Quote:
Originally Posted by TracyCoxx
... Or my favorite... There are several physical constants that must be just right to permit life to exist in the universe. ...
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That is, "life" as humans define it. This is not meant to be argumentative, only to point out that such a question by its very nature includes assumptions that, under some circumstances (including ones that we may not even be capable of thinking of), may simply be wrong.
One simply needs to consider the work of Craig Venter, the man behind the private endeavor to decode the human genome. His team has been trying to strip down an organism called
M. genitalium to its bare essential to see what it requires to survive. They have been working with genome transplant that in theory, at least their theory, constitute creating "life." Other scientists (e.g., the biophysicist David Deamer at UC-Santa Cruz) call what Venter has been doing the production of a "radically engineered organism" that is not new life.
Thus, we see that what "life" means cannot even be agreed to with respect to the human genome project.
04-26-2011
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