Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Is there a God? If so, what is She like?

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wisdomlover
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Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by wisdomlover »

Once living things appeared on earth, I am pretty satisfied that evolution by natural selection could have and probably did produce the vast diversity of species we see around us, including ourselves, and including our consciousness and intelligence.

The most difficult transition to understand, for me at least, was this earlier one:

Living organisms care about things. Seaweed grows towards the sun because it wants sunlight. Jellyfish have structures for capturing molecules that can be ingested as nutrients, and no doubt have some way of expelling waste. And some have poisonous tentacles for thwarting creatures that might try to eat them, because they don't want to be eaten.

There are things these beings care about.

But does a lump of molecules, even an impressively complex and intricate super-lump of molecules, care about anything?

Why would a lump of molecules want to avoid breaking up into smaller lumps, or want to ingest nutrients, or want to find a mate and reproduce? Why would it care?

How did a big complex lump of molecules come to be alive?

It seems mind-bogglingly improbable that molecule lumps bumped into one another and churned around in the "primordial soup" (Darwin's phrase) until one day one of them started to care about things.

I am putting this discussion in the Religion category because of the traditional explanation. I don't accept this religious explanation (do you?), but I do feel that we are talking about something happening that was just so indescribably weird.
wtf
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by wtf »

wisdomlover wrote: Mon Mar 12, 2018 11:45 pm Living organisms care about things. Seaweed grows towards the sun because it wants sunlight.
The technical word for that is tropism. There is no volition or "want" involved.

But tell me this. What is the difference, in your opinion, between

a) Seaweed growing toward the sun; and

b) A rock falling to earth.

Does a rock "want" to fall down? Or is it merely a mindless object obeying the laws of nature? Does a rock have any other choice in what it "wants?" Does seaweed?
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Greta
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by Greta »

wisdomlover wrote: Mon Mar 12, 2018 11:45 pmBut does a lump of molecules, even an impressively complex and intricate super-lump of molecules, care about anything?

Why would a lump of molecules want to avoid breaking up into smaller lumps, or want to ingest nutrients, or want to find a mate and reproduce? Why would it care?

How did a big complex lump of molecules come to be alive?

It seems mind-bogglingly improbable that molecule lumps bumped into one another and churned around in the "primordial soup" (Darwin's phrase) until one day one of them started to care about things.

I am putting this discussion in the Religion category because of the traditional explanation. I don't accept this religious explanation (do you?), but I do feel that we are talking about something happening that was just so indescribably weird.
I have two videos for you - one is very long and complex but, if you want detail about how life may have started, it's incredible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw

This next video of experiments with proto life (chemicals with some qualities of life) shows how physical attraction - the push and pull of electrons - and life's desires can look very similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dySwrhMQdX4

I think you will find throughout nature (including humanity) that every field or arena of existence - biological or otherwise - forms areas of concentration over time that develop to become ever more complex, organised, energy-absorbing and influential than their surrounds. This kind of organisation occurs at all scales, from atomic to extragalactic, from atoms, molecules, life, planets, solar systems, galaxies to human wealth, ad infinitum.

"Care" is an emotion. As noted above, the line between emotion and reflexive response is not a clear divide but a gradation. We can even observe this within ourselves, that we truly care about some things but some other things, such as the need to consume energy or evacuate waste, have a significant automatic component. We "care" but we might also perfrom the entire act of eating or excreting on "autopilot" perhaps while lost in a philosophical question.

It does appear that chordates, brained animals, feel more than simpler organisms. Further, humans have an extra emotional component to their psyches due to the ability to comprehend the flow of events over significant time spans, and that adds a great deal of poignancy to our perception of life. So much cause and effect would mean nothing to simpler animals but we perceive more of the story in its beauty and tragedy.

Our own perceptions are also intrinsically limited. Just as other species cannot conceptualise the long sweep of time, we can only perceive it from one standpoint - our own. The next level of consciousness, that will bring even more poignancy to existence, will be the machine-aided capacity to perceive multiple networked perspectives in the moment. Those multiple perspectives will be knitted together and filtered in the much the same way as our single consciousness melds and filters our various sensory information into a single perspective.
wisdomlover
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by wisdomlover »

wtf wrote: Tue Mar 13, 2018 1:07 am The technical word for that is tropism. There is no volition or "want" involved.

