I need the SDMB to decide a bet. Which is most complex on a material level, a blueberry or a winegum?
I think a factory that builds wine gums would be simpler than a factory that builds blueberries.
I don’t see how Winegum could be more complex than blueberries. Blueberries would have many many chemicals, DNA, different materials. Winegums look to be uniform in their makeup, to me.
(Link to Winegum, because I didn’t know what it was. Link to Blueberries for completeness.)
Yeah, a wine gum is basically sugar, water and gelatine, with a bit of flavour and colour. It’s pretty much homogenous.
A blueberry, however, has a complicated structure that looks like an eyeball.
do wine gums taste like booze, yuck
No, they’re fruit* flavoured semi-hard jelly sweets, with the names of different alcoholic drinks impressed into their tops during the moulding process.
*Orange, lemon, lime, strawberry, blackcurrant and sometimes pear.
No contest. A blueberry by many orders of magnitude. To start off, the blueberry has both a macroscopic and a cellular structure, whereas a wine gum would have no internal structure to speak of. A blueberry probably contains thousands of different chemical compounds, including many molecules of DNA, which themselves are extremely complex. A wine gum contains only a limited number of chemical compounds, none of which are probably very complex.
On what basis might someone think that a wine gum could possibly be more complex?
That’s what I was wondering. Seems to me that needing the Dope to settle this is like needing professional help to figure out if a rock is harder than a marshmallow.
The relevant information is readily available and the answer is rather obvious. Is this a joke? Dealing with someone who’s being obstinate, or just plain stupid? It doesn’t make sense to me.
It sounds a bit like it might be an offshoot of an argument with a creationist - winegums are simpler than blueberries, yet winegums are designed, therefore blueberries must be designed.
My WAG: Just as I did not know what a “winegum” was until ZenBeam showed me, so too, perhaps “blueberry” refers to something other than what we’re all thinking it to be.
No it’s not a creationist argument, although I myself reflected on how it could seem that way. We were discussing what I percieved as a flaw in some reasoning about what the word “pure” ment.
To him a blueberry was more “pure”, and I argued that a winegum was more pure because it was simpler and more controlled. Basically to me pure means something like devoid of scrap or irredularities, or clean. I felt he put an almost moral meaning into it, as in “good for you”.
A blueberry is certainly more natural, but that doesn’t mean it’s more pure. For one thing, aside from its own complexity, it is full of bacteria, endophytic fungi, and other microorganisms. A winegum is probably going to have living bacteria only on its surface. In any case, just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s better for you than something artificial.
Which pretty much sums up my point in the argument. Thanks for the replies 