge was built by aliens as a landing
pad for flying saucers because it is no longer possible to see the evidence of
how stone age man actually constructed it.

It does seem that way, i.e.
I don't understand it
=> nobody understands it
=> it cannot be understood.

I wonder if John would accept a theologian making
such statements about electronics.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 11/05/2019 22:47, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 11 May 2019 17:27:28 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Absurd. I never suggested any such thing, and specifically said that I
am not invoking some diety to explain DNA-based life.

All I have suggeted is that the primordial soup immaculate conception
thing (remember when spontaneous generation was orthodox? You're too
young) is improbable, so something else might be considered. The
response from people without ideas is "creationist!"

I think you're too young to remember spontaneous generation too.

But what are the other alternatives, at least in general terms?

I read a book about Louis Pasteur when I was a kid. It's amazing that
people didn't already understand about germs, from mere folklore.

They thought that disease was spread by bad smells. Not an entirely
unreasonable idea. Leeuwenhook and later Hooke had seen animicules but
no-one had associated some of them with being pathogens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animalcule

It has been long known that drinking weak beer was preferable to water.
It wasn't until 1854 that someone proved that cholera was a water borne
infection by halting an outbreak in London. Even with the pathogen
identified people were still inclined to blame miasma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak

If intelligence was involved, whether it's god or aliens, then the
intelligence still needs its origin explained.

If not intelligence, then what?

If life popped up spontaneously on Earth, a few billion years ago,
from lifeless origins, it probably popped up somewhere else billions
of years before. The universe is maybe 1e10 years old and has maybe
1e21 stars. Big numbers.

Consider the possibilities.

Our star is about 5e9 years old. The first generation of stars in the
galaxy have to burn out and go supernova before there are the raw
materials for life. They are likely to be big heavy and fast burning.

It is possible life arises everywhere that has the right raw materials
but only gets truly interesting in a handful of places. We do not yet
know whether the Earth is a rare example of intelligent life or not.

I am inclined to think that life as in coloured slime will pop up
anywhere there are the right resources for it to arise.

Roughly a rocky planet not too big with a surface temperature around
300K, all three phases of water and plenty of organics and phosphates.
It might be possible for life to arise under a much wider range of
conditions but unless and until we find an example the one thing we can
be certain of is that our planet has life.

Life on Earth went through several critical gateways of near extinction
and explosive recolonisation. We might all be intelligent technological
lizards but for a cataclysmic impact that killed off all the dinosaurs.

Evolution is still going on. We are top dog for the moment but if we
screw it up and render the planet into a scorched nuclear wasteland then
insects will get their chance. Copper based blood is much more resistant
to radiation damage and an exoskeleton helps stop alpha particles.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 14/05/2019 04:50, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 13 May 2019 23:56:35 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Why would life arrive here as spores? Why not robotic spaceships with
chem labs, to cook up something appropriate on the spot?

Great. Created by whom?

Critters that were advanced a billion years after the Big Bang. Maybe
11 billion years ago. That's some head start.

That is far too soon after the Big Bang. The early universe was a more
violent place with a lot of rapid star formation and supernovae
sterilising chunks of space. Intelligent life took about 4bn years to
evolve on Earth even with allegedly some help from these wizards.

The first time around it is very very unlikely that they will achieve
our level of complexity inside 5bn years. We still do not have anything
that is realistically capable of interstellar travel either.

Build a few billion AI robotic chem labs?

Out of thin air?

Build robots that mine planets to build robots. It's less absurd than
DNA building itself.

Fermi probes. The problem is that if they existed they should be fairly
common so why haven't we seen any?

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a more
reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have. They might
have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid helium, or something.

You really do have absolutely no physical intuition whatsoever.

Do you think that human civilization will look the same in 1000, or
100,000 years?

It might still be recognisable in another 1000 years. But in 100k years
humans could very well be back to the pathetic hand to mouth existence
of the Easter Islanders after they had destroyed their very last tree.

We had better hope that some passing space faring nation do find us
before we completely trash the planet or the insects will get their turn
(they are already among the most numerous).

Why don't people believe in evolution?

It is you who are fighting against evolution and insisting on arbitrary
complex explanations for what is almost certainly a non-problem. We may
not yet have a complete explanation of how and when life arose but that
doesn't mean that you can invent crazy "just so" stories willy-nilly.

Why don't people have ideas?

Most people here have a reasonable grasp of physics and chemistry.

