Diogenes wrote:
This is an old philosophy question. When do dead atoms make a living thing? While I love to get into metaphysics, at the moment it is irrelevant to the point. It is not debatable that "living" creatures are made of "dead" atoms. Life itself points to a sort of reverse entropy in that a meaningless jumble of random components are spontaneously assembled into a structure of a higher level of order.
negentropy
there's also information entropy and the "free energy" version of entropy. all strongly related. (also see "dissapative structures"). problem which thermo entropy - well there are many problems with it - is it discussing the situation of an adiabatic closed hamiltonian system. such a thing simply does not exist.
Yup, and i've seen that argued as proof of God's existence.
Of course Entropy theory does not disallow the existence of negentropy, it just opines that the overall system will always show an increase in entropy.
However, there was just recently (Last 6 months or so) a demonstration of a seemingly macrocosmic violation using beads.
Diogenes wrote:
I see the distinction as between having a file in a folder... or running an application. One is a sequence of instructions. The other is instructions being carried out.
well see then, it's just a matter of transplanting the dna from one cell to another. say, from a skin cell to a stem cell.
really there are still more things you have to do to stimulate the right phase transition in the cell's state ("execute the program" as you'd call it in your analogy). and i don't know what the state of research is in that area but i imagine we still have quite a ways to go there.
but point being you can just transplant the dna into the cell. it's fairly easy to grow cells. and we've perfected dna transplanting long ago. then you can take the dna from anywhere in the body and transplant it and get the same result.
which brings up an important point. the dna is really unimportant in all of this, save for the role it plays in cell duplication. you're really just growing cells. if you could track down just the active gene sequences here i suppose you could use just them. you could make it from scratch and just inject it into the cell. with a little savy you could probably have them divide indefinitely too - turn off the chemical signalling that would otherwise tell them to start differentiating (after all you've already removed that code, or in the synthetic version simply didn't put it in in the first place). then i'd guess you'd have to put some real dna back in when you want to actually start growing some tissues.
GIThruster wrote:
There never was a Christian version of the Islamic Mullah, because Christianity never presented itself as a theocracy. So as Christianity grew and institutionalized, those institutions were always outside and alongside secular authority. fact is, it went the other way 'round--secular authorities like Kings, claimed religious selection--they claimed they were set in place by God. It was really this dynamic, the secular world affecting the religious, that gave us all the religious institutionalization we find by the time of the dark ages.
So just saying, there really isn't any basis for theocracy in Christianity...
Didn't I hear somewhere the phrase "Render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar's and Render unto God those things which are God's."?
Diogenes wrote:
This is an old philosophy question. When do dead atoms make a living thing? While I love to get into metaphysics, at the moment it is irrelevant to the point. It is not debatable that "living" creatures are made of "dead" atoms. Life itself points to a sort of reverse entropy in that a meaningless jumble of random components are spontaneously assembled into a structure of a higher level of order.
negentropy
there's also information entropy and the "free energy" version of entropy. all strongly related. (also see "dissapative structures"). problem which thermo entropy - well there are many problems with it - is it discussing the situation of an adiabatic closed hamiltonian system. such a thing simply does not exist.
Yup, and i've seen that argued as proof of God's existence.
Of course Entropy theory does not disallow the existence of negentropy, it just opines that the overall system will always show an increase in entropy.
However, there was just recently (Last 6 months or so) a demonstration of a seemingly macrocosmic violation using beads.
oh geez, fusion/fission and radioactive decay are trivial examples of macroscopic violations. they convert kinetic energy (read: "heat") into mass and vice-versa. and gravity gaurantees that mass will always accrete somewhere and turn into a star. and radioactive decay is ever-present.
so macroscopic violation is collectively gauranteed by the basic laws of physics!
not to mention that _any_ attractor of chaotic order _or higher_ is _by definition_ a source of anti-entropy!
_any_ process with even a single positive lyaponuv exponent is by definition a source of anti-entropy.
Betruger wrote:Stalin's atheism's was his motivation for genocide? God's and God's divine inspiration's inexistence in Stalin's mind is what guided Stalin's hand?
His "religion" to the state is responsible for Stalin's crimes, not atheism.
It was the restraint that wasn't there. It was the key to the lock that would have stopped him from entering into genocide.
Betruger wrote:Stalin's atheism's was his motivation for genocide? God's and God's divine inspiration's inexistence in Stalin's mind is what guided Stalin's hand?
