I dealt with the page for as long as I could, scrolled, saw no video and came back here for someone to surely give the direct link. I think someone has trained me, but for what purpose I am not sure.
It took almost 10 seconds to load on my gigabit connection, then a banner came up over the play button before finally a pop up forcing me to give my email to continue. At that point I X’d out and came here.
And yet there it is, and what's more the finished product comes fully loaded with all sorts of instinct about the physical world, plus an ability to learn as it goes that our AI can't hold a candle to.
And that's just the Salamander version. Feed in a different strip of ticker tape and now you're looking at your very self emerge.
I am unable to fully explain my birth and existence through evolution alone. I become little aware of the immense beauty and complexity in the natural world and space and feel that there must be God. HN, how have you confronted and answered that question.
Read more science books and then you can fully explain it!
One of the best arguments that there is no God is exactly that beauty and complexity. It's only complex in a certain type of way, an evolutionary type of way.
No animal has jet boots, or fusion power, or laser beam eyes, or the billions of really useful, but impossible/really, really hard to evolve features. There's no design. There's no plan. There's only evolution baby!
You'll have to make do with some generalizations though, trying to go into the detail of every single thing is probably beyond what can be read in a single human's life time now.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is pretty good start, or Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins, which is a book about how science makes nature even more beautiful by explaining it, not less.
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” - Heisenberg
It doesn’t matter whether I’m atheist or not, but to state that you can fully explain - well - any process of the universe is simply naive. There are areas we know many things about, but biology itself has an enormous amount of accidental complexity, (which is often brought up by atheists as a criticism of design) for example many many signal path ways that do fundamentally the same thing, but differently. Compared to that, spaghetti codes have good architecture.
Whether God exists or not is imo orthogonal to the complexity of the world around us.
Interestingly, no, it isn't fully explained as of today. Schopenhauer's quote of "Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle" is still true today.
No, starting from beetle eggs does not count. They point is no one knows how to start from the inert chemicals that make up a beetle and cause them to assemble into a living beetle. More generally, abiogenesis has not been cracked.
Perhaps, but we also know today that a God doesn't pull the Sun up every day, no Goddess blows on the Sea to make the tides, no God gets angry and explodes mountains, and there's no Goddess painting the ceiling of the world with stars.
We do, however, know pretty much roughly how a beetle grows, how cells and DNA work, cell division, hell, even atoms, and their constituents. Even if we can't replicate it 100% yet.
Is your God one of hundreds of thousands that have been forgotten? Or do you just happen to follow one of the modern trendy ones? Is it Thor? Athena? Xerxes? Why is yours so special compared to the 99,999 that have been discarded?
First of all, I though we are past the time where attacking other’s beliefs is acceptable.
Second, have you ever heard of this thing called philosophy? It is not useless to think about the word in an abstract way - without necessary relevance to the physical world. Like, what IS math?
By the way, I do not approve of those believer that go against science, since I think belief and actual reality can go hand-in-hand, and even with God, or perhaps because of Him, one can appreciate the beauty of sciences.
I respect beliefs that aren't pushed on someone. For example, I have a working idea of the universe with regards to sprituality that involves neither science nor religion. I don't push that belief on others, I only offer it when my opinion is asked, and I discuss it with an open mind towards the idea that I might be completely wrong. That type of belief should absolutely be respected.
If we start from a primitive prokaryote, we pretty much nailed it. However, there's no experimentally verified theory of going from organic molecules to life.
I'm Christian, and I believe in evolution, the big bang, old earth.. They're not contradictory. There are actually a lot of Christians who believe in those things. CS Lewis believed in an old earth while also believing in God.
I usually try avoid religious debates on HN though.
Belief has nothing to do with forming and testing hypotheses. You don't "believe" in evolution or the big bang or an old earth. Scientific inquiry 101.
And sure, I get your overall point. I was Christian until age 26. I worked two years as a missionary in a foreign country, 90hr weeks, no pay, for my Christian beliefs. What "God" meant to everyone I encountered throughout that time, before, and after, is/was always a bit different. Ultimately we create our own personal God, and what that means can be compatible with honest and rigorous scientific inquiry. But you have to throw out large portions of the bible and accept that it's largely a work of art and useful fiction, and I will place $1000 down on a bet that the vast majority of "Christians" would bristle at such ideas.
But yeah, best to stay away from discussions of religion with anyone except your closest friends. Even then it's usually ill advised unless you have hours to sift through the nuance and are very good communicators.
> You don't "believe" in evolution or the big bang or an old earth. Scientific inquiry 101.
"Believe" is absolutely the right word; most of us don't have the time, inclination, or ability to perform the scientific method required to demonstrate evolution, big bang, or old earth. Outside of a very small number of people, the overwhelming majority of us are taking it on faith that these theories are correct.
Depends how you define your "Christians." Wikipedia mentions 53.6% of Brits as Christian but as Brit I think I can safely say most of those don't take the bible seriously. Or Christ for that matter.
Yes, I would say that is the case in the eu too. Where I am now, the majority of people are supposed to be catholic, but besides a handful of people, no one cares. And of that handful, the ones I have spoken to, do not believe either, they just consider it tradition; on Sunday they like the social interaction during and after church which involves drinking spirits with coffee.
To play the devil's advocate, suppose we show that organic life can spontaneously emerge from basic building blocks under certain conditions. Even then, there's a chance that those conditions were not present on Earth when life appeared here. It might be the case that a God had to artificially create them. And the first life was here billions of years ago, chances are we can't ever be sure.
I don’t see how the existence of God should be denied by science. In a never ending effort, science will ultimately explain God.
We all are able to take that little step inside our consciousness, trusting our innermost ancestral intuition and logic... to be grateful and humble in front of whatever is behind this universe.
I've read some books on evolution, many about philosophy and religion, and I find it all fascinating, but I didn't completely escape that feeling that it's not enough...
But, instead of saying "these explanations aren't satisfying, there must be a god behind these misteries", my position is "these beautiful explanations aren't completely satisfying, I'm left with some uncomfortable questions, and that's just part of being a human being".
I've been a devout catholic, I've been a kinda-skeptical non-denominational christian, I've been a staunch atheist and a buddhist-leaning agnostic... and I've never felt that I could find perfect answers. Some uncomfortable questioning will always be there, and it's better to try to make your peace with it before trying to solve it.
Trying to solve it is also fine, but not the complete answer.
The best answer is "we don't know until we do", so the best thing to do is to throw out any pseudoscience (name it god, budda, UFO's, chemtrails or the Bigfoot) to the trash until there's enough scientifical proof of it.
Beliefs are not solely there to explain the “unexplainable”, you forgot the human part of it.
I agree that explaining what we don’t know with God is, well.. not explaining it.
But if the said believer is not blinded by the charlatany branch of his/her religion (in case of Christianity there are many such, and many are absolutely fine with sciences), then I don’t see no evil.
For some people it is calming to know that their loved ones “can’t” inexplicably die in every moment in an accident, that perhaps someone is watching over them - and many other, fundamental human innate cravings that want a God. (Which of course begs the question of isn’t God just a projection)
>For some people it is calming to know that their loved ones “can’t” inexplicably die in every moment.
Same issue. Life is neither fair or unfair, it just is. There's no good or back luck per se, just events ongoing.