Demanding the pre-existence of a very complex and powerful system to
explain the beginning of a far less complex system is a lame
explanation. You will never avoid the prime mover issue that way.

Maybe the old guys were simpler, and invented us for fun.

This isn't sifi. It's reasonable and probable.
For incredibly small values of "probable".

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 13/05/2019 22:59, Piotr Wyderski wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

We may never know the origin of the universe or the origin of life.

We may never know the origin of the high-temperature superconductivity
as well. So what? Should we give up and not even try to find it out?

Worshippers at the Tree of Ignorance would have us do exactly that.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 13/05/2019 16:31, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 13 May 2019 07:56:38 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

On Saturday, May 11, 2019 at 10:42:44 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

Nobody here but me will even consider anything but self-replicating
RNA crawling out of promordial soup and going on to invent all the
stuff in the video. They can't allow themselves.

Actually I have already pointed out that another simpler sugar TNA
replicating molecules might have been before RNA. RNA is sort of a bit
too good to have been the original first entry into the game of life.

Some sort of panspermia should be checked. We should fly robots
to the likely planets and moons in the solar system. That would be
fun even if we didn't find any other life.

Panspermia is one of those ideas that is numerically probable but
mostly mocked for emotional reasons. Like germ theory and earth
circling the sun.

Panspermia has a reasonable pedigree with the likes of Sir Fred Hoyle
and Wickramasinghe doing some research into the possibility that life is
ubiquitous and extra terrestrial. It is a possibility that cannot be
ruled out and could perhaps be experimentally confirmed if we found long
since diverged DNA on another planet or asteroid in the solar system.

Fred Hoyle also had considerable difficulty in accepting that Darwinian
evolution could explain the diversity of life on Earth.

https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/scientists_hoyle.html

Interesting guy - he would probably have got a Nobel prize for stellar
nucleosynthesis if he hadn't made a point of becoming unpopular with
many of his colleagues.

However, it doesn't get you out of the bind of abiogenesis. Somewhere at
sometime the very first self replicating life like molecule has to arise
by chance. Otherwise you are back to a "just so" story explanation.

If God had wanted to sign the universe then making the fine structure
constant exactly 1/137 would have been one way to do it. That was a
possibility back then we now know that it is 1/Îą is 137.035999139(31).

But probably not from our solar system, which is too small and too
young.

It isn't all *that* young. About a third of the age of the universe.
Why do you think our solar system is "too small" and compared to what?

You can put some bounds on where to look for intelligent life. Star too
small then it flares too much and cooks inner planets, star too big and
it doesn't last long enough for anything interesting to get going. You
are pretty much compelled to look at F/G/M stars with mass ranges within
a factor of maybe 3 or 4 of our sun if looking for life. There is a
goldilocks region where life as we know it can comfortably exist.

It may also be necessary for a life generating planet to have a
moderately large moon in an initially close orbit to scour the seas and
put enough raw materials into solution for things to get interesting.
(certainly that is a part of how the Earth initially got started)

Phosphate groups have just the right sort of coordination chemistry to
make very useful molecules for storing and retrieving chemical energy.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 13/05/2019 14:37, Rick C wrote:

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 5:48:57 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 10/05/2019 17:35, Rick C wrote:
On Friday, May 10, 2019 at 1:01:07 AM UTC-4, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2019-05-09, Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 12:31:11 AM UTC-4, Jasen Betts
wrote:
On 2019-05-08, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highland_snip_technology.com> wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 16:54:08 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:


There is still a lot of hand waving. As in

"it is fruitful to consider the alternative possibility
that RNA was preceded by some other replicating,
evolving molecule, just as DNA and proteins were preceded
by RNA."

Is that a fact? In modern life, DNA builds RNA.

Reverse transcriptase does the opposite.

but the RNA for that is found in retroviruses so it could
be argued that it's not "life", weasel words that pomoters
of that claim may cling to.

Really? There are people who claim viruses are not life? I
don't know what they think viruses are then.

See "MRS GREN" they do no have many of the properties
associated with living things

Which of those things are not true for viruses? I suppose
respiration maybe. But otherwise they do all of the above. You
need to look at their full life cycle and not just the spore
state.

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".

I think you are being rather arbitrary about judging viruses. There
are numerous bacteria which do very little or nothing at all in a
spore state. It is only when they are in a hospitable environment
that they "come alive" and begin to reproduce. Same with many plant
seeds.