His "religion" to the state is responsible for Stalin's crimes, not atheism.
"When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything." - Emile Cammaerts
The option of choice for the last century for putative Atheist Humanists has been the Nietzschean Ubermensch.
A point which I think isn't reinforced often enough. It is perverse that the power of reason will produce atrocities, but the power of faith tends to prevent them.
happyjack27 wrote:
oh geez, fusion/fission and radioactive decay are trivial examples of macroscopic violations. they convert kinetic energy (read: "heat") into mass and vice-versa. and gravity gaurantees that mass will always accrete somewhere and turn into a star. and radioactive decay is ever-present.
so macroscopic violation is collectively gauranteed by the basic laws of physics!
not to mention that _any_ attractor of chaotic order _or higher_ is _by definition_ a source of anti-entropy!
_any_ process with even a single positive lyaponuv exponent is by definition a source of anti-entropy.
trivial. utterly trivial.
(more...)
three bodies in space are gauranteed to have chaotic orbits and thus alone are sufficient to gaurantee violation!
Diogenes wrote:Didn't I hear somewhere the phrase "Render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar's and Render unto God those things which are God's."?
That was in respect to the question "should we pay taxes to Caesar?" Which Jesus responded, in translated terms "yes".
KitemanSA wrote:Ok, you and I will just have to disagree about this. Slavery was SUPPORTED by religion for more than a millenium and it was the religious mainstream that were amongst the last to give up on it. It was the "cults" that were against slavery.
Sorry but you are mis-informed on this one.
Slavery was *never* condoned in the Bible, not once ever. The term "slavery" when it was mentioned in the Bible would today be referred to as "indentured servitude".
Other times, when *real* slavery took place, it was when people were taken hostage (like when the Israelites were taken to Egypt) and were truly slaves. Never was it condoned in this sense.
Please, be careful what you put in my mounth. I don't ever recall saying THE BIBLE condoned slavery, merely the mainstream perveyors of the Bible, i.e. religion (more specifically mainstream Christianity) though other religions condone it too.
Last edited by KitemanSA on Tue Dec 21, 2010 8:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Skipjack wrote:
Its all in the programming.
Anyway, you can divide this as many times as you want and you will get many morulas that can all develop into fully grown individuals.
So the matter is not quite as simple as you were putting it. These cells are not a human being, they can be many human beings too.
This does not comport with my recollection. Do you have a source for this?
if i may interject, it logically follows from the fact that the cells are identical and do not themselves change in any way (save multiplying) until they reach sufficient numbers (they can ascertain this through e.g. chemical signaling).
thus e.g. when you remove half of them it's equivalent to rolling back the clock to when there were only half as many (save perchance some chemical signaling residue, but you could take care of that, too.)
it logically follows.
I postulate that it is simply surmised that chemical signaling is the methodology at work. It would certainly seem to be some sort of signaling, but do we know this experimentally or is this a guess? Signaling in the Nervous system is electrical as well as chemical. (actually, all chemical reactions are electrical in nature. ) so perhaps this process begins at this early stage?
If it IS exclusively chemical signaling, then it seems likely that the chemicals being exchanged between cells are not simple compounds, else the behavior would likely have been replicated before now.
If your definition is broad enough, the entire strand of DNA is just a "chemical."
Diogenes wrote:
If it IS exclusively chemical signaling, then it seems likely that the chemicals being exchanged between cells are not simple compounds, else the behavior would likely have been replicated before now.
not neccessarily, though it might be that it has. i don't know. identifying the chemicals is one thing, understanding the reaction-diffusion dynamics is another.
and morphogenetic equations are, well, you can imagine... not easy.
Last edited by happyjack27 on Tue Dec 21, 2010 8:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Artificial cloning of organisms
Artificial cloning of organisms may also be called reproductive cloning.
Methods
Reproductive cloning generally uses "somatic cell nuclear transfer" (SCNT) to create animals that are genetically identical. This process entails the transfer of a nucleus from a donor adult cell (somatic cell) to an egg that has no nucleus. If the egg begins to divide normally it is transferred into the uterus of the surrogate mother. Such clones are not strictly identical since the somatic cells may contain mutations in their nuclear DNA. Additionally, the mitochondria in the cytoplasm also contains DNA and during SCNT this DNA is wholly from the donor egg, thus the mitochondrial genome is not the same as that of the nucleus donor cell from which it was produced. This may have important implications for cross-species nuclear transfer in which nuclear-mitochondrial incompatibilities may lead to death.