It sucks, I know, but thanks to science and trying to understand how the Universe works, we invented the seat belt, for example.
Or automatic braking systems for car. And yet, no magic or praying involved. Just lots of hard work.
You can stay quiet and do nothing, or you can have a better understanding of your surrondings to avoid the less accidents, the better.
The world may be rational, the human mind is definitely not (even when we believe so) - for some people, believing in a higher entity helps. And they can work harder because of it, or simply have better mental health.
Also, many scientists were/is religious, so let it be a personal choice, up until it doesn’t hurt others.
What about non-experimental questions, like how did life form? There is useful research regarding these questions with great, educated guesses on the unknowable parts - is it not science?
Also, nitpick but it would be absurd to call ‘religion’ not real. Like, one of the most fundamental organizations in the previous centuries is something I would not call non-existent. Whether God exists or not is a different, philosophical question - and to a degree it is similar to the how did life start on Earth question, with hypotheses that can’t necessarily be verified.
What I am reading is: "the [universe] is so large and complex, and I feel that it is beautiful, therefore there must be some entity that created it"
How does that logically follow? To me that is clearly just a projection of the human concept of a "creator", a person who makes things (like a house, a fire, or a website), onto the universe. I see no reason to project my human experiences and ideas onto something as vast as the universe. Whatever is "out there" or "beyond" is by definition something that far exceeds our comprehension, our human concepts. If you want to call that "god", so be it, but I don't see how that's anything more than just a placeholder for something we can't reach.
We can, on the other hand, gradually understand more and more of the laws and properties of the universe itself, and how those work together to create the phenomena we find in the universe. All those gaps in the subset of phenomena that we can observe, I am confident that we are at least theoretically capable of understanding.
Humans understand these things because they are persons. Where did their personhood come from if not another person? How personhood can arise out of non-personhood is unexplained.
"Personhood" seems a very arbitrary (and not at all clearly defined) qualification here. "Understanding" arises from thinking, not from "personhood". And surely, there are non-person minds that understand less complex things. That they can evolve to achieve person-caliber capabilities incrementally and over long periods of time is well-accepted.
As an aside, we can't communicate very well with the smartest animals, so we don't know how much they can understand. It could be more than most of us think.
That's merely your conclusion. Others (like me) understand God as a being that was not created. Being Created contradicts Divinity. It's like asking "Who killed Newton's wife" when Newton, in fact, had no wife.
I conclude that God is the origin of everything. this is something you can't prove or disprove with Science. Some might argue it's not worth thinking about, but it comes down to the individual whether they want to think about it or not.
I get the stellar opposite reaction. One look at evolution, the terror of it, the inhumanity, and I'm convinced there is no higher power. At least none a human being should pray to.
I haven't. I think people are too afraid to say "I don't know".
But man, our universe sure is weird. On a fundamental level. I think people under-model just how strange our universe is. Even things like Pi. Why does Pi equal Pi? What an unlikely number to define something fundamental about the universe itself. Or take the logistic map [0]. I mean, what? Why is our universe this way? Or Euler's Identity (e^(pi*i) = -1). Why e? Why pi? I get that the math works, why does the universe need those values for the math to work?
Does pi (math) exist at all is perhaps the more interesting question. Or that why can seemingly ‘random’ rules we made up be applied to the real world. Especially when it comes to infinity.
With you 100% on the totally human reaction. Which interestingly covers awe and perhaps even bordering on worship, if I’m recognizing the reaction - one of the reasons biology is queen of the sciences IMHO. However, is it correct to say that what is being witnessed is evolution? Seems to not match up with evolutionary theory in any of it’s current definitions that I’m familiar with.
Think of life as a huge legacy system. It's incredibly complex, yet many of the systems are on the brink of exploding. DNA code is a mess: remnants of retroviruses, non-functional pseudogenes, the expression patterns are incredibly hard to understand. If a God was building the life around us, I'd imagine it to be much more tidy. You know, God being all-mighty and all.
Well, it is known from the formal logic that one can deduce anything based on a false assumption. One can explain anything based on the God hypothesis. Therefore the hypothesis is wrong.
I believe it’s a cornerstone of rational thinking to be able to accept that I don’t know something. To, when confronted with something like this, think only “I don’t understand that”, not “I don’t understand that, therefore I’m going to assume my guess about it is right.”
> These books should help you understand the science behind life's existence
Those can explain how life evolves once it already exists. And there's no argument about that, we know many laws governing those processes, from molecular to population-scale models.
However, nobody was able to show that life can emerge from non-living matter.
My current working idea is that the universe itself is conscious, and that life is merely a small chunk of that consciousness attached to physical flesh. I have no evidence of this, of course, just merely gut feelings. Everything is viewed and understood through the human filter, even our own existence itself. That human filter has no frame of reference for what could be before or after.
Right so the idea being, whoever is pondering where they came from, by definition is already that 1 in a gazillion node in the compute cluster that actually arrived at a viable solution. Is that what you're getting at?
I hear you, but it seems neat that our ticker tape yields a meat bag that likes to send rockets to other hunks of rock in a giant cold vacuum (for example). Salamanders on a cosmic scale are probably difficult to distinguish from humans – just more bundles of cellular automata that share more in common than they don't, but the differences are fascinating from an earthly/human perspective.
I really wonder, too - does a dog care as much about a salamander as a human? How about a crow? Do crows think we're interesting at all? It's impossible to say.
Ultimately you're right though, we're just creatures trying to survive in various ways. Humans have very sophisticated ways of doing it, but they aren't inherently more amazing outside of the human lens.
> I hear you, but it seems neat that our ticker tape yields a meat bag that likes to send rockets to other hunks of rock in a giant cold vacuum (for example).
I'd suggest as individuals of our species, we're not much more interesting than ribosomes -- one could say that ribosomes execute all the stuff in the salamander video (hey, they print the DNA into proteins).
Humans are maybe just biological machinery in the organism of culture, like ribosomes are the molecular machinery in the organism of biology. Culture does all those amazing things, and humans just skim along the unfathomably long and multi-dimensional ticker tape of language/culture :)
Just my 2c, of course, and the way I stay humble about humanity
I get the desire to stay humble. This feels like splitting hairs though.
You would say it's not humans, but human culture that is causing global extinction event?
Well, okay.
In any case, you may find the book 'Sapiens' interesting. It argues that the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life is our ability to abstract and conceptualize.
Respectfully, it doesn't feel like splitting hairs to me... but quite a significant frame-shift. (Defensive credentializing: I'm a former biochemist and now technologist and event facilitator, with a fascination for the always-evolving fields of social physics & complexity science.)
This theory proposes that language is a separate strata of organism/information that co-evolved with the host biology of the human mind. i.e. We're unique not because we're simply "the smartest biology", but rather, we're more like a cyborg of two organisms, one biological and one semiotic. As a assemblage, we have vastly overrepresented dominance of the semiotic organism compared to other creatures who host very primitive semiotic organisms.
In this frame, humans can be conceptualized as individuals, but alternatively as simply hosts to the mind, which functions as the replication machinery of the larger social organism that takes shape between minds in the strata above (organizations, nations, culture).
I'm still chewing on all this stuff, mind you :) And thank you for the recommendation -- I really need to pick up that book!