The difference is that whereas a virus absolutely depends on its target
host for replication the bacteria and archaea are fully self contained.

Your point seems to fixate on the fact that the virus requires a host
not just as food, but the means of reproduction. I don't see where
that makes it any less alive. It reproduces, has motion, feeds and
most importantly - the one essential thing left out of MRS GREN -
mutates to allow for evolution.

It copies imperfectly and so can evolve. That is true. But on its own it
only has the power to infect particular target host cells. If there are
no suitable host cells remaining then it is effectively inert.

The fact that they usurp a host cell to do these things doesn't
mean they aren't happening. Viruses are parasitic and like many
parasites they can not complete their life cycle without
infecting the host.

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.

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 reproduction.

I think they have also been shown to evolve as they jumped the species
barrier into humans. That scrapie had never done so gave us a false
sense of security and John Selwyn Gummer force feeding his granddaughter
with a beefburger was caught on camera.

Thanks to BSE I could no longer donate blood when I lived overseas.

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.

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 spread BSE as well as actual brain tissue does. We just
got lucky.

It was back in the care free days when they really did go out of their
way to put the junk into "junk food" for humans and for animals. What
was surprising was how quickly something took advantage of the niche.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 14 May 2019 10:32:29 +0100, Tom Gardner
<spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/19 04:54, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 14 May 2019 00:16:36 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Tom Gardner wrote:

Many of John's points and questions indicate he can't
get past the concept that a creator isn't necessary.

Maybe he is right. But then he must accept that the creator
does require a creator too. By exactly the same reasoning.

Sure, but don't assume that they look like us.

Only people that get their science from Star Dreck
would think that. (And I use the word "think" loosly).

But I don't understand why John continues to think
punting the key (interesting) issue to another planet
answers anything.

Because here may be incremental-evolution ways to make life from
scratch, but it ain't ours.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 14 May 2019 10:23:34 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/05/2019 22:47, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 17:27:28 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Absurd. I never suggested any such thing, and specifically said that I
am not invoking some diety to explain DNA-based life.

All I have suggeted is that the primordial soup immaculate conception
thing (remember when spontaneous generation was orthodox? You're too
young) is improbable, so something else might be considered. The
response from people without ideas is "creationist!"

I think you're too young to remember spontaneous generation too.

But what are the other alternatives, at least in general terms?

I read a book about Louis Pasteur when I was a kid. It's amazing that
people didn't already understand about germs, from mere folklore.

They thought that disease was spread by bad smells. Not an entirely
unreasonable idea. Leeuwenhook and later Hooke had seen animicules but
no-one had associated some of them with being pathogens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animalcule

It has been long known that drinking weak beer was preferable to water.
It wasn't until 1854 that someone proved that cholera was a water borne
infection by halting an outbreak in London. Even with the pathogen
identified people were still inclined to blame miasma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak


If intelligence was involved, whether it's god or aliens, then the
intelligence still needs its origin explained.

If not intelligence, then what?

If life popped up spontaneously on Earth, a few billion years ago,
from lifeless origins, it probably popped up somewhere else billions
of years before. The universe is maybe 1e10 years old and has maybe
1e21 stars. Big numbers.

Consider the possibilities.

Our star is about 5e9 years old. The first generation of stars in the
galaxy have to burn out and go supernova before there are the raw
materials for life. They are likely to be big heavy and fast burning.

It is possible life arises everywhere that has the right raw materials
but only gets truly interesting in a handful of places. We do not yet
know whether the Earth is a rare example of intelligent life or not.

I am inclined to think that life as in coloured slime will pop up
anywhere there are the right resources for it to arise.

Roughly a rocky planet not too big with a surface temperature around
300K, all three phases of water and plenty of organics and phosphates.
It might be possible for life to arise under a much wider range of
conditions but unless and until we find an example the one thing we can
be certain of is that our planet has life.

Life on Earth went through several critical gateways of near extinction
and explosive recolonisation. We might all be intelligent technological
lizards but for a cataclysmic impact that killed off all the dinosaurs.

Evolution is still going on. We are top dog for the moment but if we
screw it up and render the planet into a scorched nuclear wasteland then
insects will get their chance. Copper based blood is much more resistant
to radiation damage and an exoskeleton helps stop alpha particles.

I think that the self-building DNA structure had to exist before it
could exist. That's kind of a paradox.

