Before I get into an argument with the atheocrats, I’ll have to say one thing to characterize where they seem to want to take the thread.
Just because your cells don’t have style doesn’t mean mine don’t.
Erek
Damn right. It’s a kludge. To turn something off the cell just doesn’t not do it - it sticks a protein on something that would cause something to happen, but gets blocked. And sometimes to make it happen it blocks the first one from working. It is exactly what you’d expect from a genetic algorithm. It works, but it ain’t pretty. You know about the design flaw in our eye causing our blind spot, right?
No, this stuff was known long before the human genome project. That shows how high a percentage of our genetic material is noise.
The whole thing is like old code that I’ve written. I special case this problem here and there, I take code from one place, modify it slightly, and use it for something else. It works, it is better than redoing it from scratch every time, but it sure isn’t elegant!
This has nothing to do with atheism, just biology. Why should a god care if our cells are elegant?
Zero mutations; the point is, you make it so any differences between the original and the copy ( or at least whatever it uses in place of DNA ) cause immediate shutdown or destruction of the defective copy. It shouldn’t be hard; making things able to mutate and still function is much harder.
No, no such simulations of nanotech have been done, or of anything else as far as I know. “All possible mutations” is too large a number; it’s better to make mutation impossible.
Unless you’re an alien, you have the same cells as the rest of us.
DNA strands recombine, just because something is ‘junk code’ in one operation doesn’t mean it has no purpose. It might stop the particular thing from happening, but that doesn’t mean to me, “inelegant”. My problem here is the usage of the word elegant. Elegant is a completely subjective term, and while I might concede that you know more about molecular biology than I do, I doubt the combined knowledge of everyone that has posted in this thread would equal enough qualification to pass judgement as to whether or not a cell was “elegant”.
You cannot leave purpose out of these equations, something that is CONSISTENTLY done in arguments I’ve seen. Just because a square peg won’t fit in a round hole doesn’t make the round peg more ‘elegant’ because it does.
I am not debating whether things can be more mathematically elegant than others, I am debating whether or not YOU are qualified to make such a judgement, there’s a big difference in that.
To determine whether something is elegant or not you need to know it’s purpose, what it is trying to achieve by the action it took.
You are taking a qualitative judgement and acting like it’s a quantitative measure.
So, here’s the crux of the issue for me. I do not think that any of us is MORE sentient than a tree. I can not presume to know all of the functions that a tree can go through in it’s thousands of years of life.
I happen to think trees are quite elegant, and that a cell in the tree is only part of the whole, and has a specialized function within that whole, just a tree is a part of the whole called the forest, and the forest is a part of the whole of the ecosystem and so on to the Earth, to the Solar System to the Galaxy to the Universe.
It’s all an elegant singularity, and you are making an artificial dissection and trying to judge a part in a vacuum without looking at the entire picture.
Erek
*Scott then goes on a “You are the one to bring up the concept that biology is “elegent” bender”, brings out his family . . ., and finishes the whole act by wipping it all on a cross.
"That’s great! Byut what do you call yourselves? “Why”, I reply, “the atheocrats.”
Whenever I debate the three of you, I definitely feel like we’re from different planets.
Erek
The point was not that it is impossible to create a flying car, or any other example of stuff that has been predicted, the point was that the PRACTICAL application of technology is constantly being incorrectly predicted. Flying cars are far less practical than cars that roll for many reasons, and it’s possible that nano-bots that burn fat might be impractical also compared to other alternatives.
I completely agree with this statement, as I said in my post “Naysayers are probably wrong also.” People are constantly getting it wrong on both sides of the prediction spectrum.
I’m an IC test person, and it is not easy to figure out if something has gone wrong. How about a mutation that duplicates a function? If you do some sort of checksum, first there is aliasing, and second a double mutation can affect the checksum also.
Sorry, this does not give me a lot of confidence.
Not to mention that any such scheme will be expensive, and nano,being small, will tend towards efficiency - to fit in better where it is to do the work.
That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. 
Well, I suppose if your purpose was to design a junk yard (for a movie say) you can have an elegant junkyard. But I think it is better to talk about the function of cell processes, not purpose. (since many of us think there is no purpose, and even those who do have no way of knowing what it is.) Something that can do the job in fewer steps using less energy is more elegant than something that takes more. Is wasted effort ever elegant?
If you are saying that by definition anything with a purpose is elegant, and everything has a purpose, it is hard to argue. If the purpose of a rusted out car to sell rust protection, is it elegant? Effective, perhaps, but elegant no.
Must restrain comebacks of death.
Not everything with a function is sentient.
Well, I think trees are artistically elegant also - but maybe because we are culturally programmed that way. I know little of botany, but some things in it seem elegant. On the other hand trees grow big because of wars for light. They therefore spend a lot of resources, are more prone to falling, and must create gigantic root systems. Beautiful and elegant in that sense, yes. (I’m lucky in that I don’t live all that far from the redwoods and sequoias.) Elegant biologically, I’m not sure.
The cell by the way, is awe inspiring in my book. Just not elegant.
Is the internet elegant? Maybe so. It sure as shit is chaotic. Perhaps that’s the answer. Sort of a self healing organism.
That’s the point isn’t it? Can we design a machine to go after cancer cells? Can we design it to not become destructive?