It is debatable whether "the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life" i.e. "our ability to abstract and conceptualize" is unique to humans.
Cat's and dogs abstract and conceptualise. So do crows and whales. But more than that, before you get too carried away with the importance of this "fundamental change", consider the possibility that the ability to "abstract and conceptualise" doesn't yield a "fundamental change" at all.
How can that be?
Consider the ends to which all this abstract thought is being applied.
Why do humans spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours buying and applying makeup to their faces?
Why do humans spend thousands of hours in the studio creating the latest dance music hits?
Why do humans buy the biggest, fastest cars?
Why do humans spend weeks comparing and assessing home insulation materials from multiple vendors?
Why do humans spend thousands of years developing steel making traditions that result in the finest weaponry?
Why do humans use google maps navigation?
Are humans, with all their advanced skills at abstraction and conceptualisation, and vocabulary and communication sophistication, doing anything that birds and bees and whales and cows aren't already doing?
All us animals are just waking up every day, checking on the kids, going to work, getting hungry, fixing lunch, getting horny, feeling frustrated, lashing out, seeking to impress, preening our feathers, and, from time to time, thanking our lucky stars.
What else can we do? Technology doesn't change that. It just gives us different ways to do the same things we and other animals have been doing since the dawn of life on earth.
> It is debatable whether "the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life" i.e. "our ability to abstract and conceptualize" is unique to humans.
I like your questions.
I'm not disagreeing (unsure myself), but this talk of what "the fundamental" is, it makes me want to share about another hypothesis: that the mind's ability to operate via "recursion" is the feature from which a bunch of other things emerged. A good book that lays the case, still reading, but very thought-provoking: https://www.amazon.ca/Recursive-Mind-Origins-Language-Civili...
So if that's true, it's less about there being some fundamental core difference between us and animals. I think I agree that the same underlying drives motivate. I understand that the core drive of all life (below the particulars of our biological strata) are perhaps seeking the right alchemical mix of (1) entropy/micro-diversity and (2) cycles/periodicity and (3) compartmentalization [1]. These drive information-creation about the environment -- mapping information of the environment into the structures "trying" to buffer themselves from change in a chaotic environment. But "trying" is anthropomorphizing (and applying false agency), and in essence, this simply allows a structure of any scale or medium to "persist" better into the next tick of the engine ;) And a structure that persists tends to have information about the environment (and the environment's future) encoded within itself. This encoding in persistent structures is what we tend to read as free-will and agency.
But anyhow, in a round-about way, I'm just proposing that perhaps "recursion" was the "new innovation" that biology of human mind stumbled upon, that really expanded the capacity to persist. And language, which not a result of new drives, fell out of that new ability of minds :)
ps, sorry for rant, i get excited about this stuff! sorry if overload, and apologies for not citing the web of readings that led me here. Happy to linkshare, if you're interested, as I certainly have sources and go back to them often! e.g., [2] [3] :)
Thanks for that. It didn't sound ranty, particularly as you were careful to qualify your ideas with pointed references to information sources and information processing.
I agree about recursion. When I first heard about it in CS101 a lightbulb lit up. It's an elegant computational mechanism to resolve complexity, given enough stack space.
When I later heard the theory that the human neocortex is so large so as to accomodate data structures to manage social contexts of communities of 150 people, it made more sense.
Our social reckoning depends on knowing or anticipating or game theorising what other people are thinking, so as to be able to assess group dynamics. But these assessments are contingent. A might support us, but only if she doesn't know what happened with B, which only C knows about, and I trust C. But I'm not sure where D stands in all of this, and I haven't seen E for a while, but she has a connection to both C and A.
Your last paragraph describes exactly what motivates me to work on an open source platform called https://pol.is/home . Or rather, the loss of the ability to navigate those dynamics in high-volume, low-empathy digital spaces we've created, that's what motivates. The platform is big in Taiwan, and is being used to crowdsource national legislation. It allows the opinion landscape of thousands to be made legible in aggregate to all participants so that everyone can build the nuanced and deep stories around complex issues, instead of collapsing into emotional tribalism. We lose all that good stuff in online spaces, that our wetwares gives us for free in meatspace :)
> the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life
Are you sure that has happened?
Do humans dominate insects, fungi, and bacteria?
Do humans dominate the biomass of Earth?
If you limited the scope of your remark to mammals, fish, reptile and birds, I would understand what you are saying. Humans have excelled at habitat destruction. Still, I would point out that the "domination" of which you speak is less than 300 years in duration, with no certainty to last beyond 500 years.
Yes, we do.
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506
"the total plant biomass (and, by proxy, the total biomass on Earth) has declined approximately twofold relative to its value before the start of human civilization. "
>Still, I would point out that the "domination" of which you speak is less than 300 years in duration, with no certainty to last beyond 500 years.
The Cambrian explosion happened 500 million years ago. Photosynthesis is projected to last another 600. We've used all easily available complex elements, and extracted much more. It will all oxidize once were are gone, and it will not regenerate in this time period. Even if we are gone, our impact and legacy will outlive us, likely ensuring we are the last advanced civilization this world will produce.
I understand what you are feeling when you contemplate the wonder of humankind's technological achievements, which, by some measures, necessarily narrow, far surpass the capabilities of any other species. It's worth reflecting on this feeling, which comes reflexively to anyone who is presented with the intellectual challenge that you answered with your complete response above.
When Darwin first published his theory of evolution, he got a lot of pushback from people because of this exact feeling.
19th century British humans resented being "relegated" to the relations of apes. They scorned Darwin for saying it.
I don’t mean to say I’m not satisfied with being a hairless ape - I simply am what I am. But as much as I marvel at other species and even envy their abilities, I appreciate our own unique abilities as well. And of course, reflexively marvelling at human achievement is worth reflecting on. I do that quite a bit.
I personally think humans are largely pro-social, and this reflex is partially an extension of the human tendency to innately cheer for humanity. It seems literally in our nature to promote ourselves in this way.
At the end of the day, I’m largely vegetarian (I eat some fish) because rationally I know that I can’t really differentiate my human experience from that of a cow or chicken, and I’d rather not risk that killing and eating a cow would be no different from a cow killing and eating me. Space exploration isn’t enough for me to justify killing an animal that’s ultimately not much different from me.
Perhaps somehow we could learn that that’s ridiculous and all animals are basically robots and humans are the only conscience on the universe. Until then I’d rather assume some cow out there is wondering about humans and wondering why we aren’t as clever as they are.
I’m honestly not sure. The world appears to contain life which feeds on life, so on some level it’s entirely necessary in order for life to continue as we know it. I know that I can make a choice to feed on life (or at least life like my own) less but I have no way of knowing that about anything else.
My intuition is that most animals can’t or don’t distinguish much in what life they feed on and so if they eat humans, it’s simply according to nature and not problematic in the least.
> My intuition is that most animals can’t or don’t distinguish much in what life they feed on and so if they eat humans, it’s simply according to nature and not problematic in the least.
I agree with the second part of your statement, and also much of the first part, sort of... but what I'm about to write may at first glance sound like a snarky gotcha. That's not my intention at all. It is an informed, educated view, and I don't like it any more than you might, because it bursts an illusion, at least for now.