So, my most-likely opinion is that our DNA-based life form could not
have been created by evolution, but was designed to evolve.

That should make everyone happy.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Rick C]

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 11:50:35 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 13 May 2019 23:56:35 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Why would life arrive here as spores? Why not robotic spaceships with
chem labs, to cook up something appropriate on the spot?

Great. Created by whom?

Critters that were advanced a billion years after the Big Bang. Maybe
11 billion years ago. That's some head start.


Build a few billion AI robotic chem labs?

Out of thin air?

Build robots that mine planets to build robots. It's less absurd than
DNA building itself.

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a more
reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have. They might
have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid helium, or something.

Sorry, "more reasonable" way? What does that mean???

Do you think that human civilization will look the same in 1000, or
100,000 years?

Why don't people believe in evolution?

People do believe in evolution. Idiots don't believe in the scientific evidence behind evolution.


> Why don't people have ideas?

Sorry? Are you being introspective here?

Demanding the pre-existence of a very complex and powerful system to
explain the beginning of a far less complex system is a lame
explanation. You will never avoid the prime mover issue that way.

Maybe the old guys were simpler, and invented us for fun.

This isn't sifi. It's reasonable and probable.

LOL! So where are these "old guys"? Like on Star Gate, the ancients are long gone? They made us and died?

Or maybe they are still around and manipulating use for their amusement like in the Randy Newman song.

John may think the idea of life having been created by "old guys" is "reasonable", but he seems to be ignorant that it is totally untestable.

I don't typically bother with such discussions with friends other than to point out the futility of trying to prove it one way or the other since we will gain knowledge in this area very slowly. Anyone who insists either idea is impossible is not in possession of the facts. But it is totally clear there is no evidence supporting creationism. It has to be accepted on faith.

When people ask me why I don't believe in god I reply that if god cared if I believed in him he would simply let me know that in a way a mere mortal can understand. I don't believe anyone so omnipotent would have to hide his presence so that he would need to be "believed" in on faith alone. If he wants me to know he is there I'm sure he will tap me on the shoulder and tell me.

--

Rick C.

-+--- Get a 5,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 9:07:35 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:

On 13/05/2019 14:37, Rick C wrote:
On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 5:48:57 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 10/05/2019 17:35, Rick C wrote:
On Friday, May 10, 2019 at 1:01:07 AM UTC-4, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2019-05-09, Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 12:31:11 AM UTC-4, Jasen Betts
wrote:
On 2019-05-08, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highland_snip_technology.com> wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 16:54:08 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:


There is still a lot of hand waving. As in

"it is fruitful to consider the alternative possibility
that RNA was preceded by some other replicating,
evolving molecule, just as DNA and proteins were preceded
by RNA."

Is that a fact? In modern life, DNA builds RNA.

Reverse transcriptase does the opposite.

but the RNA for that is found in retroviruses so it could
be argued that it's not "life", weasel words that pomoters
of that claim may cling to.

Really? There are people who claim viruses are not life? I
don't know what they think viruses are then.

See "MRS GREN" they do no have many of the properties
associated with living things

Which of those things are not true for viruses? I suppose
respiration maybe. But otherwise they do all of the above. You
need to look at their full life cycle and not just the spore
state.

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".

I think you are being rather arbitrary about judging viruses. There
are numerous bacteria which do very little or nothing at all in a
spore state. It is only when they are in a hospitable environment
that they "come alive" and begin to reproduce. Same with many plant
seeds.

The difference is that whereas a virus absolutely depends on its target
host for replication the bacteria and archaea are fully self contained.

An arbitrary distinction. You want to "see" the virus as the object that carries the seed of viral life then I get that. But I look at the life cycle and a virus has one, so clearly it is alive. The fact that it has cast off loaded it's excess baggage and uses the nest of another like a Cuckoo doesn't mean it isn't alive.

Your point seems to fixate on the fact that the virus requires a host
not just as food, but the means of reproduction. I don't see where
that makes it any less alive. It reproduces, has motion, feeds and
most importantly - the one essential thing left out of MRS GREN -
mutates to allow for evolution.

It copies imperfectly and so can evolve. That is true. But on its own it
only has the power to infect particular target host cells. If there are
no suitable host cells remaining then it is effectively inert.

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.

The fact that they usurp a host cell to do these things doesn't
mean they aren't happening. Viruses are parasitic and like many
parasites they can not complete their life cycle without
infecting the host.

