A thought on nanotechnology: considering that biological cells already have most of the capabilities of molecular nanotechnology, and that said cells have been undergoing natural selection for over a billion years, if something better were possible, it probably would have evolved by now. For example, I’d be very surprised if somebody one day makes a machine that’s significantly better at protein synthesis than a ribosome is. I suspect that future nanotechnology will look a lot like today’s biological systems.
Um… that’s a rather odd argument to make, considering steel, wheels, nuclear power, transistors, radio, lasers, books, LEDs...
Proteins are held together by van der Waals forces, which are much weaker than covalent bonds. Preliminary calculations show gargantuan opportunities for improvement (see Drexler’s Nanosystems).
Um… that’s a rather odd argument to make, considering steel, wheels, nuclear power, transistors, radio, lasers, books, LEDs...
::urge to play devil’s advocate rising::
Well, our power sources still have some disadvantages when compared to cellular respiration—we can’t yet build insect-size robots because we don’t have a practical way to power them. And wheels are bad when there are no roads. Ever ridden a bicycle on rough terrain? It’s awful. Also, how does the information storage density of DNA compare to books? As for LEDs, fireflies are still more efficient than anything humans designed. Steel? Spider silk has a higher tensile strength. Given the constraints that biological systems operate under, they tend to be very, very good at what they do.
Still, all your arguments could have been said half billionion years ago: There was DNA, super developed arthropods (maybe fireflies and spiders?) and plants that photosynthesized more efficiently than today’s solar cells.
Still, evolution did not stop there, the Cambrian explosion and the rise of vertebrates was imminent...
Now we are having a new explosion which is based on a completely different paradigm, is a million times faster and accelerates.
Proteins are held together by van der Waals forces, which are much weaker than covalent bonds
I’m not sure how this affects the argument, but the very flexibility of proteins is one of the things that makes them work. A whole bunch of biological reactions involve enzymes changing shape in response to some substance.
if something better were possible, it probably would have evolved by now
I don’t think this argument works. Adaptive evolution has mostly been driven by DNA mutations and natural selection. DNA is transcribed to RNA and then translated into proteins. I’m not sure evolution (of Earth’s cell-based life) could produce something radically different, because this central mechanism is so fundamental and so entrenched.
You could be right; the cellular machinery hasn’t changed very much for ages, so it certainly could have gotten caught in a local optimum. We don’t know very much about what life looked like before modern cells, so we don’t know what our current cellular machinery competed against.
I guess. I’m not sure we can justify drawing that arbitrary line just because we want novelty in synthetic intelligence but little novelty in protein production. And I don’t really think 2 billion more years of evolution is going to produce they kind of intelligences most people around here are expecting to see in the next couple hundred years.
Part of the reason people like the prospects for better intelligence is that we can identify really obvious ways in which our’s could be improved. I wonder if there are systematic errors made in cellular mechanics.
And in particular, there’s good reason to believe that brains are still evolving at a decent pace, where it looks like cell mechanisms largely settled a long while back.
I don’t know that much about the topic, but aren’t viruses more efficient at many things than normal cells? Could there be opportunities for improvement in current biological systems through better understanding of viruses?
A thought on nanotechnology: considering that biological cells already have most of the capabilities of molecular nanotechnology, and that said cells have been undergoing natural selection for over a billion years, if something better were possible, it probably would have evolved by now. For example, I’d be very surprised if somebody one day makes a machine that’s significantly better at protein synthesis than a ribosome is. I suspect that future nanotechnology will look a lot like today’s biological systems.
Um… that’s a rather odd argument to make, considering steel, wheels, nuclear power, transistors, radio, lasers, books, LEDs...
Proteins are held together by van der Waals forces, which are much weaker than covalent bonds. Preliminary calculations show gargantuan opportunities for improvement (see Drexler’s Nanosystems).
::urge to play devil’s advocate rising::
Well, our power sources still have some disadvantages when compared to cellular respiration—we can’t yet build insect-size robots because we don’t have a practical way to power them. And wheels are bad when there are no roads. Ever ridden a bicycle on rough terrain? It’s awful. Also, how does the information storage density of DNA compare to books? As for LEDs, fireflies are still more efficient than anything humans designed. Steel? Spider silk has a higher tensile strength. Given the constraints that biological systems operate under, they tend to be very, very good at what they do.
Transistors, though, I’ll give you. ;)
:)
Still, all your arguments could have been said half billionion years ago: There was DNA, super developed arthropods (maybe fireflies and spiders?) and plants that photosynthesized more efficiently than today’s solar cells.
Still, evolution did not stop there, the Cambrian explosion and the rise of vertebrates was imminent...
Now we are having a new explosion which is based on a completely different paradigm, is a million times faster and accelerates.
Nit-pick: 500 million years ago the Cambrian explosion had happened already. It was 530 million years ago.
I’m not sure how this affects the argument, but the very flexibility of proteins is one of the things that makes them work. A whole bunch of biological reactions involve enzymes changing shape in response to some substance.
I don’t think this argument works. Adaptive evolution has mostly been driven by DNA mutations and natural selection. DNA is transcribed to RNA and then translated into proteins. I’m not sure evolution (of Earth’s cell-based life) could produce something radically different, because this central mechanism is so fundamental and so entrenched.
You could be right; the cellular machinery hasn’t changed very much for ages, so it certainly could have gotten caught in a local optimum. We don’t know very much about what life looked like before modern cells, so we don’t know what our current cellular machinery competed against.
I don’t necessarily disagree but couldn’t you say the same thing about brains and intelligence?
/me shrugs
Brains have been around for far less time than cells.
I guess. I’m not sure we can justify drawing that arbitrary line just because we want novelty in synthetic intelligence but little novelty in protein production. And I don’t really think 2 billion more years of evolution is going to produce they kind of intelligences most people around here are expecting to see in the next couple hundred years.
Part of the reason people like the prospects for better intelligence is that we can identify really obvious ways in which our’s could be improved. I wonder if there are systematic errors made in cellular mechanics.
And in particular, there’s good reason to believe that brains are still evolving at a decent pace, where it looks like cell mechanisms largely settled a long while back.
I don’t know that much about the topic, but aren’t viruses more efficient at many things than normal cells? Could there be opportunities for improvement in current biological systems through better understanding of viruses?