Firstly, I think animals can distinguish what they eat in a very sophisticated way. At least as sophisticated as humans. Animals, after all, feed themselves with their own energy, guile and knowledge. They don't rely on supermarkets like many humans do, so they know exactly what is going on.
I am mostly vegan, because I prefer vegan food. When I eat animals on occasion, I do it in the same spirit you described in your consideration of animals who kill humans and other animals for food. It is part of nature, and I can embrace that.
You also said this is "a choice". Ethically, morally, spiritually, and out of shared interest, I can agree with you. However, I learned something recently from a radio show that followed a group of people who set up on virgin land, trying to be self-sufficient. What they found is important for our discussion.
It isn't possible for everyone who wants to live self-sufficiently to grow enough protein to survive. The soil in most places, and the climate won't support it. In order to live as a pure vegan, we need supermarkets and globalism, or at the very least, food transit on a global scale. Those giant South American soy plantations are built on destroyed forest habitat. :-(
The people in the radio documentary had to grow animals in order to obtain protein to survive. When they ate those animals, they did it with profound respect and understanding for the value of life, having raised the animals themselves. I've heard conventional farmers speak this way about animal lives too. It's something I think we need to understand and come to grips with intellectually, because the pure choice some people have of going vegan, is not a choice for everyone on the planet, at least, not with current technology and environmental constraints.
Which yet has to be proven they are really working in the long way, because we are still on trial. Also let's see if we can retain our humanity whilst surviving as a species.
Perhaps I misunderstood the thrust of your point, in which case I hope you’ll correct me. It seems you’re saying basically all species are equal, not in all being created, but in all being alike. If I’m close to target, and if the basic salamander could talk ontology, I posit they would disagree with you… not by saying “salamanders are dull, humans are exciting”, but by saying “we are both created we know not from where, and go to we know not where – but you humans show evidence of caring about this, unlike us salamanders.” The very existence of a salamander – let alone seeing it form and grow – says very clearly a few points, especially that humans are amazed by these things (look at the comments!) wherease salamanders are not amazed but merely (although still gloriously) amazing. In which case an argument that humans aren’t special (and therefore have a greater burden of responsibility and joy) seems to fall wide of the mark.
That humans are indeed special because they care about this video, while this li'le salamander over there would be satisfied by spending his day on a tree branch waiting for a fly to pass nearby.
That sort of thing just amazes me. I get that it is "programmed" by DNA, and I understand programming quite well, but the series of chemical reactions that allow the cells to go from gamete to full thing still fills me with wonder.
Increasingly it's becoming clear that DNA is only a small part of the picture. Cellular electrical dynamics are the forefront of morphogenesis research atm. Look at any recent high profile work out of Michael Levin's lab for an example.
During the initial boredom of Covid, I got very interested in Levin’s lab’s work and morphogenesis in general.
I made a program to implement some of my theories.
You’re welcome to try it.
cycell2d.com
My pet theory — morphogenic fields — is described in their on one of the pages.
(Caveat: I’m neither a biologist nor a ‘real’ programmer. But, I was able to come up with a system to ‘grow’ certain animals and found it a fun way to spend the lockdown... almost as much fun as posting ‘Covid is a hoax’ comments on HackerNews... ahhh... those were the days.)
I'm very impressed, this made my day (my month ?). Too bad your site lacks some nice video demos on the front page.
To other HN readers, look what I found in it's tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkvB4nb8PXw
Small part of the picture is an exaggeration, IMO. Cellular electrical dynamics matter, but we already know that surface physics matter (see: any mammalian lab with those flat little red bottles). Those dynamics (physical, electrical, chemical) are all derived from genes coded in DNA, and so long as you have the basic ribosomes / mitochondrial structures, you can re-instantiate an entire organism from just the DNA.
DNA can’t bootstrap itself, so to say. So previous cell-functionality is required for everything, so you can only re-instantiate an entire organism if you have a denucleated pluripotent cell from an evolutionary close enough organism. (But correct me if I’m wrong)
DNA is certainly necessary and integral, but not at all sufficient for a full scientific understanding. Just like quantum mechanics is to rocket science. The heavy focus on genetics has hindered our understanding until very recently IMO.
> hindered our understanding until very recently IMO
Any specific examples of how it hindered our understanding? Like maybe some grants or something? Because as a synthetic biologist, I've never seen a heavy emphasis on genetics take away from other causes of cellular dynamics - in fact, exactly the opposite, because genetic engineering has allowed tinkering of those cellular dynamics (for example, cardio tissue surface physics).
I don't know of any serious biologist that (even historically) disregarded the importance of other physical factors in favor of DNA, but I would love to know compelling counter examples.
I'm not sure what the conclusion of biologists is today, but I have a feeling a lot of important mechanisms aren't encoded in the DNA - or, at least, not anymore. The key insight here is that cell reproduction doesn't happen out of nothing, it's always an existing mechanism working on a new mechanism.
The seminal paper of Ken Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" (1984)[0], demonstrates how you can encode a backdoor in a compiler in such a way that the compiler embeds this backdoor in every program it builds, and embeds the backdoor-embedding machinery in every new compiler binary it builds. You can use it to build a "vanilla" compiler and make it backdoor-embedding, even though the source code doesn't have backdoor-embedding instructions in it.
I suspect similar things happen in biology - there is computationally relevant information embedded in the runtime state, that's not explicitly encoded in the DNA - but it carries on, because every new living cell is built by a previous living cell.
The issue is you’re going to get massive mutations building up in anything that doesn’t have the significant error correcting capability of DNA. So while the coding is not direct, it still has to somehow be in DNA so that the trait will be conserved over the generations. Shorter term changes could conceivably be stored in other molecular structures, though. (Think patterns of methylation in epigenetics or even the fringe idea of RNA memory.)
I would suspect really basic things like replication would be stored somehow in DNA (nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA, etc) as they must be highly conserved and mutation resistant in order for organisms to survive and reproduce.
I get your point and I agree, the DNA runs on hardware, which is why you can't take cat DNA and put it in a salamander cell and expect to get a cat. The resulting cell will just die since the hardware is not compatible with the DNA.
My point was that there is only so much information capacity in the cell if you exclude DNA, surely much less than needed to store electrical fields patterns for a whole embryo.
Each electron present in one of the atom's orbitals is a bit, so yeah.
More realistically, the simplest atom- one proton, one electron- has 3 integer numbers associated with the state of the electron. You need more than a bit to describe the state of that system, so yeah.
Computationally relevant information is sometimes embedded in runtime state (for example, yeast prions), but this is very rare. For small bacteria, you can switch out the entire genome with a new genome and have them continue living just fine. For all intents and purposes on an engineering level, everything is/can be encoded in DNA.
Speculating for fun based on what scientist people have told me at parties :) I think the idea is that DNA will directly and literally encode things like "the genes for proteins A and B tend to get activated together". But the next thing that happens is that protein B catalyzes some chain of chemical reactions that winds up activating a different gene for protein C. And then maybe protein C causes some sort of mechanical change in the cell, and the resulting mechanical stress triggers the production of protein D in adjacent cells. Mapping the mechanical relationships between cells in an animal with developing bones and muscles gets super complicated. So the question of "does the DNA encode the relationship between A and D" ends up depending on what you mean by "encode".
In our more limited experience, certain levels of complexity mean unpredictable outcomes.
