humbling.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20906-lifelike-cells-are-made-of-metal.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/lee_cronin_making_matter_come_alive.html

it's not a new idea. i think it traces back to asimov. but it's neat to see it actualized.

i know he's trying to avoid a teleological discussion, but by focusing entirely on competition he's actually being teleological; whether working with chaos or pure random bullshit luck, an inherent aspect of evolution has to be *chance*.

i agree that it's a certainty that non-carbon life exists; again, that's not a new idea. the thing is that nasa isn't looking for living things, it's looking for dead things in the form of oil...

he has a teleological trap here, and now i see why he circled around it. it's not going to be enough to simply put life in a box and apply external pressure in some kind of hegelian plot. life isn't competing against itself so much as it's competing against other life forms, and against randomness. there's not a contradiction there between competition and chance, it's that the chance drives the competition. that could conceivably be corrected by creating ever more elaborate challenges for the life to evolve to conquer. it's reasonable that he oversimplified the point for a general presentation. yet, there's a lot of faith there, and i'm not sure it's well placed. evolution actually has a very low success rate, as evidenced by the plethora of evolutionary dead ends. one of the prime strategies that organisms use is reproducing by the dozens or hundreds or even thousands. a little good luck would probably help, and it would be hard - if not impossible - to create that in a lab. what i'm getting at is that it's predictable that these experiments will produce a lot of "dead" "organisms", unless some kind of escape route is consistently presented - or will simply lead to stasis, if the hegelian plot is too lenient. demonstrating the ability for metals to evolve is not the same thing as simulating useful evolution.

he also *seems* to be ignoring the idea of sexual reproduction, which is something that is probably absolutely required for any kind of serious evolution.

worse, it may also be lamarckian, if he's assuming organisms will adapt on the spot to meet pressures (i can't tell if that's what he's getting at or not, but i think it might be). i mean, putting a handful of these things in a box and assuming they'll just change to fit the environment, then pass on those traits, without external forces to battle against? both teleological and lamarckian...

i think it's a really interesting idea, though, i just think maybe he should have a talk with a biologist in strategizing - or maybe the presentation was absurdly over-simplified. i couldn't find an update (this is from two years ago).

ok. he acknowledges there's no dna. no dna means no mutagenesis, which means no evolution. at best, he's using the idea of "evolution" figuratively and is just talking about molecules that have the ability to *adapt* - meaning he's constructing something that is meant to operate using a lamarckian mechanism. that just entrenches the teleology.

but details are sort of scant. i'm speculating.

although. wait. i'm being too literal. there could be some other mechanism to carry a "genome". it doesn't have to exactly simulate dna. and it almost sounds like he's expecting that to appear, spontaneously. and, why not? you'd just need to simulate it a few katrillion times, i guess.

still lamarckian, though.

still teleological...