But tell me this. What is the difference, in your opinion, between

a) Seaweed growing toward the sun; and
b) A rock falling to earth.

Does a rock "want" to fall down? Or is it merely a mindless object obeying the laws of nature? Does a rock have any other choice in what it "wants?" Does seaweed?
Living beings are unique in that they have (a) metabolism (nutrient input into and waste output from a semi-permeable structure that can stay intact for a while) and (b) reproduction.

This is true of seaweed but not of rocks, so seaweed is alive and rocks are not. If a rock moves, it is not due to any internal tropism, but some external change, like when the Old Man of the Mountain here in NH fell down in a big storm. (I drove by it that day but it was foggy and I didn't noice that it was gone.)

I would caution against bringing the terms "volition" and "choice" into this. They seem to be capabilities of fairly advanced organisms that evolved perhaps billions of years after life arose. I can't imagine that the first organisms made choices. Wouldn't a brain be needed for that?
wisdomlover
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

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Greta wrote: Tue Mar 13, 2018 1:28 am This kind of organisation occurs at all scales, from atomic to extragalactic, from atoms, molecules, life, planets, solar systems, galaxies to human wealth, ad infinitum.
Thanks for the YouTube lecture links.

Your point is important. Apparently the sun shines because it is a mass of hydrogen busy converting itself into helium (simpler to more complex).

Starting with hydrogen, then helium, as temperatures cooled all sorts of new elements came together, including oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and now there are something like 280 (?) different elements.

Then, atoms of different elements seem to bind to one another and make big "tinker-toy" molecular structures. Why things get more complex over time, I have no idea. Some sort of electromagnetism?

Apparently, scientists have gotten to the point where they have made amino acids in the laboratory. These are super-complex molecular structures. But still, they are nowhere near being alive.

Pending my digesting these YouTube videos, I am stuck with thinking how infinitesimally improbable it was that a big molecule lump came alive.
Atla
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by Atla »

wisdomlover wrote: Mon Mar 12, 2018 11:45 pm But does a lump of molecules, even an impressively complex and intricate super-lump of molecules, care about anything?
Imo you are reading a bit too much into this.. what we roughly mean by "care" and "want", are behaviors of much more advanced organisms.

The first organisms were basically just little self-reproducing machines. Yes molecules kept bumping into each other until eventually self-replicating ones were formed. It's improbable, but it's still nowhere near as improbable as for example our universe having just the right constants for life.
wtf
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by wtf »

wisdomlover wrote: Tue Mar 13, 2018 9:56 pm I would caution against bringing the terms "volition" and "choice" into this.
Someone using your handle wrote:
wisdomlover wrote: Mon Mar 12, 2018 11:45 pm Living organisms care about things. Seaweed grows towards the sun because it wants sunlight.
You have a cat? Mine writes novels using my keyboard. Clearly yours is writing things you don't mean.
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Greta
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by Greta »

wisdomlover wrote: Tue Mar 13, 2018 10:11 pm
Greta wrote: Tue Mar 13, 2018 1:28 am This kind of organisation occurs at all scales, from atomic to extragalactic, from atoms, molecules, life, planets, solar systems, galaxies to human wealth, ad infinitum.
Thanks for the YouTube lecture links.

Your point is important. Apparently the sun shines because it is a mass of hydrogen busy converting itself into helium (simpler to more complex).

Starting with hydrogen, then helium, as temperatures cooled all sorts of new elements came together, including oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and now there are something like 280 (?) different elements.

Then, atoms of different elements seem to bind to one another and make big "tinker-toy" molecular structures. Why things get more complex over time, I have no idea. Some sort of electromagnetism?

Apparently, scientists have gotten to the point where they have made amino acids in the laboratory. These are super-complex molecular structures. But still, they are nowhere near being alive.

