Atoms are Forever
We wake up each morning to a world of hurt. The pain is all around us. We take an anthropomorphic view, but all life experiences birth, reproduction and dissipation. Life is often referred to as a gift. A better description would be to refer to life as food. We are being harvested. The specter of life is to be consumed as food.
Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution and DNA are the self replicating molecules for the blueprints of life.
James Watson claimed that he and Francis Crick discovered the secret of life, the very elegant double helix, DNA. Just four chemical bases stored in strands of double nucleotides chains, each chain a replica of the other can spell the recipes for life. Their discovery changed the world of science as it had been known up until that time.
These were the blueprints. The energy for life is ATP (adenosine triphosphate), manufactured in photon pumps in the mitochondria of living cells. The analogy which is sometimes used for ATP is a re-chargeable battery.
Over 30 years ago, Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene: "At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Re-plicator. It may not have been the biggest or the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself."
"As the battery's energy is used, its energy state is lowered until it reaches the point where it cannot be used again until it's recharged. ATP is the charged battery. ADP is the discharged version, while the input of additional energy `recharges' ADP into ATP once again, in a process known as oxidative phosphorylation." (Ed Regis, What is Life, 2008)
ATP synthesis is life's motive force. ATP is recycled, converted to ADP and back again to ATP; over and over again. This process occurs in the mitochondria organelles in a cells cytoplasm. A million mitochondria packed together would be no larger than a grain of sand. In most cells there are hundreds of them and we get them all from our mothers. When the synthesis of ATP stops the cell dies. Without it, muscles would not have their flexibility. Without it, the deficiency of new ATP in cells, rigor mortis sets in.
It is the phosphate in fertilizers which provides for ATP synthesis in plant cells.
What is similar to all life is a means of reproducing. A single stranded version of the double helix is RNA (ribonucleic acid) which can replicate. Its version uses uracil in place of DNA's thymine. RNA molecules are called ribozymes. The theory is RNA came along first and synthesized proteins and DNA came along later.
It has been suggested that RNA preceded DNA reproduction and perhaps it did because RNA can replicate without DNA but DNA cannot replicate without RNA. RNA contains ribozymes which with enzymes produces proteins and ALL life as we know it shares the same chemistry. Pollock (94) in Signs of Life wrote: "...we are related enough to a duck and an orange that we can eat them both."
We are carbon based life. DNA is a helix of the building blocks of life: the code which is a recipe for constructing and maintaining life. The three components necessary for life -as we know it- is energy, water and carbon; all of which is found throughout the universe.
Most of our energy comes from the sun but now we know energy also comes from the core of the planet as hydrogen sulfide which provides energy for life which survives without the sun, i.e. thermophylic bacteria and other organisms which live in the depths of the oceans.
"...The current need for carbon from carbon dioxide by all photo-synthesizers totals one hundred billion tons per year. Yet only a half billion tons per year is supplied as new carbon into the biosphere from rocks and volcanos. Without recycling, global productivity would only be a half billion tons per year, a mere two-hundredth of its current value. Invert this number and we can say that our real world recycling the dead increases all life two hundred times above what it would be without recycling. Death, thus two times more life." (Tyler Volk, What is Death, a Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life, 2002)
Life becomes food. Life feeds life and it changes, it is "chemically transformed", subsumed by the planet "into a gigantic functioning system", says Tyler Volk.
"For example, a dead leaf fallen to the forest floor will be consumed by dozens of species of soil detritus feeders, from worms to bacteria, who release some of the former carbon into the leaf into carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Thus what happens to the dead amplifies not just any one other organism but to some extent all of life..." (ibid)
There are some theories that life arrived on meteorites or comets as RNA or amino acids. 70 separate amino acids have been discovered in meteorites and contain all the essential ingredients for life. Meteorites and comets have impacted the earth throughout its history and the force of these impacts transformed amino acids into the proteins necessary for life. And some theories [see Harper, Nova TV series, WGBH 2005, Origins: How Life Began] suggest it was bacteria, which was the precursor of eukaryotes which arrived from outer space transported here by meteorites and comets.
Life is both prey and predator. My best non-human friend(s), my dogs, have the predatory behavior of their ancestral wolf. My predatory behavior is tied to survival. Hostility and war is as natural as life is old (in our frame of reference). My dogs also have instinctual behaviors; they have "fear and flight" behaviors; they have hierarchy and dominance behavior which they display with each other when they are not playing or sleeping and when cornered they will fight.
We in our species will just kill our enemies who are those who compete with us for territory and resources - which has been the history of groups since time began.
Dogs stalk, chase, grab and bite each other. Predatory motor patterns are obvious behaviors in animals and we are just animals with a larger brain and we assume an awareness of these things, which evolved as our defense against predators and our offensive strategies and the success of our species.
Of course different animals display different patterns and so do we because we are by the way, just animals ourselves, in spite of some who think humans are a higher form of life - which we are not.
We are human-centric organisms and are too often oblivious to the pain of other animals. Some cultures eat animals we would never think about as food. And the females of several species also eat their mates after they copulate with them. This happens with spiders and some other animals. The males actually welcome being consumed by these female spiders because it ensures that their sperm will have longer to fertilize her eggs and eating the male spider is a distraction so the female doesn't move on to another spider until she finishes her meal. I wouldn't exactly call it love, but maybe to a spider it is? It most assuredly is the ultimate in love making. I like sex but not that much. But you know humans have some weird sexual perversions also and can be very self-destructive.
