Re: machine, organism, life

[Judith Rosen <***>]

Is there an ecosystem if there are no living organisms in it (like on the
moon)? If yes, is there life in that ecosystem? If there is no life in that
ecosystem, why not? If life is a quality that inheres to ecosystemic
organization, why is there no life in most of the ecosystems in our solar
system?

If, on the other hand, you believe there is no ecosystem on the moon or
anywhere else that has no living organisms in it, then could you please
elaborate on your definition of "ecosystem"?

Either way, however, you need to be able to elucidate what your reasoning is
on why living organisms are alive and rocks are not, if they both "evolved"
here in this same ecosystem. What are the principles at work?

Genetics is only one aspect of the organization of certain living organisms.
To use genetics as any part of origin-of-life arguments is to take an
incomplete piece of the epistemology of current life and try to understand
origin of life from it. If this were easy to do, science would have been
creating new life all over the place by now. According to Rosennean
Complexity Theory, it is impossible to extract or extrapolate the ontology
from the epistemology in a complex system, it is only possible to do this in
a non-complex system. Furthermore, contemporary science has yet to fully
comprehend the full epistemology of the humble phytoplankton or any other
single-celled life form, never mind the epistemology of multicellular,
conscious life forms like human beings. So how is science supposed to get to
onotological issues of organisms with such a piecemeal picture of what
"life" is?

I am certainly willing to be open to the possibility that you have a
completely unique take on the nature of the universe and that it may be
capable of blowing all other scientific theories away as irrelevant, but
let's see the foundations you're resting your claims on, Dan. From where I'm
looking at it from so far, nothing is clear. Furthermore, the Rosennean
identification with life as an emergent property caused by a certain type of
 complex organization in a given system (which my father called "organisms")
is hardly the same set of principles which have led to what you described
as:  "the rigid identification that has held up life science progress and
also helps fuel our self-destruction as a species." I would say that the
Cartesian/Newtonian paradigm has done that, and Rosennean principles are a
radical switch from that particle-based paradigm to an organization-based
one.

Incidentally, it is not accurate to say my father "rigidly identifies life
with cells or organisms" because he was actually identifying life with
complexity (i.e. with the effect that complex organization has on a system)
and the systems which exhibit the type of complexity that cause life were
what he called "organisms". In his view, ecosystems are "biological systems"
but are not "alive" in the sense that organisms are alive. Organization is
the key, here. In other words, the only reason organisms are alive is
because of their organization... and their organization is not the same as
ecosystemic organization (which is much looser and has far fewer closed
loops of entailment). The Rosennean view is that any life in an ecosystem is
a consequence of the living organisms residing in it, whereas you seem to be
saying that the only reason there are living organisms at all is because
there was a living ecosystem, first. This is where, in my view, the logic
breaks down.

Judith

> Dan Fiscus wrote:
> I have to disagree. I see machines and organisms more alike than
> either is to life itself. Both are mostly localized and fully or nearly
> or easily fractionable and separable in terms of internal component
> parts as well as separating system from environment. In these
> characteristics, they are both more simple than complex. Life on the
> other hand and in an ecological/community/ecosystem or network
> model of it, is by comparison more complex in the Rosen sense -
> harder or impossible to fractionate without destroying the life in it
> or the essential organization, also harder to separate from
> environment. I think the rigid identification of life with cell and
> organism for both an original (origin of life) and fundamental (what
> is life?) nature is a misconception that has held up life science
> progress and also helps fuel our self-destruction as a species. Only
> after we get rid of this old mono-model (life = organism only) and
> at the very least balance it with an equally weighted complementary
> view (life = ecosystem/community/autotroph+heterotroph) will
> we ever be able to figure out "the meaning of life" (original and
> fundamental nature of life) and "how to save the world" (successful
> paradigm and program for sustainability as in open-ended evolution
> for humans-integrated-with-life-and-environment.
>
> One solid development that supports this view comes from work to
> trace back genetic changes toward some last universal common
> ancestor or LUCA. This news/commentary article in Nature tells
> some of the story about how many respective workers are now
> suggesting the idea of a LUCA as a cell may be completely wrong
> and fruitless:
>
> Nature 427, 674 - 676 (19 February 2004); doi:10.1038/427674a
> Origins of life: Born in a watery commune by JOHN WHITFIELD
>
> one snippet:
>
> "But there are now hints that some of these questions may be
> answerable. While some groups are zeroing in on LUCA's preferred
> temperature, others are targeting its genetic blueprint. From all this
> work, one of the more surprising theories to emerge may also help
> to explain why LUCA has been so hard to find. Perhaps it wasn't a
> single organism at all. Instead, most researchers now believe we
> should think of LUCA as a pool of genes shared among a host of
> primitive organisms.
>
> "The naive picture that a group of organisms got all their genes
> from a simple last common ancestor is breaking down," says
> microbiologist Gary Olsen of the University of Illinois at
> Urbana-Champaign. In its place, the image of a sophisticated, global
> community is emerging, he says. "In the past two years, it feels like
> it's fallen together into a coherent picture." Rather than a last
> common ancestor, LUCA may have been a last common community."
>
>  From this fuzzing of the boundaries to a global community of
> organisms we will likley have to go another step toward blurring the
> boundaries to a global network of pre-organismic molecular
> processes. After this step we ought to be able to see/understand
> how life emerged from environment while also  continuing to know
> how to remain fully integrated and mutually causal with its
> environment everywhere and always.
>
> Some comments toward what I see as a more truly complex
> approach to the origin and nature of life...one I think compatible
> with Rosen's work even though he used the term "organism" a lot...
>
> Dan
>