As for why-not-DNA, I think about it in terms of "If there were some way that was faster able to adapt organisms than DNA changes, wouldn't most organisms accumulate substantial functionality via that pathway over time?"
It is indeed not true, even omniscient beings can only produce probability distributions.
However it is not clear if quantum effects are relevant at a biomolecular scale. Some experts[1] suggest so but these ideas are considered fringe by the mainstream.
I'm of the mind that randomness is only an approximation of complexity, if you're omniscient then randomness doesn't exist and everything is deterministic.
However it seems to me the deterministic vs randomness debate is of the same order as the existence of god(s) : we will never be able to prove or disprove it and we aren't able to make useful predictions out of the information one way or the other so we might as well just agree to disagree and move on.
DNA is basically digital information. Every rung on the helix ladder is either an AT or GC. Nature found the simplest say to store information in our chemistry set. Couldn't really store any field patterns though.
have you read "Spark in the Machine"? Its an attempt to connect bioelectric science with ancient notions of 'chi', it goes over neural crest cells, organization centers for cell growth, and the electrosensitive pericardium cage near the heart.
They definitely didn't get 100% of it right, buts its quite uncanny how the ancient texts were so accurate at predicting certain things that are only becoming evident in morphogensis research.
Indeed, there are always two parts to it: the software and the machine (the system of chemical structures and interactions inside the cell) , both equally important. We are at the point we can read the software but have a very limited idea on how the machine works.
Mm I would argue that we have a fair understanding on how the hardware works (chemical processes). But we have not clue how things are controlled and how things work together.
It is "programmed" by the recursive feedback loop of evolution. If anything fails to work, the program terminates and something more reliable will take its place.
Still nothing short of incredible. "the recursive feedback loop of evolution" abstracts a mind boggling amount of complexity. How did such a complex system start? I suppose if we knew, abiogenesis would be a solved problem.
There are some plausible theories, like RNA randomly crystallizing on a suitable surface. Sooner or later a self-copying one just happened to crystallize by chance, and there was no going back. Fun lecture series: https://youtu.be/PqPGOhXoprU
You may like "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane, a book which presents one possible scenario in a quite readable way. Much of it is quite speculative of course, but you get a good idea what the basic principles are.
People also underestimate how easy it is for life to get started by accident. Let's say you need a short segment of DNA to randomly pop into existence, capable of nothing but self-replication. What are the odds?
Here's my best analogy: If you take one mole of "random" Rubik's Cubes (the number of molecules in a glass of water), then search for 'Solved' ones you'll find 512 are magically solved, merely by the power of large numbers. The ways molecules can 'snap together' are similarly 'finite', just like a puzzle.
Now think how many glasses of water are on earth. A replicating molecule would have existed probably on the FIRST DAY earth had cooled enough to form water.
If we knew what the shortest sequence if DNA is that can replicate, we'd be able to mathematically state the probability of it existing in any 'random' length of DNA of that length as 1/(4^N) where N is DNA length (number of AT/GC pairs).
"The present study describes the directed evolution of replicating RNA enzymes that operate with an exponential growth rate of 0.14 min−1, corresponding to a doubling time of 5 min. Each parental enzyme can give rise to thousands of copies per hour, and each of these copies in turn can do the same, all the while transmitting molecular information across the generations."
Thanks for that link! That's amazing. I had no idea that work had ever been done.
According to my math 10 million moles of random sequence 50-base pair RNA segments would be required to ensure a correct 'Hit' on a replicator, assuming only one of those 50-long sequences can replicate. 4^50=10^30. 10^30/Avogadro=10^7. Assuming each enzyme is the size of a water molecule, that would be about one large swimming pool of water.
https://nebiocalculator.neb.com/#!/ssrnaamt 10 million moles of RNA of length 50 turns out to be a large amount of RNA... but then again there was like a billion years for life to develop, all around the world.
All around every world in the universe. If life had emerged on planet 5 around star 1778465 in galaxy M33 instead of earth, then people on that planet would be having the same thoughts.
This makes the assumption that all the RNA molecules of 50 bp length are "clean" chains of nucleotides, without any chemical modifications that break the replication process. This is highly unlikely if the RNA is not produced by existing enzymes, but by more or less random chemical processes.
It's purely the math probabilities I was getting at above. If you take the number of molecules in a large swimming pool, that is the same number of 50-long RNA molecules it would take to statistically cause at least one RNA to accidentally have any specific pattern of length 50.
In actual evolution this number of RNA molecules can be thought of as 'diluted' across the entire oceans, and not magically sitting in single pond.
> Let's say you need a short segment of DNA to randomly pop into existence
But do you?
If elements A and B tend to form compound A-B, and compound A-B can attach a further set of A and B, forming B-A-B-A which under certain circumstances will split into A-B and A-B, you have basic reproduction, and perhaps the occasional presence of element C will expedite the process. Game of life.
In my [very] layman's view of the world, given a billion years or two, some such infinitely simple process should be enough to get the ball rolling, as long as it can somehow produce an ever so slightly errorprone copy.
That's right. Once you have a replicating strand that's modular (linearly able to glue end-to-end) it can also recombine randomly with other completely different replicators to see if the "offspring" can replicate. We know for a fact major sections of DNA are shared among lots of different organisms, so we know this did happen a lot during evolution.
Going from a short segment of DNA randomly popping into existence, capable of nothing but self-replication to living organisms, carrying a tremendous amount of intelligence, those are two very different things.
To make an analogy, what you describe would be only the electronic chips or the logic gates of a computer. There are a still the CPU, RAM, and the whole software stack from the OS that runs our bodies (and mind you, there is a different one for each species) to the yet unknown abstractions from which human general intelligence emerges.
I think people underestimate how difficult it is for all the above to get started by accident.
Once the process is started with simple life evolution just causes complexity as a rule. I think people who can't believe evolution made us from "nothing" have never really tried to understand the time frame in which it happend, which is a really long time.
Humans can't conceive of large timescales nor large numbers. That's why I use my Rubik's Cube example. A single glass of water contains enough molecules that if they were each a random Rubik's cube then there's a mathematical certainty that 512 of them will be perfectly solved (per glass).
For molecules that are a linear chain of only 2 possible items in the chain, it becomes a 'brute force search' of a 'puzzle space' to find a chain that 'does something like computer code', and the earth has the computing power to solve that brute force problem in 30 seconds, not 30 million years.
But this is more of a proof how insanely big a mole is, rather than the fundamental question. Also, Rubik’s cube possibilities is not that high. Try to create each permutation of a standard deck of cards (hint: there are less atoms in the universe than the number of permutations)
About the 'card deck' combinations: That's why we can be virtually certain there are no life forms in the universe that consist of a chain molecule (as it's version of "DNA") where there's more than a handful of different types of molecules along the chain.
Nature is statistically guaranteed to find the simplest patterns first and that's why our life is built on 'binary' (two kinds of 'cards' AT/GC). Life on all planets will likely use binary "information storage", especially because of it's modularity (i.e. it can be cut-n-pasted together in different patterns)
It's perfectly legitimate to say life stores information using only two "types" of things (AT or GC) which can be oriented one way or another, which is a "binary choice of the type". I explain it that way because it reaches a wider audience (easier to visualize)
However there's always at least one stickler who wants to quibble that the orientation is also a "binary bit" of information. Congratulations, you're him today!!