There are some things we may never know. We may become extinct as a species before we discover the theoretical distinctions between what is known and what can only be imagined.
Humans however, have a heightened awareness of self which is why religion has played an essential role in human life since the dawn of history. There has been fear responses which rely on escapism and apologia for what appears inevitable, and the need to believe in stories and myths was a way to stay sane - to find explanation is what would otherwise be inexplicable, until we discovered science and tested the theories. In spite of how far we have advanced intellectually there is still this fear response which makes it satisfying to hold on to comfort myths. Those themes are balm for the pain which accompanies conscious minds.
Life is a product of death. Life recycles. Atoms become the stuff of new organisms. Death makes possible more life.
Not only spiders and mayflies and wasps and ants AND to humans too; the essentiality to all life is life.
"Biological recycling is the worm that munches leaf litter into microscopic bits that are then further degraded by bacteria into nutrients that later can become tree leaves again Death makes life..." (Tyler Volk, What is Death? -a scientist looks at the cycle of life-)
Life reproduces itself; it dissipates heat into the external environment. The cell is the smallest life and besides pico-eukaryotes, bacteria is life; it is the life that was here for billions of years before our more complex, nucleated cells, when Eukaryotic cells evolved.
Bacteria is also life but bacteria don't need to eat organic organisms to survive. They can consume the garbage in land fills. They can consume carbon dioxide and they can clean up after oil spills.
"Life is distinguished not by its chemical constituents but by the behavior of its chemicals. The question `What is Life?' is thus a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, recreates and outdoes itself." (L. Margulis and D. Sagen - What is Life? - 1995)
"The surge of activity which not only applies to cells and animals but to Earth's entire atmosphere, is intimately connected to two of science's most famous laws--the laws of thermodynamics. The first law says that throughout any transformation of the total energy of any system and its environment is neither lost nor gained. Energy--whether as light, movement, radiation, heat, radioactivity, chemical or other--is conserved." (ibid)
"But not all forms of energy are equal; not all have the same effect. Heat is a kind of energy to which other forms tend to convert, and heat tends to disorganize matter. The second law of thermodynamics says that physical systems tend to lose heat to their surroundings." (ibid)
"The second law was conceived during the Industrial Revolution, when the steam engine represented the state--of-art in engineering. French physicist Nicolas Carnot (1796-1832), aiming to improve the efficiency of the steam engine (whose governor mechanism was invented by James Watt), came to realize that heat was associate with the movement of minute particles. And from that, he envisioned the principle that is now known as the second law. In any moving or energy using system entropy increases."
"....(the first law of thermodynamics of conservation of energy holds), the amount of energy available to do work decreases. In computer science entropy is measured as the uncertainty in the information content of a message. The second law unequivocally claims that in changing systems entropy increases, implying that heat, noise, uncertainty, and other forms of energy not useful for work, increase. As local systems lose heat, the universe as a whole is gaining it. Although not so popular now, in the past physicists and chemists have made the prediction that the universe will whimper out in a `heat death' as a consequence of the tendency for entropy to increase. More recently, they have even invented the word `negentropy' for life, which in its tendency to increase information and certainty, seems to contradict the second law. It doesn't; the second law holds as long as one regards the system (LIFE) in its environment." (ibid)
As stated previously in quoting Ilya Prigogine, the interpretation of the second law has changed and Prigogine, a Belgian Nobel laureate pioneered the view or "the consideration of a larger class of `dissipative structures,' which also includes decidedly nonliving centers of activity," [Margulis & Segan], i.e. whirlpools, tornadoes, flames. - A dissipative system may grow and maintain itself. It does this by importing useful energy and exporting less useful energy and as Margulis further points out, this thermodynamic view even extends back to Schrodinger, who "likened living beings to flames, `streams of order' that maintain their forms." (Margulis and Sagan)
Important to life is the ability to be self-sustaining and increasing itself. This is the basis of evolution. Natural selection is one aspect of evolution. And maintaining itself [autopoiesis] is a fundamental aspect of life.
"Islands of order in an ocean of chaos, organisms are far superior to human-built machines. Unlike James Watt's steam engine, for example, the body concentrates order. It continuously SELF-REPAIRS (emphasis mine). Every five days you get a new stomach lining. You get a new liver every two months. Your skin replaces itself every six weeks. Every year, ninety-eight percent of the atoms in your body are replaced. This nonstop chemical replacement, metabolism, is a sure sign of life. This `machine' demands continual input of chemical energy and materials (food)." (Margulis and Sagan)
And the fundamental component of life must be `autopoiesis' The reference is to the continuous producing of itself. The reference applies to all life. Life is purposeful. It reproduces. The molecules at the end of eukaryote life dissipates back to the external environment.
"Life is a bitch, and then you die" - as the saying goes; but, it is somewhat of a comfort to know that your life doesn't end, that it is transformative and is part of a much bigger system, that you are integral to the process which sustains all life.
But to think about death as essential to life is to put us on the same level with the most profound minds of history who recognized the focus of real life is not about death at all. The focus on death distracts us from living. Life is existential. Life is self-awareness.
So why would we go through life asking ourselves what is death? We should change the question to: What is Life? - because if life is predicated on death it is the gift of death which gives us what is special which is our very unique consciousness and our loves and it is our own atomic immortality we should be contemplating not the dying of our body.
Hank Roth
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Today is Saturday February 04, 2012
Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982)