Story here from msnbc.
Wow. “Capable of Darwinian evolution.” Or else it’s not “life.”
How exactly are interstellar probes supposed to determine that? Wait around a million years, and take notes? And isn’t it possible that other planets or alien environments may be sufficiently stable that “evolution”, as such, is not necessary? Or that alien life may be constituted so differently as to not be suited to such distinctions at all?
Okay, I know we have to start somewhere. But I think somehow we give this whole evolution thing rather too prominent a place in our self-identity; as if it were working towards a specific linear goal, at which point it will be finished.
I mean, why not “a self-organizing chemical system that bites you on the nose or tries to sell you something?”
Fascinating article, indian. Thank you!
Not unless life forms are artificial, and carefully designed for that stability. It would have to evolve just to get to that stable state after all; and then all possible competitors would have to be eliminated, and it’s stability would have to be perfect.
Evolution isn’t about “necessity”; it’s inevitable given genetic variability ( or an equivalent ), and any variation in the ability to reproduce due to that variability. In order to have no evolution, something would have to stop it from occurring.
Evolution isn’t something that only occurs over long timescales. It’s happening now and can be directly observed. The commonly cited example is the development and spread of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, which occured over the last 50 or so years. Evolution can also be induced and observed in a lab on a timescale of weeks or months with large populations of rapidly reproducing organisms, like bacteria or fruit flies. Also, it’s not necessary to directly observe the effects of evolution on a population of unknown life forms to determine whether that life form is theoretically capable of evolving. Basically, if heritable traits exist in that organism, there is a method for new traits to be introduced, and a selective pressure can be exerted on the population, evolution is possible.
Also, evolution is a process, not a goal. Organisms aren’t “more” or “less” evolved than another. For evolution to not occur, the population* would need to be in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. This means that selection of mates is completely random, no mutations are occuring, the population does not migrate and exchange genes with another population, the population size is large, and no selective pressures are being exerted. These conditions are only achievable in a lab, so based on the current understanding of evolution, a real-life population of organisms will never stop evolving.
*A population is a specific group of interbreeding organisms that belong to the same species and have traits in common, such as geographic distribution.
Two very informative explanations – thanks! Still, perhaps a better question for me to ask would be, “Why assume genes?”
I just sometimes think that when we do run across alien life, we will probably trip over it before we even recognize it; because we seem to really believe that if our instruments can’t detect it, it doesn’t exist.
Do we really have adequate reason to assume that Earth’s paradigm is the only one which is viable? We know that life here arose from the presence of certain compounds in the presence of certain conditions, acted on by certain forces – might not altogether different compounds with altogether different conditions and forces also produce life?
For instance, (and I’m serious here) what if we encountered an organism whose substance derived from dark matter? Would we be able to detect it?
What if our Singularity was an extremely large, yet still localized event? What if at the edge of detectable spacetime were a neighboring continuum produced from a different singularity?
I realize that we can’t program space probes to detect things that we’ve never heard of. I just think that looking for things with genes and evolutionary capability may be unnecessarily restrictive, or somehow misguided.
They really need to come up with a test to detect robots too, just to be safe.