*What is "Life"?

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What defines something as alive?

Independent existence.	13%	[ 3 ]
Motor activity/movement, however slow/limited.	0%	[ 0 ]
Sense "organs"/sensory functions which determine reactions.	4%	[ 1 ]
Transformation of energy received/construction of new material.	17%	[ 4 ]
Capable of constructing and maintaining an ion/electrical gradient.	0%	[ 0 ]
"Life force".	25%	[ 6 ]
Other, please explain in thread.	42%	[ 10 ]

Total votes : 24

twoshots
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25 Sep 2008, 9:55 pm

LKL wrote:

regardless of the size of the computer, in biology there are often simply too many variables (often interacting too rapidly) to be able to input the data into the computer and get a prediction that isn't obsolete before it's calculated. Maybe when the tech (and the computation equipment) is small enough and sophisticated enough to do real-time measurements on hundreds of factors, we will start to see more non-statistics math in biology.

As it stands, the human brain is generally often than a mathematical algorithm at predicting and describing biological processes, though we often can't say why we made the prediction we did. When we have computers as sophisticated as a human brain, maybe we'll get somewhere...

Again, this establishes absolutely nothing about the actual idea that the essential laws by which the world operates are or are not mathematical. This is a practical issue; as it stands, the underlying processes of the physical world have admitted quite accurate quantitative understanding. Any point a biologist could ever make about the distinction between laws and models is largely them talking out of their depth.

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25 Sep 2008, 11:10 pm

Haliphron wrote:

LKL wrote:

Life/nonlife is a fuzzy boundary, as with so much in biology. The more we learn, the scarcer absolutes become.

You dont like reductionism now, do you LKL :lol:

?

I have no problem with reductionism. There is a fuzzy boundary between life and nonlife; there are often fuzzy boundaries between species; there are fuzzy boundaries between classification levels (family/genus, family/order, etc); there are even fuzzy boundaries between major divisions due to gene sharing. Our definitions are often not absolute.

Quote:

It IS possible that consciousness is something metaphysical. Surely it seems to be more than just a mechanical process, but its a little too early to tell. So Slowmutant: you finally admit that non-sentient life is actually not metaphysical, right?

I'd vote for consciousness as an emergent property of purely physical neurological interactions.

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25 Sep 2008, 11:18 pm

twoshots wrote:

Any point a biologist could ever make about the distinction between laws and models is largely them talking out of their depth.

It was a joke, fool. I thought I made that clear. Biologists get sneered at because macrobiology is too complex to be analyzed by current computers and current instruments in a purely mathematical format, so biologists turn the sneer around and point out that current mathematical models cannot yet describe emergent properties of biology, which is the 'reality' that biologists care about.

We've improved our insturments and computers to the point that we can begin to describe biology at the most basic (biochemical, and even sometimes cellular) levels, and now those branches of biology are gaining some respect amongst the 'hard' science advocates. It's not that the objects, or the objectives, of study have changed - only that the technology and information canon has.

chever
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25 Sep 2008, 11:27 pm

Uh huh huh

She said 'hard'

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twoshots
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25 Sep 2008, 11:37 pm

LKL wrote:

twoshots wrote:

Any point a biologist could ever make about the distinction between laws and models is largely them talking out of their depth.

I don't know about biologists catching flak from those of us in the mathematical sciences.

We get plenty of material from social scientists and the humanities as it is.

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chever
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25 Sep 2008, 11:56 pm

twoshots wrote:

I don't know about biologists catching flak from those of us in the mathematical sciences.

We get plenty of material from social scientists and the humanities as it is.

ownt lol

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26 Sep 2008, 3:56 am

Biology is a mathematical science, as well as an observational one. It just uses statistics rather than simple calculus. Biology may not be outright mocked, like psychology or sociology, but it is often looked down upon as 'soft.'

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26 Sep 2008, 10:00 am

LKL wrote:

It's certainly softer than chemistry and physics, which are both based upon a firm mathematical framework (though don't you dare liken it to the social sciences! :lol:

). Nevertheless, with the growing popularity of bioinformatics, computational biology, and theoretical neuroscience, the discipline is definitely becoming more quantitatively refined.

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twoshots
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26 Sep 2008, 11:25 am

LKL wrote:

Generally, no, it's not a "mathematical science". For exactly the reasons you have been talking about.

And seriously, half my professors do work in dynamical systems like population and epidemiology. I have no idea what you're talking about.

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26 Sep 2008, 2:51 pm

No idea about which part?

twoshots
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26 Sep 2008, 4:20 pm

LKL wrote:

No idea about which part?

About people in the mathematical sciences pooh poohing biology.

And one more thing

Quote:

It just uses statistics rather than simple calculus.

This reflects a misperception of the mathematical sciences. A vast number of the mathematical developments over the past 200 years were driven by physics, and you're going to need a butt load more than what you're going to get from a standard calculus sequence.

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26 Sep 2008, 4:44 pm

Bones.. finger-nails.. teeth.. hair..

Dead... or alive... ?

-

slowmutant
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26 Sep 2008, 5:43 pm

Accelerator wrote:

Bones.. finger-nails.. teeth.. hair..

Dead... or alive... ?

-

All these things appear to be dead but are actually alive. The human body is a wonder.

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26 Sep 2008, 7:55 pm

slowmutant wrote:

Accelerator wrote:

Bones.. finger-nails.. teeth.. hair..

Dead... or alive... ?

-

All these things appear to be dead but are actually alive. The human body is a wonder.

Bones, teeth, and hair definitely ARE alive. Im not so sure about figernails. They are made of solid keratin and dont contain living cells the way bones and teeth do.

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26 Sep 2008, 11:29 pm

twoshots wrote:

LKL wrote:

No idea about which part?

About people in the mathematical sciences pooh poohing biology.

Oh, it happens. Actually, not so much mathematicians: it's the physicists that have the 'holier than thou' attitude, most often.

Quote:

Ok, I know that. I've ranted enough to get the chip off my shoulder: physics goes way more into both nuclear reactions and calculus than I have gone, even with my chemistry and the calculus that I took for fun. As may be apparent, though, I get rather sick of physics majors going on about how biology is just one step removed from hand-waving hucksterism.

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26 Sep 2008, 11:45 pm

LKL wrote:

I'm not sure what you can do for comebacks, but I have a suggestion (it might be a long shot): ask them what they think of abstract mathematics. If they're undergrads, they might start guffawing at that, too. (Some physics and engineering students I've come across also consider things like abs. alg. and formal logic to be meaningless BS, believe it or not.)

Anyway, if they do laugh at abstract mathematics, you have them by the balls, because modern physics depends on a fair amount of it, mainly group theory. If they're graduate students, they won't fall for it, but graduate students actually tend to be less arrogant, because they are more aware of limitations, both their own and on knowledge in general.

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