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.

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 reproduction.

I think they have also been shown to evolve as they jumped the species
barrier into humans. That scrapie had never done so gave us a false
sense of security and John Selwyn Gummer force feeding his granddaughter
with a beefburger was caught on camera.

Thanks to BSE I could no longer donate blood when I lived overseas.

You are probably lucky. I donated platelets so much my veins are damaged and they can no longer get a needle in my arm. You can donate too much which they won't tell you and never even keep track of.


--

Rick C.

-+-+- Get a 5,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+-+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 10:00:37 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

I think that the self-building DNA structure had to exist before it
could exist. That's kind of a paradox.

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.

So, my most-likely opinion is that our DNA-based life form could not
have been created by evolution, but was designed to evolve.

That should make everyone happy.

Yes, I'm happy to agree that this is your gut feeling and not based on any facts.


--

Rick C.

-+-++ Get a 5,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+-++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Tim Williams]

"Clifford Heath" <no.spam@please.net> wrote in message
news:jZmCE.33381$2%2.2575@fx08.iad...

Hard to get the heat out if you go properly 3D. You'd need a densely
folded structure with the hot bits around the folded surfaces, and
reticulated fluid cooling... wait, that's starting to sound remarkably
like the cortex of a brain!

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?..)

And even harder to debug... plus you have to think about fault recovery.
The smaller the machinery the smaller the error that fouls up its
operation... you need, hmm what shall we call this... and immune system?

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...

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design
Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 12:00:37 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 10:23:34 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/05/2019 22:47, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 17:27:28 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Absurd. I never suggested any such thing, and specifically said that I
am not invoking some diety to explain DNA-based life.

All I have suggeted is that the primordial soup immaculate conception
thing (remember when spontaneous generation was orthodox? You're too
young) is improbable, so something else might be considered. The
response from people without ideas is "creationist!"

I think you're too young to remember spontaneous generation too.

But what are the other alternatives, at least in general terms?

I read a book about Louis Pasteur when I was a kid. It's amazing that
people didn't already understand about germs, from mere folklore.

They thought that disease was spread by bad smells. Not an entirely
unreasonable idea. Leeuwenhook and later Hooke had seen animicules but
no-one had associated some of them with being pathogens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animalcule

It has been long known that drinking weak beer was preferable to water.
It wasn't until 1854 that someone proved that cholera was a water borne
infection by halting an outbreak in London. Even with the pathogen
identified people were still inclined to blame miasma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak


If intelligence was involved, whether it's god or aliens, then the
intelligence still needs its origin explained.

If not intelligence, then what?

If life popped up spontaneously on Earth, a few billion years ago,
from lifeless origins, it probably popped up somewhere else billions
of years before. The universe is maybe 1e10 years old and has maybe
1e21 stars. Big numbers.

Consider the possibilities.

Our star is about 5e9 years old. The first generation of stars in the
galaxy have to burn out and go supernova before there are the raw
materials for life. They are likely to be big heavy and fast burning.

It is possible life arises everywhere that has the right raw materials
but only gets truly interesting in a handful of places. We do not yet
know whether the Earth is a rare example of intelligent life or not.

I am inclined to think that life as in coloured slime will pop up
anywhere there are the right resources for it to arise.

Roughly a rocky planet not too big with a surface temperature around
300K, all three phases of water and plenty of organics and phosphates.
It might be possible for life to arise under a much wider range of
conditions but unless and until we find an example the one thing we can
be certain of is that our planet has life.

Life on Earth went through several critical gateways of near extinction
and explosive recolonisation. We might all be intelligent technological
lizards but for a cataclysmic impact that killed off all the dinosaurs.

Evolution is still going on. We are top dog for the moment but if we
screw it up and render the planet into a scorched nuclear wasteland then
insects will get their chance. Copper based blood is much more resistant
to radiation damage and an exoskeleton helps stop alpha particles.

I think that the self-building DNA structure had to exist before it
could exist. That's kind of a paradox.

More statement of incomprehension. It's fairly clear that DNA-based life evolved from RNA-based life, because there are still some RNA-based enzymes around. Tom Gardener seems to know of some speculations that therose-nucleic acid compounds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threose_nucleic_acid

preceded ribose nucleic acid (RNA).

So, my most-likely opinion is that our DNA-based life form could not
have been created by evolution, but was designed to evolve.

