I'm sitting in front of my computer at work, bored senseless because our new lab still hasn't been finished two months after we moved in. So it naturally occured to me to put a thought I had a little while ago into an ATM theory and post it here to be torn apart, or supported (unlikely).

To get one thing clear at least: by complex I mean ordered but complex, as seen in DNA.

I'd like to put foward the idea that there was no 'eureka' moment when inanimate matter made the crossover from non-life to life*. Instead I propose that the qualities we associate with life can arise in any complex system, and that different qualities require greater or lesser degrees of complexity. So self replicating patterns which can, under the right conditions, occur in very simple things (such as crystals seeding other crystals) is a phenomena which needs only a modest degree of complexity, darwinian evolution requires more complexity (such as in DNA, which is also a type of crystal), and self awareness requires a lot.

I predict that on titan we will find higher areas of complexity, (and some 'life like' chemical and even physical behavoire) supported by lower areas of complexity (and less 'life like' behavoire) as there is a great deal of material suitable for complex behavoir (organics), same as we do on earth, but the maximum complexity will be lower, as there is less energy to drive the development of titans organic material. I haven't given water any special role in this idea but I might.

So does any of that make sense? If yes, have I got anything new here? If yes, does anyone see any value in it, and if yes where does it fall down and be valueless?
If No to all of the above please be polite, and if it's too rediculous to be polite about at least try to make what you post on it funny!

John

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For me it's enough for the garden to be beautifull; why do so many want to see fairies at the bottom?

"Many of those people are not getting four when adding two and two; many of them aren't even getting five or twenty-two. They're getting potato."
Gillianren

Question: How does life have no origin? I don't understand why that is the title of this thread.

Hi John,
did you mean that to be the other way around?

ie, from non-life to life?


(I usually call it the transition from chemistry to biochemistry)

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I agree with most of the beginning of the post, but you threw me for a loop when you mentioned Titan.

Because what, exactly, is your ATM claim?
That life is a matter of complexity?
Or that Life or life-like qualities are to be found on Titan?

I won't touch the Titan one for now...

But Complexity, by itself, is not necessarily- Life.

The weather is extremely complex, yet is not "alive." But if the weather were to develop in complexity to the point of becoming self aware and able to make decisions about its behavior, then, I would consider it alive.

I agree about there not being a "Eureka!" moment to some degree, that it was a gradual process. But there had to have been a series of defining moments nonetheless.

Wow that was quick! Will have to be quick myself as I have to shoot off:
Neverfly: The ATM claim I'm making is that there is no quality life has that is not replicated by some other non living system, and hence life is not unique (and has no origin), although the systems found on earth have such an abundance of energy and organics to work with they appear to be unique. I mention titan because it has a lot of organics interacting for the same length of time as earth, but with much less available energy; so there may be systems on titan that mimic one or two of the qualities we find in 'life' in isolation, proving that there is nothing unique about life.

Cran: yes I did, thanks!

Lepton: life had no origin, because life is a collection of traits, each trait has an origin, but they don't arrive as a package.

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For me it's enough for the garden to be beautifull; why do so many want to see fairies at the bottom?

"Many of those people are not getting four when adding two and two; many of them aren't even getting five or twenty-two. They're getting potato."
Gillianren

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

That's pretty much what I read too. It sounds more like the issue with the definition of life to me.

If that definition requires more than one factor, then each of these defining moments includes the first time "x" occured, or the first type "x" and "y" formed together.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Now that isn't ATM but it's semantical claptrap. The traits that constitute life each had an origin but life doesn't?

Seems like a Zeno's Paradox type thing: implying that the development of life was a process and there was no precise moment of genesis means that there was no origin. I'd counter that in that case life still has an origin, it's just that its origin is a process rather than an epiphany.

The rest seems pretty mainstream to me. The hypotheses about abiogenesis that I've heard always imply that it took a very, very long time for things on Earth to get from puddles of organic goo to puddles of organic goo that contain self-replicating systems of molecules, and that it took a very, very long time after that to get to self-replicating systems of molecules that do anything that could be described as metabolism.

Cougar: yes thats the kind of thing I'm driving at, thanks for the link!
It is an issue with the definition of life, but the definition of life is a mainstream concept, so suggesting it be changed would fall under against the mainstream wouldn't it? I'm not taking the mick if it belongs somewhere else please move it! I'm suggesting that 'alive' be an umbrella term for any system that has a certain amount of complexity, and that it doesn't need to show any specific behavoir other than having that level of complexity to qualify. Personally I'd spread the umbrella wider than kauffman, to include dusty plasmas and programming systems at least.

Lepton: I apologise for any offence, I think the difference between several qualities with seperate origins being assumed to be linked inextricably and being labelled life, and recognising them as being seperate and possibly even unrelated is important.

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For me it's enough for the garden to be beautifull; why do so many want to see fairies at the bottom?

