Re: Other half of: The difference between organism and ecosystem...

[janos nagyapu <***>]

Judith, I commend you for your open mind. I kept
preaching this for the past decade, since I wrote MY
sci-fi of people from the universe with 3 poles: a +,
a - and a third one. You don't know what that may be?
nor do I or anybody in our universal system, but that
is no restriction on my fantasy. Another universe...

Water and other (terrestrial) circumstances are for
the model of (scientific) biology, as I said earlier. 
What leads me back to my question: thinking in
generalities, is there something like "life"? can we
ever step out from our reductionist models? 
(This is definitely a post-RR question, negating the
mathematical etc. biology as was known it for the past
millennia on Earth. This one). 
But it is definitely based on RR-type thinking.
Cheerz

John M

(my computer is still on strike, I found this Yahoo
mailbox to substitute for a more civilised one).
I hope it tolerates my e-mail address and forwards
this post). I try it anyway. Please try to use my
regular address for a response. JM

--- Judith Rosen <***> wrote:

> Oops... I forgot to write the rest of my comments on
> this thing, 
> before hitting the send button! Sorry. Here's the
> missing stuff:
> 
> 
> Dan Fiscus wrote:
> In addition to a balance of gravitation and
> radiation for
> conditions needed for an "endless" hydrological
> cycle,
> which in turn is perhaps necessary for life to
> emerge, I
> forgot to mention that I think a planet(oid) would
> need
> water itself.
> 
> 
> Why do you think water is required?
> 
> I was trying to describe an approach to telling the
> story
> of the origin of life as told from the perspective
> of
> ecosystemic/community life as opposed to trying to
> imagine how life emerged as cells/organisms.
> 
> 
> Well, it seems to me that we may have a problem
> imagining the earliest 
> organisms because the planetary situation was
> radically different back 
> then. We can't use our current biosphere as a model,
> which means that 
> current living organisms are probably not
> appropriate as models, 
> either. The earliest organisms may not have been
> plants, and may not 
> have been sun energy based. So many planetary
> cataclysms have 
> occurred, too, causing massive die-offs. We know
> about a few of those 
> from the fossil record, but it would be pretty much
> impossible to find 
> a fossil record of microscopic evolutionary epochs,
> wouldn't it? 
> Anyway, all of this begs the question; Is there only
> going to be one 
> way for life to form?
> 
> How is an organism a community? Do you mean
> inwardly,
> or outwardly?
> 
> Well, my comment was based on your reference to a
> series of 
> "proto-biotic" complementary processes as "a
> community". I then 
> suggested that this definition was a synonym of
> "system".  It also 
> struck me that an organism could be viewed as
> basically the same 
> thing... The stuff organisms are made up of is not
> alive, the 
> processes, themselves, aren't alive; in fact life is
> not IN the parts, 
> but in the whole.
> 
> I guess I was playing with the words, trying to see
> if perhaps the 
> different definitions were somehow just a
> perspective problem-- that 
> perhaps we were both describing the same exact
> "thing".
> 
> Judith 
>