What's the difference between living and non-living things?
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- čas přidán 27. 09. 2012
- For decades, biology has been trying to develop a 'theory of life' which explains how living things first came into being -- how the inanimate become animate. Addy Pross shows that it is chemistry, specifically the new field of systems chemistry, that is at last providing the answers. ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/97...
- Věda a technologie
Pross is someone who sees lots of trees but no forest:
www.eoht.info/page/Addy+Pross
Asking what the difference is between a living thing and non-living thing is like asking what the difference is between an etherized and non-etherized location of space, both ether and life are defunct concepts: they do not exist.
Yes, that's absolutely right. Natural selection will also extend to self-replicating chemicals. More stable chemical products will get selected over unstable ones.
Well, there is a misconception in this video: Darwinos theory is about the origem of the species and their evolution, his theory never was intended to be about the origin of life. For instance, Oparin brought forth a theory about what the video title says.
Mechanistic and in a generic way any body that know basic principles of science knows what life is: it is a very complex way by which matter process energy and matter to fight against the ever incrising entropy that after all will always wins; so life is a thermodynamical process.
The problem is that we lack a lot of links of the "tree of life", that is, DNA ostly probably wasn't the very first genetic code to ever exist on earth: it is too complex to emerge in an earth without life and DNA alone is not able to copy itself, the virus proves it - indeed virus are very interesting in the perspective of evolution as in spite of being extremely simple in comparison to even the most simple of the the bacteria, they cold not be among the very first maco molecules cabaple of self replicating, as they donot have a metabolism of their own.
What I think complicates this discurssion is the mish mash that people make between "what is life" from the objective scientific mechanistic stand point with "what is life" to human beings, from the existencial-philosophical stand point.
BS