"Many of those people are not getting four when adding two and two; many of them aren't even getting five or twenty-two. They're getting potato."
Gillianren

Most of what you have said so far is pretty mainstream, the only ATM factor I can find is that you are allowing the possibility of Life at a very low level of complexity, which I'm sure is not mainstream.

No offense taken. Still it is incomprehensible how one can take the constituents of life and admit they have their origins yet the process of life doesn't. If life didn't have an origin, either it has always been around or it doesn't exist. Both those topics border on theology and not science.

You seem to be jumping to conclusions.

The OP made it quite clear what Marsbug was trying to express: That there was not a magical Eureka Moment.
And so far, it's been agreed on that is mainstream thinking too, anyway.
The OP was Hardly bordering on, much less within the realm of, theology.

The argument over semantics would seem to be useless at this point.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

I suspect that a lot of this is down to the definition of life that has developed over time. Everyone has a sense of what is, and what isn't, alive. Over time, the application of these definitions has led to some curious beasts. Are viruses alive? In many respects they behave like they are, but then there are odd properties as well, for example it is possible to form crystals of the tobacco mosaic virus.

It is also possible that we could build a machine (with cogs, etc) that would meet all of the definitions of being alive. At the very least, nothing seems to rule this out. I suspect, however, that we would modify the definitions in order to exclude such a beast. (A related example is the "tinker toy" brain. If consciousness was simply the product of a sufficiently complex Turing machine, then it should be possible to build a conscious brain using wooden sticks, wheels, and gears. Even if it fitted our definition, we would find it difficult accepting that it really was conscious.)

Its an interesting idea. My take on what you are saying is there is no sharp boundary between "Not Alive" and "Alive", but more a gradual transition. Along that idea, there is some research I posted about some months ago in this thread.
But I'm not sure that "complexity" is the right criteria. For example, the Space Shuttle might be more complex that a simple bacteria, but the bacteria is certainly more alive.

I think it is more that there are certain characteristics that we attribute to living things that we don't to non-living, such as reproduction and metabolism (taking in food and either growing or using the energy). It might be that the "creation of life" school assumes that all of these characteristics have to arise together, but instead, they might be able to arise independently so. That would mean that you could have things have some of these characteristics, but not others, and thus would be "semi-alive".

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One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Jim, thank you, and thank you again, I should have fixed the typo myself really, and I think this is a much more appropriate home for this thread.

Lepton: Swift has just put it much more clearly and succinctly than I had been managing. Now I've had some time to collect my ideas I realise I should at least amend the title to something more like 'Life has no single, specific origin'.

I would add to what swift has said that when we look at a system we do not insist that it's temperature be measured as either hot or cold, we give it a temperature in degrees something. I have begun thinking that, particularly for places like titan where many of the 'ingredients' for life are present and have been interacting in a complex way for a long time, a 'life temperature reading' may be more appropriate than a simple judgement of alive or not.
Complexity was simply my first thought for a criteria to use. That would mean even very simple systems might have to be assigned some degree of aliveness to make the scale consistent, which would fly in the face of accepted views on life as neverfly pointed out. As swift pointed out complexity may well not be the best criteria to use.

A further thought I was trying, and not really succeeding, to express was that some systems might show the 'higher' attributes of life, but not the lower. For example an AI could show intelligence, empathy, emotion and even intuition, but not be capable of reproduction or Darwinian evolution. This would present a similar problem to classifying viruses, in that although something is definitely going on in there, it doesn't fit neatly into the definition of life, and so a 'life temperature', or 'degree of life' would be a more useful measure to apply to it.

If we discover forms of 'weird life', using methane instead of water, or in the solid or gas state, they would also push the boundaries of what is considered alive. Instead of giving them long names like 'Darwinian information carrying, environmentally responsive dusty plasma phenomena' we could simply say its a plasma entity with a life rating of 6.5 ( or 6.5 for life criteria x, 5.2 for life criteria 2 .. and so on). I'm sure there are some fairly obvious core criteria, and a lot of less important but still useful ones to be added. Agreeing a list that could be accepted by most scientists would be a first step towards such as system, which could well be needed as we begin to explore stranger environments.

EDIT: Er... How do you change the threads title, I can't work out how to edit it, does it need to be done by a moderator?

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For me it's enough for the garden to be beautifull; why do so many want to see fairies at the bottom?

"Many of those people are not getting four when adding two and two; many of them aren't even getting five or twenty-two. They're getting potato."
Gillianren

It would be easy to define life as that which is built from subentities bounded by fatty membranes and containing many proteins and nucleic acids on the inside. But many biologists have found this definition to be unsatisfying because it does not mention what they take to be the essential mark of life, and that is the purposive teleology that life apparently exhibits. Of course complex human artifacts are also teleological, but the purposiveness of human artifacts can be accounted for through human teleology. That is, humans "inject" teleology into their artifacts; so the purposiveness of artifacts is said to be "derived", and not "intrinsic". Organisms, on the other, have an "original" teleologicality that both artifacts and nonartificial physical systems do not possess.

