Comment on Could objects like stars be considered living?
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 days ago
My personal definition of life includes the propagation of latent information—meaning that a “child” inherits something from its “parent” that isn’t visible to an observer but that nevertheless affects its potential behavior.
Assuming we can see the size and chemical composition of the gas cloud out of which a star condenses, our current theory is that this completely determines the future behavior of the star. If that’s so, then the star wouldn’t be alive by my definition. But if there’s some unobservable quality that the star inherits from its parent and that does affect its behavior, I’d be willing to reconsider.
Wrufieotnak@feddit.org 2 days ago
But why does it have to be unobservable? And if it is unobservable, how do you know that it is there?
We know pretty well and can observe that children inherit the DNA of their parents. And nowadays we also know that it is not only the DNA, but the epigenetic postprocessing that gets (at least partially) inherited. So according to your definition if we ever fully understood how bacteria propagate and behave, it would not be alive anymore?
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Specifically, an organism has to store latent information that’s unobservable to anything it interacts with (i.e., its ecosystem)—or at least, anything with an interest in predicting and controlling it. Otherwise, it has no possibility of independent behavior, and it’s effectively part of a colony organism (or an organ of another organism). It also has no differential behavior for natural selection to act on, so it can’t evolve in a Darwinian sense.
To take your example of bacteria, we don’t know and control the entirety of each individual bacterium’s behavior, but it has happened: it’s how mitochondria ceased to be independent organisms.