I did think about that, that’s why I added the second paragraph, namely that what about RNAs? (Since presumably they precede the DNA world) They can self-bind (I don’t know the proper nomenclature in English), but by all means they have 4 bases.
No. Oxygen screws a lot of things up. Also, RNAses are now everywhere (organisms secrete them all the time, which is why RNAse away is a product), and since the original replicating molecules were likely RNA, pretty much the entire world is toxic now.
If we found a sequence of DNA on some sample, and another identical sequence in that same sample, we still wouldn't know replication is happening.
However there may be slightly more requirements like the sequence has to be found in an oil film (bubble) up until it can form a skin/membrane, to protect itself, so even if it was happening on earth trillions of times every day no one would be there to discover it, and other life on the planet with a head start (bacteria, etc) would consume it before it made more 'progress' by evolution.
In the early planet there was nothing to "eat up" life as it was starting. Everything was on an equal footing.
There's strong evidence that all life on this planet can trace back to a single strand of DNA, which evolved exactly once in our billions of years.
For example, if I understand this correctly, a random jumble of DNA as you describe would have a 50/50 chance of twisting to the right or twisting to the left. And yet all life on earth uses DNA that is "right handed" twisting to the right.
The fact that life is right-hand twist DNA probably means left-hand was unsuccessful due to chemistry either in itself or in the environment, because an inversion of a molecule (chirality, twist, etc) means it will behave completely differently chemically. So left-hand twist can exist, but not necessarily in a way that can build life...even if it's able to initially replicate.
And then calculate the odds that the given DNA (though the RNA hypothesis seems more plausible) is in sufficient conditions like inside a lipid-bilayer with sufficient nucleotides for a reproduction - which is more than likely thermodynamically not a stable state to be in, so add another factor with an e^(-x) expression.
AT and GC are such simple molecules we can assume wherever we find 50 of them in one place (first replicator) you're going to have not just 50 but an abundance of them in that place too. And since that's what the replicator needs to replicate it's literally sitting in a bath of it's own "food" with no predators around, so it will grow like crazy and immediately. lipid-bilayer might be needed to find a pattern for "cells" to form, sure, agreed. And in all this 'base' counting math the statistics is the same regardless of whether it's DNA or RNA.
Thermodynamics would beg to differ about your first sentence.
Also, I’m not trying to disprove your point, since life did emerge in some way and I’m not fond of unscientific explanations.
But it is naiv to assume that life is a definite outcome given an Earth-like situation with a primordial soup.
It's already experimentally proven you can mix up N, H, and O and it spontaneously forms RNA. We've even found entire RNA and sugars on meteorites. It's not rare in nature, it's abundant and self-emergent from the raw atoms themselves.
I replied in terms of your first sentence. Molecules doesn’t concentrate spontaneously without active energy expenditure from someone (putting salt in a pot will have salt uniformly distributed everywhere).
Now, either there were some naturally formed impermeable areas with an abundance of base material (yet again, I’m not saying life emerged because the UFOs created it), or we are talking about many orders of magnitude less statistical chances.
I am willing to believe that many, not individually extraordinary thing had to happen at the same time, that made life possible - but that pretty much makes their combined presence extraordinary, which is my claim.
(Some form of underwater volcanic caves or whatever could sound like a possibility, especially because last I checked, starting sticked to a surface with certain catalytic activities is a plausible theory. Especially due to the reduced statistical chances due to a 2D surface instead of a 3D one! What I have a bit of trouble seeing, is how did organic materials form - I am aware of the famous experiment with lightning bolts that created ammonia and some other chemicals, but it would only slowly increase their uniform distribution in the oceans. Perhaps some chemical reaction with gases that made them accumulate? )
AT and GC never concentrate spontaneously. Brownian motion makes them 'find' each other and immediately snap together like tinker toys when they find a partner that fits. That's why you need warm temperatures, and it's why all chemical reaction rates are proportional to temperature. Even in a solution with 0.00001PPM reagents, reactions take place rapidly when warm.
> People also underestimate how easy it is for life to get started by accident.
That's well known. It is the key driver for the global contraceptives market, which generated revenue of $28,175 million in 2015 and is estimated to reach $43,812 million by 2022.
Good point. That seems like a "soft-shutdown" compared to the "hard-shutdown" that I interpreted from the parent post: dying due to being unfit in the environment.
The trippy detail for me is that the runtime is time and space, thats what its frictioned against, even matter and its states are determined by it. Evolution sure is a word.. Not sure it captures it tho
Well I think of it as the state machines and cellular automata. And yes, how cellular state machines work is clearly different than how a computer state machines work, they have a surprising (to me) lot in common. If you are interested in these comparisons I can recommend two books, one is Feynman's "Lectures on Computation" which discuss computation (and programming) in a very generalized way, and Nick Lane's "The Vital Question" which looks at the origins of life and discusses the evolution of multicellular organisms in a very approachable way.
The process is riding on a foundation of chemistry and physics that has a whole lot of intrinsic dynamics. The DNA only has to take a causal role in modulating those existing dynamics. It doesn’t have to orchestrate every minuscule interaction, only coordinate things to the extent that the intrinsic dynamics come together to form something with an emergent complexity. It’s like calling into a complex library with a line or two of python. Yes, the top level is compact, but only because it’s built on top of a base of complexity.
To add to this: It's like the floating water level valve in a tank. It accurately controls the level of the water in the tank with a very simple mechanism. It does not control where every water molecule goes.
But it does not really explain certain phases of this process, in the beginning, where cells are dividing exponentially and suddenly a fold appears, and simultaneously many cells, many being far apart, start behaving differently from other cells just next to them.
So whatever chemistry or physics foundation helps achieve that, it has this capacity to be very selective (these cells far apart do it, but these ones next to them don't), i.e. it is not temperature, acidity/base concentration, pressure, or other basic physics, because these phenomena don't have this kind of selectivity.
Though it is sort of well understood in embryology.
It was quite some times ago I studied it, but the big picture is that each cell starts out as a so-called pluripotent cell, that can turn to every other cell type. The important first step is axes selection (head-tail, left-right). The left-right axes is selected in a really interesting way, cells in the middle have a little flagella that tends to rotate in a specific direction. (If my memory is right, the condition where someones internals are all mirror images of “normal” is caused by some problem with these) Now secreted signal molecules will be concentrated on one side, and this selects the given side.
But the big picture is that each cell has a decision tree, and local signal molecule concentration is the criteria on which they decide. And later each cell has the ability to express yet another signal molecule and so on. If we were to imagine a 2d plane and you could symmetrically place a secretion center of A and B signal in a left and right region respectively, than you can have a new type of cell in the middle if it changes based on “signal A and B is on”.
I think such basic phenomena have more power than it would seem. I’m not a biologist, but from poking at wikipedia:
> Turing correctly predicted a mechanism of morphogenesis, the diffusion of two different chemical signals, one activating and one deactivating growth, to set up patterns of developmenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis
A complex organism uses the DNA to its full potential. For example, some genes are regulated by a large number of enhancers, which results a combinatorial complexity. That is, you don't need a large number of regulators for your system. Instead, there's just a handful, but they're mixed and matched to create thousands of combinations. Alternative splicing and post-translational modifications contribute to complexity as well, as you can create hundreds of thousands of protein variants with relatively few genes. And not to forget that genome is highly dynamic: there're constant rearrangements, which allow producing complex patterns of gene expression.
