One of the dumbest science concepts in the press this year is the claim of “making life from scratch.”
Your building materials are shown below. Have at it.
Charles Darwin can be forgiven for having made the mistake of believing that there was such a thing as a “simple life form.” We now know that all life, all cells, all molecules, all atoms, and all particles are incredibly complex.
And the First Law Of Thermodynamics makes it abundantly clear that you can not make anything “from scratch.” Anything you build necessarily starts with preexisting materials.
Steve
The picture you show is all black
Exactly!
This boils down to the definition of life itself. For what defines a living thing? The highschool student will tell you that a living thing:
(1) feeds itself ( is a transducer)
(2) grows
(3) reproduce
However by doing so he misses the point for a living thing does such things precisely because it is a living thing.
Then, what defines a living thing? Is it its internal functioning? Nope, because function follows form, hence a living thing functions in a certain way because it is a living thing…and so on and so on…
What is life?
If you had a magical machine that could correctly assemble all of the molecules/atoms/particles that make up a person in the correct arrangement, would the result be alive? Or is some sort of “spark” or “essence” required?
If our magic machine could assemble all of the molecules/atoms/particles in exactly the same arrangement as my brain, would the resulting thing have the same personality and memories as me?