So if you really want to break down the life/nonlife distinction, the best strategy would be to show that even "mere" physical systems also exhibit a certain teleologicality or functional organization. This could be accomplished by showing that the physical systems we actually observe have undergone a history of natural selection of sorts. Thus, you could say that even mere physical systems are functionally organized around the intrinsic value of physical persistence.

How do you change the threads title, I can't work out how to edit it, does it need to be done by a moderator?

'fraid so. What do you want the title to be?

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
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Well, self-organization is another consideration. Crystals self-organize, lipid vesicles self-organize, and life self-organizes to a much greater degree.

This would seem to show another "slope from nonlife to life", I think.

But this "life temperature reading" might again be simplifying the question too much. Instead of a black/white alive/not-alive measure, you are just substituting a grey-scale. I'm contending that it may be more "complex" than that. And your example of an AI is a good example of this - an AI might measure 100% for intelligence and response to the environment (see below), and 0% for metabolism. But averaging that to 50% doesn't seem to do it justice.

I think, taking your idea further, that one can't come up with a simply "life" scale, but must measure a creature on many factors. And even bolder is the idea that some creature could measure high on some of these, low on others, and still be "alive".

As a starting point for what factors or characteristics one might include for life, this wikipedia article has a good starting point.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Jim please change the title to: "Life and non-life, what lies in between and how do we define it?". It's a bit simplistic but it conveys what I originally meant much better. Thanks!

I think self organisation is a much better criteria than complexity, as complexity can mean chaos as much as something highly ordered. Functional organisation also sounds good, but I expect there is a lot of cross over of meaning between the two, so in my opinion they should really come under one criteria if possible.

So:
(Self/Functional)Organization Yes but I disagree with the wikipadea definition of it as most life is single celled but still by necessity highly organised.

Metabolism: yes no argument there.

Reproduction: Again no objection although I can imagine that some highly organised metabolising growing systems that do nor produce offspring (like a hinny or mule)

Growth: It's important but if reproduction is present is it vital, some systems may reproduce themselves without increasing the individual?

Adaptation: It sticks in my craw to say this but in a very stable environment I can imagine life doing without adaptation, though that makes it much less interesting. Perhaps the potential for adaptation could be substituted?

Response to stimuli: Isn't this just another form of adaptation? A tree turning its leaves to follow the sun is adapting to meet its environment, as is a leopard pouncing on its prey.

And we should bear in mind that to develop a life scale(s) or a 'life space' where these things could be mapped we need some way of quantifying them. Metabolism might be fairly easy, but I think the others will be more challenging.
What do people think?

__________________
For me it's enough for the garden to be beautifull; why do so many want to see fairies at the bottom?

"Many of those people are not getting four when adding two and two; many of them aren't even getting five or twenty-two. They're getting potato."
Gillianren

What about artificial intelligence?

If an AI is programmed to "think" it is alive, and is able to improve itself and have the capacity for learning and growing, is it alive? Is the only thing preventing us from making living AI at the moment limitations in the technology?

As for biological life I think my signature makes my opinion on that pretty clear.

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if A.I. is self aware, I would consider it alive. If not life.

We have created electronic life already. There are quite a few examples of living programs that reproduce, adapt and compete on there own without human interferance once their virtual "world" has been set up. Some people will no doubt say these programs aren't really alive because of their limited enviroment, they only exist inside a computer, but I figure that if a parasitic worm that only lives under hippotamuses eyelids is considered alive despite its limited environment, why not these programs?

Heck, we're pretty limited ourselves...

Do you think the same would be true of some matter here on Earth, much easier to get at and observe?

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Yes, there are already many phenomena which we don't classify as life, are far to simple to be conventionally alive, and yet display some characteristics of living things.

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For me it's enough for the garden to be beautifull; why do so many want to see fairies at the bottom?

"Many of those people are not getting four when adding two and two; many of them aren't even getting five or twenty-two. They're getting potato."
Gillianren

Examples? List?

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Sorry for the delay in replying, yesterday was a busy day:
As examples I would list, in decreasing order of complexity:
Nanobes (speculative I know but interesting)
Viruses, which can infect each other
Satellite
Plasmids (according to the article it can be considered a seperate life form)
Phagemids
Viroids
Prions
self replicating molecules
I've included a link to the wikipadea page on julius rebek, an expert on self replication and self assembly, just because it makes interesting reading.

I'm sure the exact status of any of these can be argued over but thats part of why we're having this discussion isn't it!
There are also many computer programs that can give a sembelance of life. I'd also like to mention theorised plasma crystal life, since it's a good example of something that shows some living characteristics, but would probably have a hard time getting accepted as life even if some were actually found.

I have also heard, although I've not been able to confirm it, that during victorian times there was a strong movement to include crystals as 'alive' as they show both growth and self replication. This view has been more recently echoed in the clay crystal life hypothesis.

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For me it's enough for the garden to be beautifull; why do so many want to see fairies at the bottom?

"Many of those people are not getting four when adding two and two; many of them aren't even getting five or twenty-two. They're getting potato."
Gillianren