I agree those can be very compact, and looks like a whole world is depicted in 4kb with music!
Demos are based on combining perfect geometrical structures in clever ways (planes, spheres, sinusoids, etc) because they all can be compactly expressed with the type of algebra/arithmetic/geometry that is exactly what our CPUs were built for.
If you watch many demos you tend to see certain symmetries, reflections, and other artifacts that make it all seem repetitive and plain (despite the number of moving objects, effects, etc.)
The process in this cell dividing feels very different to me, but it is hard to put my finger on it.
Watching the initial stage where this amorphous blob of cells just kept multiplying, made me think that the blob of cells is just that - the bioprinter material. The shape is probably set by the printer, i.e. the parent body, and that blob of cells would never form anything meaningful without the parent. This theory would fall apart, though, if such an organism can be replicated in a lab.
The most mind-boggling thing about development IMO is the fact that it works at all, let alone so reliably.
It's a really complex system navigating all these different regimes of stability and instability, with variations caused by internal/external forces, yet coming out almost exactly the same every time.
> The most mind-boggling thing about development IMO is the fact that it works at all, let alone so reliably.
That's why so many people don't accept the evolutionary theory. It's just hard to think on evolutionary timescales, there's no difference for most of us between 1 million, 10 million or 1 billion years. Nevertheless, it took billions of years for life to evolve.
The process looks similar to a CNC machine replicating a predefined shape. Except that here the material is able to grow itself. In this case it's not surprising that a CNC machine always creates about the same shape from a rather amorphous material.
Some of the sound effects they chose were a bit much. Pretty sure a cell doesn't sound like anything at all, never mind the sound of lightly splashing water.
I loved watching for the moment the topology of the creature changed from a sphere to a torus. Not exactly sure when it happened, but there was a point where it wrapped itself in half and seemed to fuse.
The neural tube is the predecessor to the spine. Gastrulation isn't really a tube formation more like layers forming, it's the initial differentiation of cells from uniform to specialized.
The initial result of the gastrulation and neurulation. e.g., what would've made that process 'useful' so that it persisted in an evolutionary sense. Would intestinal processes work as well if they weren't contained (from mouth to anus), or if brain/spine/nerve channels weren't separated from other parts of the body.
Neural tube-like structures are pretty ancient. Hallucigenia, I believe, is the oldest fossil (-0.5 BYA) that shows the differentiation of a single neural tube-like structure [0], right back to the mid-Cambrian Explosion. We are the ancestors, likely, of that animal. It seems that bi-lateral symmetry is a highly advantageous body plan, as it's evolved a few times in separate clades that weren't that before. As to the reason why bilateral symmetry is good, it's a good question! As for the difference in why neural tubes are better, it seems that the ability to centralize the information exchange between the body and (what may pass for a) brain is a better fit with a single trunk. Other animals do have other arrangements, but the one we have has the most diversity of subsequent animals forms. It seems to be a more flexible arrangement and evolution seems to have preferred it. Granted, the neural tube idea has been through a few mass extinction events, so there is a considerable amount of luck involved too.
[0] For reference, the reason that arachnids are different than other 'insects' is because they have dual ganglia structures that run down the rostral(head)-ventral(tail) axis instead of a single neural tube. That divergence took place before Hallucigenia, I believe.
"And just as an organism in the embryonic stages seems to race through the aeons of evolutionary development, from single cell to ultimate complexity, in mere weeks or months; so the individual scientist in the course of their life repeats the history of science and loses themselves, by progressive stages, in the orchard [of science]."
This somehow almost feels me with awe even thought I am somewhat a cynical person. It’s another level of demonstrating how intricate life is, how powerful evolution can be and how incredibly well-tuned our (Earth) environment for these sorts of things (which seems to be in stark contrast with what we see elsewhere).
This video brings up a crackpot theory I've been toying with. I know it's crazy, but I keep thinking about it.
The Fermi paradox asks, why haven't we found any alien probes? Why have we received no contact or evidence of aliens visiting Earth in the past? Why aren't there galactic-wide civilizations, or super advanced beings that have spread over the entire galaxy?
If there were such a being/civilization, perhaps their planning time horizon would be billions of years, instead of (optimistically) hundreds of years like for humans. With that magnitude of time horizon in mind, what might that civilization's colonization efforts or exploratory probes look like? What would their machines look like, if time was not a concern?
If 4 billion years is nothing to you, and assuming there really isn't a way around the speed of light, maybe sending self-assimilating, self-adapting machine "seeds" to all Earth-like planets is the most efficient way to expand or explore. Seeds that perfectly adapt to the environment they're exposed to, self-replicate, take over the planet, and then the solar system.
Sort of like the Protomolecule from The Expanse, instead of hijacking life, it hijacks raw materials, and was designed on a timescale of beings that think in terms of eons.
I look forward to a future where we will be looking back with nostalgia on these days thinking how bizarre it must have all felt to be living in these times. Perhaps not too dissimilar to how now we look back on the ancients way of thinking about the cosmos before there was any theory of gravity or any understanding of the strong force in nuclear physics.
That yellow goo we see from the beginning. Is it just a mix of the same thing, or is it a bunch of different things that we can't see with the naked eye? And if it's a bunch of different things, why is it yellow?
Like, why does it look so simple, like a ball of playdough, when it works more like a very complex machine...
I believe that is a fertilized egg cell, so kinda both. It's the yolk (all one thing), plus a bunch of associated organelles (bunch of different things).
An annotated version of this video would be amazing. What's happening at each moment? Where do the movements come from? What is happening when it "closes"?
Energy and entropy are not really the right metric here. The thing that is lost when a species goes extinct is information, and specifically, information that has been acquired by a process of parallel search that has been going on for literally a few billion years, so the odds of reproducing that information once it is lost is effectively zero. Imagine working on a term paper for a few billion years and then having your computer crash and not having a backup. That's what happens when a species goes extinct.
Would there be a way to use "information entropy" as the measurement? Late in the day so I'm struggling to finish my thoughts, but putting this here in case you can connect the dots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
Yes, but it's tricky for two reasons. First, we don't really know how to quantify the relative value of two different species. It's kind of like trying to quantify the value of a book. Losing a volume of Aristotle's Poetics is probably worse than losing a Harlequin romance. And second, the information is not just resident in the genome. We can quantify how many bits of information is contained in DNA, but just knowing the complete gene sequence of a salamander is not enough to be able to make a salamander. You need to embed those genes in the right environment, and we have no idea how to quantify the information needed to describe that. So actually putting a number on it is hopeless. The best you can do is look at the effort it would take to reproduce that information once it's lost, which is essentially infinite.
To extend on your analogy a bit: Imagine working on that term paper on GitHub and then having your repo deleted. The odds of reproducing that information completely is zero. But there might still be some forks (related species) around. So it's pretty hard to wipe out everything.
How does each cell know it exact location to decide which specific cell to become (i.e. which part of the dna to read)? Especially at the very early stage?
This is an excellent question with no easy answer. Drosophila is one model organism for which we know something about how expression of specific genes leads to developmental structure [1] but there is a lot still unknown, not just for Drosophila but also for cellular differentiation [2] more generally.