Your most-likely opinion is based on remarkably inadequate information. Somebody with more sense would get better informed before spreadign his opinions around,

> That should make everyone happy.

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 nonsense 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 this.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Martin Brown]

On 14/05/2019 15:00, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 10:23:34 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Evolution is still going on. We are top dog for the moment but if we
screw it up and render the planet into a scorched nuclear wasteland then
insects will get their chance. Copper based blood is much more resistant
to radiation damage and an exoskeleton helps stop alpha particles.

I think that the self-building DNA structure had to exist before it
could exist. That's kind of a paradox.

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?

So, my most-likely opinion is that our DNA-based life form could not
have been created by evolution, but was designed to evolve.

That should make everyone happy.

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.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Jeroen Belleman]

Rick C wrote:
[...]

Humans will not be different in any significant way in 1,000
years. Are we any different than we were 1,000 years ago? [...]

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.

Jeroen Belleman

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

Martin Brown wrote:

On 11/05/2019 15:50, John Larkin wrote:

Sure, but a pile of TTL gates on a table don't spontaneously orgainze
themselves into a computer running Jill of the Jungle under MS DOS.

I have never seen Jill of the Jungle - how does it compare with Zork?

Jill had a much much much better body. When she climbed jungle vines
her thighs moved a certain way.

Incidentally several very striking non-equilibrium self organising
chemical reactions are known which date back as far as Turing although
the most curious is probably the Belousov-Zabotinsky reaction.

https://www.faidherbe.org/site/cours/dupuis/oscil.htm

and

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Belousov-Zhabotinsky_reaction

Take a look at the pictures even if you don't understand the maths.

Poor Belousov was on the wrong side of the Iron curtain and was unable
to get his very counterintuitive reaction published.

It must have gone against dialectical materialism.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 1:25:51 AM UTC+10, Martin Brown wrote:

On 14/05/2019 15:50, Rick C wrote:
On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7:04:31 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2019 04:50, John Larkin wrote:

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a
more reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have.
They might have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid
helium, or something.

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.

It hasn't. The microwave background radiation is currently at 2.725K and superpfluid He-4 needs to be cooler than 2.172K.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluid_helium-4

You really do have absolutely no physical intuition whatsoever.

JL's talents include designing analog electronics at the board level,
drinking beer and eating burgers. He is largely ignorant of the
greater world and chooses to remain that way. Are you really
surprised at this point?

He is still a decent engineer and obviously intelligent. I cannot
understand why he has such a preference for "just so" stories.

Do you think that human civilization will look the same in 1000,
or 100,000 years?

It might still be recognisable in another 1000 years. But in 100k
years humans could very well be back to the pathetic hand to mouth
existence of the Easter Islanders after they had destroyed their
very last tree.

Humans will not be different in any significant way in 1,000 years.
Are we any different than we were 1,000 years ago? But it is a

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_human_height

That is down to better nutrition rather than genetics. Although the
proportion of overweight obese people has also increased as well.

pointless question for this conversation. JL is suggesting that
evolution will make major inroads into our existence while it was
highly improbable that the current DNA replication process could have
evolved in a billion years. Huh?

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.

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.

In other words, his mind is blown!

I think he might well have a point if 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.

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.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Martin Brown]

On 14/05/2019 15:50, Rick C wrote:

On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7:04:31 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2019 04:50, John Larkin wrote:

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a
more reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have.
They might have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid
helium, or something.

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.

You really do have absolutely no physical intuition whatsoever.

JL's talents include designing analog electronics at the board level,
drinking beer and eating burgers. He is largely ignorant of the
greater world and chooses to remain that way. Are you really
surprised at this point?

He is still a decent engineer and obviously intelligent. I cannot
understand why he has such a preference for "just so" stories.

Do you think that human civilization will look the same in 1000,
or 100,000 years?

It might still be recognisable in another 1000 years. But in 100k
years humans could very well be back to the pathetic hand to mouth
existence of the Easter Islanders after they had destroyed their
very last tree.

Humans will not be different in any significant way in 1,000 years.
Are we any different than we were 1,000 years ago? But it is a

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_human_height

That is down to better nutrition rather than genetics. Although the
proportion of overweight obese people has also increased as well.

pointless question for this conversation. JL is suggesting that
evolution will make major inroads into our existance while it was
highly improbable that the current DNA replication process could have
evolved in a billion years. Huh?

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.

In other words, his mind is blown!

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.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown