Life! What a concept!

This year's Annual Edge Event took place at Eastover Farm in Bethlehem, CT on Monday, August 27th. Invited to address the topic "Life: What a Concept!" were Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, and Seth Lloyd, who focused on their new, and in more than a few cases, startling research, and/or ideas in the biological sciences.A small group of journalists interested in the kind of issues that are explored on Edge were present: Corey Powell, Discover, Jordan Mejias, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Heidi Ledford, Nature, Greg Huang, New Scientist, Deborah Treisman, New Yorker, Edward Rothstein, New York Times, Andrian Kreye, Sddeutsche Zeitung, Antonio Regalado, Wall Street Journal. Guests included Heather Kowalski, The J. Craig Venter Institute, Ting Wu, The Wu Lab, Harvard Medical School, and the artist Stephanie Rudloe. Attending for Edge: Katinka Matson, Russell Weinberger, Max Brockman, and Karla Taylor.We are witnessing a point in which the empirical has intersected with the epistemological: everything becomes new, everything is up for grabs. Big questions are being asked, questions that affect the lives of everyone on the planet. And don't even try to talk about religion: the gods are gone.Following the theme of new technologies=new perceptions, I asked the speakers to take a third culture slant in the proceedings and explore not only the science but the potential for changes in the intellectual landscape as well.We are pleased to present the transcripts of the talks and conversation along with streaming video clips (links below).

We want to be able to mirror image PCR, polymerase chain reaction, where you can amplify up DNA with a mirror-image polymerase. A post-doc has gone through a prototype polymerase which is for a medium size ” 353 amino acids long ” and he's made all but four of the peptide bonds now. So we're very close to getting that first polymerase.But the goal then so we can make mirror image DNA is to make mirror image proteins, and there we have to make all of the ribosome from scratch, and so we wouldn't make all the ribosome just for fun, but this is something that we think is useful. And that's about 25 times more bonds to be made than just making the DNA polymerase. But, as Craig will greatly attest, scaling up by a factor of 25 is not that big a deal. In the genome project we went basically a hundred thousand fold scale-up from where we were at the time we started. And now we're talking about doing many many genomes. I think we will be able to make a mirror image DNA polymerase and ribosome, in which case you can start programming it straight from the computer. Once you have it all you can start making mirror-image proteins.

And then your OP include this quote: "We are witnessing a point in which the empirical has intersected with the epistemological". Since epistemology is way off track (IMO), I don't find that encouraging.

I'm reminded of Turing's 1950 prediction that successful AI was just around the corner.

In this discussion there appears to be an assumption that life is digital. I likewise believe that to be a faulty assumption.

It's been known since the structure of DNA was elucidated that DNA is very digital. There are four possible base pairs per site, two bits per site, three and a half billion sites, seven billion bits of information in the human DNA.

I don't define life as the genome. I don't define thought/intelligence as logic. I suspect that we are seeing two different versions of the same mistake.

Quantum mechanics means that there are only a discrete number of species of chemicals. You can only put together two hydrogens and an oxygen to make a molecule in one way that I know of. This means that we can catalog chemicals in a discrete list ” chemical number one, chemical number two, chemical number three ” you can order it any way you want according to your favorite chemicals. But it's discrete. This digital nature of the universe actually infects everything, in particular life. It's been known since the structure of DNA was elucidated that DNA is very digital. There are four possible base pairs per site, two bits per site, three and a half billion sites, seven billion bits of information in the human DNA. There's a very recognizable digital code of the kind that electrical engineers rediscovered in the 1950s that maps the codes for sequences of DNA onto expressions of proteins. There's a digital nature to the universe, and quantum mechanics makes this happen.

As long as they are the right conclusions, then no harm done.

That omission is telling us something.

I'd like to step back from talking about life itself.

Well, excuse me, then. In the subject .pdf of your OP, Seth Lloyd says this:

I'd like to step back from talking about life itself.

I just pointed out to Hoot Mon that DNA isn't the only way "digital" information could be passed on from one generation to the next.

I just pointed out to Hoot Mon that DNA isn't the only way "digital" information could be passed on from one generation to the next.