Pending my digesting these YouTube videos, I am stuck with thinking how infinitesimally improbable it was that a big molecule lump came alive.
The improbable becomes inevitable with enough iterations. Buy trillions of lottery tickets and you will inevitably win multiple times. On the early Earth over thousands of years the numbers of organic molecules bubbling around into different permutations would number in the what ... quadrillions? With all those countless permutations, some permutations were more durable than others. The durable ones would have increased their number at the expense of less durable kinds of molecules that would just break down as usual.

These increasingly complex and durable entities would keep pulling in energy until they had too much material for their membranes to hold and then they would split. This would have also happened countless times and most times the "offspring" would not have been viable, lacking a metabolic nucleus like the "parent" - effectively just nonliving complex organic molecules.

Then, after countless iterations again, one of these splits did not just break the "parent" as usual but resulted in two nucleated offspring with more or less the same metabolism as the parent. Once that happened, those first life forms would have spread untrammelled wherever there was the right temperature and pressure, water, heavy elements and an energy source. There would be no competition. This is why some posit that the first organism (known as LUCA - Last Universal Common Ancestor) might have functioned effectively like an ocean-sized super organism, which then broke up in all manner of ways, depending on environmental differences.

What is reproduction but the use of other parts of the Earth to make imperfect copies of oneself? So, increasingly, geology on the planet's surface was transformed into biology. Now here we are, the most recent arrivals in a long line of the most durable entities in this part of the galaxy so far. Life is ultimately about the ability to persist and spread influence.
Atla
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by Atla »

wisdomlover wrote: Tue Mar 13, 2018 10:11 pm Why things get more complex over time, I have no idea. Some sort of electromagnetism?
Imo, here we might have to deviate from mainstream logic and turn to the weak Anthropic principle. We have to ask ourselves, are we here because complexity kept increasing, or did complexity necessarily have to keep increasing because we are here now? These two opposite ways of looking at it may apply at the same time, like two sides of the same coin.

So evolution might have no driving force whatsoever, it's not "striving" for complexity, it's just a necessary chain of events that led to the present moment where self-aware humans exist.
wisdomlover
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

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wtf wrote: Tue Mar 13, 2018 11:27 pm You have a cat? Mine writes novels....
No.
Last edited by wisdomlover on Thu Mar 15, 2018 10:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
wisdomlover
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by wisdomlover »

Greta wrote: Wed Mar 14, 2018 12:47 am The improbable becomes inevitable with enough iterations. Buy trillions of lottery tickets and you will inevitably win multiple times. On the early Earth over thousands of years the numbers of organic molecules bubbling around into different permutations would number in the what ... quadrillions? With all those countless permutations, some permutations were more durable than others. The durable ones would have increased their number at the expense of less durable kinds of molecules that would just break down as usual.
That is a great point and I have a feeling is a big part of the answer I am seeking. Thanks. The novels by a cat walking on a keyboard might be pretty bad though.

The rest of your post will take time for me to work through.
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Greta
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by Greta »

wisdomlover wrote: Thu Mar 15, 2018 10:16 pm
Greta wrote: Wed Mar 14, 2018 12:47 am The improbable becomes inevitable with enough iterations. Buy trillions of lottery tickets and you will inevitably win multiple times. On the early Earth over thousands of years the numbers of organic molecules bubbling around into different permutations would number in the what ... quadrillions? With all those countless permutations, some permutations were more durable than others. The durable ones would have increased their number at the expense of less durable kinds of molecules that would just break down as usual.
That is a great point and I have a feeling is a big part of the answer I am seeking. Thanks. The novels by a cat walking on a keyboard might be pretty bad though.

The rest of your post will take time for me to work through.
I imagine that the probabilities behind a cat writing a novel would produce a number akin to the number of atoms in the known universe or more :)

I personally suspect that life would have emerged multiple times in the Earth's history except that existing and "toughened" life would have simply eaten any vulnerable newcomers. Once life emerges and spreads I doubt it can emerge again until the existing life is cleared out, which is my guess as to why life on Earth only seemed to emerge from a single common ancestor.
wisdomlover
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Re: Random Motion and the Origin of Life

Post by wisdomlover »

That seems likely. It also explains why we don't see many "missing links" from the very early days of life -- viruses may be an exception. The more robust early living things ate the simpler ones.
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