Artificial embryo splitting or embryo twinning may also be used as a method of cloning, where an embryo is split in the maturation before embryo transfer. It is optimally performed at the 6- to 8-cell stage, where it can be used as an expansion of IVF to increase the number of available embryos.[7] If both embryos are successful, it gives rise to monozygotic (identical) twins.
Dolly the Sheep
Main article: Dolly the Sheep
Dolly, a Finn-Dorset ewe, was the first mammal to have been successfully cloned from an adult cell. She was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Scotland and lived there from her birth in 1996 until her death in 2003 when she was six. Her stuffed remains were placed at Edinburgh's Royal Museum, part of the National Museums of Scotland.[8]
Dolly was publicly significant because the effort showed that the genetic material from a specific adult cell, programmed to express only a distinct subset of its genes, can be reprogrammed to grow an entirely new organism. Before this demonstration, it had been shown by John Gurdon that nuclei from differentiated cells could give rise to an entire organism after transplantation into an enucleated egg.[9] However, this concept was not yet demonstrated in a mamallian system.
Cloning Dolly the sheep had a low success rate per fertilized egg; she was born after 237 eggs were used to create 29 embryos, which only produced three lambs at birth, only one of which lived. Seventy calves have been created and one third of them died young; Prometea took 277 attempts. Notably, although the first clones were frogs, no adult cloned frog has yet been produced from a somatic adult nucleus donor cell.
There were early claims that Dolly the Sheep had pathologies resembling accelerated aging. Scientists speculated that Dolly's death in 2003 was related to the shortening of telomeres, DNA-protein complexes that protect the end of linear chromosomes. However, other researchers, including Ian Wilmut who led the team that successfully cloned Dolly, argue that Dolly's early death due to respiratory infection was unrelated to deficiencies with the cloning process.
Diogenes wrote:
So, dumb question. How do the cells know when to start differentiating? Is this happening according to some sort of plan that the too dumb to think cells are following?
like i said life isn't some self contained thing, it's a property of the dynamical relationship among multiple things. just like the liquid phase is not an element on the periodic table.
Just as the relationship between the docking ring on the Russian Soyuz capsule just coincidentally matched the docking port on the US Apollo craft, we may conclude that multiple things will always fit together without some sort of a design influence.
What I'm getting at, (If i'm not being too cute to be understood) is that the properties and dynamic relationships among multiple things are part of the design of the system. In other words, the blueprint expects these other factors to play a role, and the role they play is part of the design.
happyjack27 wrote:
not neccessarily, though it might be that it has. i don't know. identifying the chemicals is one thing, understanding the reaction-diffusion dynamics is another.
and morphogenetic equations are, well, you can imagine... not easy.
written by none other than alan turing. the man who laid the theoretical foundations for the digital computer. (he also cracked the german submarine codes that were thought to be uncrackable, marking a turning point for world war 2)
Diogenes wrote:
This is an old philosophy question. When do dead atoms make a living thing? While I love to get into metaphysics, at the moment it is irrelevant to the point. It is not debatable that "living" creatures are made of "dead" atoms. Life itself points to a sort of reverse entropy in that a meaningless jumble of random components are spontaneously assembled into a structure of a higher level of order.
negentropy
there's also information entropy and the "free energy" version of entropy. all strongly related. (also see "dissapative structures"). problem which thermo entropy - well there are many problems with it - is it discussing the situation of an adiabatic closed hamiltonian system. such a thing simply does not exist.
(more...)
there's nothing spontaneuous about it. and like i said life is not made of atoms. it's made of dynamical and morphological relationships existing in an entropy/energy gradient. (e.g. "dissipative structures") which an important point, and it's not so much a philosophical point as a mathematical/logical/spatial one
In terms of perception perhaps, but the stuff operates whether we perceive how or not. From what i've seen, mathematics can be more abstract than reality, and also not complete. It has only been since Mandelbrot that fractal Mathematics has even been noticed. I wouldn't be surprised if someone unlocks even deeper means of perception in the future.
But yes, all the stuff works together in a synergistic fashion, and we can explain it, or aspects of it with our math and science. We can define beauty with numbers and equations.