Basically, the mother determines which side of the egg is "up" by adding chemicals to one side. From there on many different gradients of proteins and chemicals form, which pattern embryos into subsections of more and more detail. The graphics in the Drosophila article linked in the sibling will give you a good idea.
The magic ingredient is time. This is the result of billions of years of iteration, trying quadrillions of quadrillions of different approaches, parallelised across a whole planet, with every generation being built only from a successful previous generation. The result is amazing, but the scale of all this compounding is also amazing.
"If we went to Mars and found there a computer, we wouldn't ever say that it popped up by accident. There had to be some creator of it. On the other hand, we have brains, which are much more complex than computers and we deny the existence of some creator."
I heard this anecdote during homily in church and honestly it perfectly describes how I think about God.
Again, that's not the valid answer. Who created God then?
Stop using God as a placeholder and be more humble.
The correct answer is "we don't know", but for sure today
God is not a valid theory. No more than Spiderman, Batman or
cosmic magical people from Andromeda.
That's right. And that is the moment when science has to give place to beliefs. Everyone can have different. Some poeple none at all. For a person who wants to find a bridge between science and religion, this model may be good.
Yeah, if everyone did that, we could be trying to fly the Ocean by praying. Or trying to cure plagues in the Middle Ages too, with the same bullshitery.
Hint: in didn't work. Once we threw that crap away, and began to properly was the hands, or develop the steam machine in the 1800s, with no "magic" in between, the progress and science development skyrocketed.
I don't know why but I have a flashback of the X-Files episode where someone had a salamander arm.. It was something about reversing ageing. :Nostalgia
It depends on the species. For instance, most mice will start out as a tube, and then they turn inside out at embryonic day 8 (I think, It may be earlier though). Whereas rats, dogs, and humans do not do this. And that's just the mammalian development that has been under a lot of study. What other vertebrates do, well, that takes a bit more funding!
what's striking to me is how similar in early stages it looks like the Flower of Life pattern. Perhaps its possible that our life in the 3D world is essentially geometry on the hyperdimension that somehow trickles down into life. ex) DNA to proteins.
I agree. I think our entire 3D universe is really more like a 'projection' (onto lower dimensions) of some vastly larger hyperspace in many more dimensions, so we're always seeing basically only a sliver of true reality, and if we could see it all (all of reality) it would be vastly more complex, but also a lot of things (like this video) would seem more mechanical than magical.
Language seems to be this, especially alphabet, symbols.
"If you have a powerful enough language, you can take control of reality. This is what magical languages, like in the late Renaissance, were about. The only thing which comes close to that today is code for computers. Essentially, these are languages which, when executed, something happens. They are languages of efficacy. They carry, not meaning, but motivation to activity. This Kabbalistic question is very interesting; someone showed me, recently, a sculptural object, which, when illuminated from various angles by a source of light behind it would cast, one after another, each of the Hebrew letters on a screen. In other words, this was a higher-dimensional object which had the entire Hebrew alphabet somehow embedded in it. When I mentioned this to Ralph Abraham, he said, 'Well, all you have to do is digitize and quantify that object, and we’ll be able to compute from that three-dimensional object to a 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, or 9-dimensional object, which would cast all letters of all alphabets into matter.' So one way of thinking of the 'transcendental object at the end of time' is as this kind of Ur-letter or Ur-word in hyperspace, from which, as it sheds the radiance of its syntactical numenosity into lower and lower dimensions, realities as literary functions of being constellate themselves."
There was a Standford professor that studied this extensively and while I don't bu 100% into it, he makes a pretty compelling argument. The 3d molds that he created when held at specific angles and viewed, they certainly resemble letters of the Hebrew Alphabet. In turn, the way he holds them in both hands (arms extended out or twisting) represents specific meaning! In theory this should work with other languages as well but the bottom line, going back to the idea that our language itself is a trickle down effect from the outer workings beyond our current dimension.
All of this should be read with a very open mind however, nonetheless, the original video, the various "sacred" geometries (why are they even sacred to begin with?), inspire thinking that what if languages and symbols representing ideas are simply projections?
> more mechanical than magical.
This. As we learn more and more and our understanding expands, I don't see why not.
(I'm really pleased that we can have this thread on HN)
Completely agree. I think this could also explain the fundamental randomness we perceive at the quantum level. We're simply not seeing/unable to see the full picture.
Yep, most every serious Physicist today agrees, it's more likely we're not "seeing" everything. Slit experiment, Entanglement, etc. prove we're missing lots of the picture. All the particles popping in and out of existence...seems like really they're just 'passing thru' and we only see them a fraction of the time, because most of the time they're in some 'realm' we've only thus far managed to label as "Wave Probability"
or the even more interesting question is: what if the human consciousness is hyperdimensional (the spiritual theory that the universe itself is conscious and capable of perception) but that through quantum trickery we simply perceive "others" and "me, us, them"?
If entanglement or Einstein's "spooky magic" is possible at the building layers of reality then why do we balk at the idea of this not being possible in other levels of dimension?
Are we like the many "Random Novelty Generators" that is needed for the whole thing to work where each layer of complexity created (in our case our collective human experience consisting of many individual ones) a platform for which additional novelty is generated?
Very interesting ideas to "toy" with. Samsara, karma, reincarnation, Einstein's theory that "God doesn't play dice" all seem strangely possible as our understanding of reality advances. It is weirdly mechanical in its raw form but borderline "pure **ing magic".
(I would also point out how the Western thought rejects all forms of non-objective, impossible-to-prove-therefore-nil ideas in pursuit of its theory that all we see is all we get. We attack all ideas that remotely challenge the religion that has become Science. Seems to be built upon shaky grounds as we seem to slowly approach a convergence of religion, spiritualism, quantum theory especially at a very high elite academic level. Ironically the only people in the scientific community I can have these conversations is also quantum physicists, and some molecular biologists.)
Very nice discussions today I am very satisfied with HN as normally this kind of talk gets the boot and hostile reactions from co-workers.
I agree with what you said. Even the concept of "God" seems like it's been 're-framed' by science lately (in a good way) with many scientists having to admit that a simulation theory is as good as any other theory for our origins, and if we're being simulated then by definition the thing doing the simulating is a "god", by most definitions despite whether it is concerned with human feelings or what we call morality.
HN is definitely a great place to find others who are intellectually curious about these topics. It's a shame that most people (in society at large) would rather discuss sports or entertainment, than the actual interesting scientific or philosophical things that matter more.
That's simple. Science says "probe it, or GFTO". Thus, religion and pseudoscience is out today, and for good.
We are not children believing on monsters under the bed anymore.
No, the information in the additional variables would be like a hidden variable theory, but the hidden variables make predictions that disagree with the experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory
There are a few physics theories that use additional dimensions, but they are use quantum mechanics.
Interesting. Can you confirm my ELI5 understanding of it? Is it that we could potentially claim that QM is not really random, we simply do not have all the data (like predicting a dice roll without accounting for the roughness of the surface). But then, experimental evidence contradicts this claim. Correct?
If I were to play the hippy mumbo-jumbo part for a moment, I would suggest a trip with Salvia Divinorum to perfectly capture and have a direct perception of what you say in your comment.
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