You joke, but it’s still a valid way of doing it.
If we are going be inquisitive in a systematic manner, we have to measure things in comparison, and to start doing that we had to start somewhere, in every single different field. Eventually we got to the speed of light as a constant, figured out the 1/137 fine structure constant, the helical configuration of DNA and RNA, etc., all starting from arbitrary suppositions, getting honed and adjusted by laboratory and thought experiments.
loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
We invented the word “living”, we get to chose what it refers to. We are necessarily right, because this is a truth we create, not a transcendent one. If we collectively decide to change the definition of “living” to include viruses, we will still be right but it won’t mean we were wrong before.
angrystego@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Our opinions are not homogeneous and they change in time too.
loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
True, I guess several definitions of life may coexist with different implications. But in the context of this debate, I think most would agree that the best definition would be the one that has the biggest consensus amongst biologists, and maybe more precisely microbiologists. And most such definitions you’d find would include “self-replication” as a necessary trait.
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
I disagree. At one time, consensus was the Earth was the center of the universe, that the world was just a few thousand years old, that life just sprung into being sometimes, that unwashed hands were perfectly fine to perform surgery with, that some peoples were much closer to other animals than some other peoples, that the universe was static, that light was continuous, and that Ceres was a planet.
Consensus is nice, but usefulness is the gold standard. Is holding metabolism and a complex proteome as the limit of life --excluding viruses, preons, and mechanical reproducers-- useful to expanding our understanding of life and how it functions? Is taking replicators as the most important distinction a necessary step to understanding the origin of life and how we can engineer it ourselves? Will the ability to manipulate certain chemicals and not others help us describe the world? Are edge cases explained better with a genomic, proteomic, or metabolomic base?
I do know that we have a lot left to learn, and I would be very surprised if our current definition of life is fully sufficient for the next century of life sciences.