Probably not. Can we design it to self heal? Maybe.
Is the internet the macro version of nanotechnology? Are we the cells in the body?
Very interesting thread.
I don’t know that the effort is wasted. You seem to believe it is.
I am saying it’s arrogant for a creature born of such biology to think that they can make something superior to that biology. For instance, in the case of the singularity, we won’t create an intelligence greater than human intelligence, we will create the next step in the evolution of human intelligence, and it may not resemble something recognizable to us at this stage pre-evolution.
Possibly true, but I think a lot is being assumed about the function of a tree.
You seem to have some zero sum measure of elegance, that exists in a bubble. You say that trees have “big roots systems” but big is a meaningless term unless there is some optimal size for living creatures to be, which I don’t think there is, they grow to what they can sustain in their environment, some fall but the vast majority do not.
Well, my problem is that I think you are trying to take a subjective idea and apply it objectively.
I am simply not convinced that humans have a monopoly on awareness. I think trees are aware, just not in an anthropomorphic sense.
Erek
Ok, let’s bring the thread back on topic.
I want to talk about the economic impact. Let’s say that only big corporations for now have access to nanotech, but it significantly lowers their production costs, this means that cell phones, iPods, televisions, etc… are all super cheap because their tiny parts are produced by nanontechnology.
What if nanotechnology is capable of seperating materials at the molecular level so we can just dump trash in a decompiler to harvest the raw materials?
How would this change things?
Not to hijact this thread, but Dr. Richard Smalley, nanotechnology pioneer and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of buckminsterfullerenes (“buckyballs”) has died. He was only 62. 
I started a thread here.
Fundamentally. Basically manufacturing as we know it would be a thing of the past. Even countries with cheap labor would not be able to compete with a company that could basically ‘grow’ manufactured goods from raw materials (and your trash example really gets to the point there…landfills would become gold mines in a world where you could have nano-bots separate and compound materials at the molecular level.
Another big impact would be that manufacturing would probably come back in a big way to the US, simply because we have literally tons of trash and waste materials that could potentially be used to produce new products…and we have the capital to invest in such technology. Same for Europe and places like Japan. Jobs…there probably wouldn’t be many jobs in manufacturing (just maintenance monitoring and tech type support), but probably a boom in higher end design type jobs (CAD designs translated into rapid prototyping, establishing required materials, programming of the ‘growth’ process for the desired goods), as well as distribution jobs (think of the markets that would open up if you could ‘grow’ clothes, luxury items like iPods…even the poorest folks could buy them and that means markets where there have NEVER been markets before). Probably a lot of new jobs in things we can’t even envision today as well (maybe nano-bot monitoring detectives, 'bot wranglers, etc).
Take this to its logical conclusion and you’d have a society where material goods would be extremely cheap, where physical manufacturing labor would be a thing of the past, and where creativity would be your major selling point for your services. What new product or service can you envision and figure out a way to have automatically mass produced, what materials would you need and where is the cheapest/easist source for them, etc ect.
-XT
xtisme: My view of the imminent future has always been one of an artisan culture. It influences my politics quite a bit, because I don’t believe in the old paradigm where we hold up, or pretend to hold up the value of the “worker”. In my opinion a socialist structure would be the only real valid one, where basics are covered, but luxury rewards are available for those that wish to stretch themselves further. There will be no value in the Proletarian worker any longer, and I don’t want to see them impoverished or cut from society.
This is why in my OP I mentioned the obsolecense of the Left/Right paradigm.
Erek
THe problem with this is that the definition of what the ‘basics’ are changes as we get wealthier. I would argue that in most western democracy everyone DOES get the ‘basics’. Your average welfare recipient today makes vastly more than the middle class did 100 years ago. In fact, welfare in the U.S. pays people more than the world average income today. And yet, people still want more.
And so it will be. As our productivity increases, our wealth will increase. When I was a kid, a sign of wealth was a family that had two cars and two TV sets. The average home was about 1100 square feet. In the 1940’s, the average home was more lik 900 square feet. Today it’s probably 1600 square feet, and even poor people have multiple TV sets, air conditioning in hot climates, computers, internet, etc.
One thing you can be sure of - our appetites will grow with our income. 100 years ago, most of the population was involved in making and distributing food. Today, something like 5% are. But we didn’t all retire and live off the other 5% at our then current standards of living.
For that matter, in 1967, a time when people thought they were pretty well off, the per-capita income in the U.S. in constant dollars was $11,067. Today it’s more than twice that, and yet people work as many hours as they did then.
There will always be scarcity. Nanotech might lower our costs of finished goods dramatically, but it can do nothing about the cost of real estate in Martha’s Vineyard, or the value of an original artwork, or the value of a plot of land in a desirable area in a city.
I don’t believe there will ever come a day when we all have everything we want and our lives are spent smelling the daisies and painting. We’ll just move the poverty and wealth yardsticks.
Well what I am more concerned about is what happens when there is no necessity for the average laborer. What happens when computer voice recognition gets good enough that we don’t need call centers? What happens when transistors are being built by nanites. What happens to the people who have no job skills? How will we take care of them?
I think that the coming age of material ease will eliminate the need for a proletariat, and what concerns me is that our idea of ethics is based so strongly around a strong work ethic. What happens when that work ethic becomes obsolete?
Erek