A Rain of Frogs

Neat article. Another good example of just how simple, yet elegant and clever, the concept of evolution is.

Interestingly, the article could be construed as an argument FOR creationism – at least, the sort of creationism that accepts evolution, but posits that life was created, not a random happening.

At least it’s a conversation piece.

Good read. I’m not convinced, though, that the process of evolution is tied to the question of a creator, designer, or the lack thereof. The hypotheses in either direction are underdetermined, so we can come up with any number of them and not have any way to tell which has stronger explanatory power.

It’s pretty cool, but I’m not sure why they wouldn’t expect something like this to happen. After all, they’re not synthetic in the sense that they were created from scratch, or—more importantly—in such a way as to escape statistical reproduction defects.

There are other things that challenge the standard classification of “alive,” too, most notably virii and prions. They exhibit several of the properties of life, just not all of ‘em. I think we’ve wrapped ourselves too much in our definition of life, as if it’s intrinsic to the universe, when in fact it’s a classification we created, we defined. Like the whole kerfluffle about removing Pluto’s planetary status: if you look at the old definition of planet, it wasn’t consistent with data we’ve collected and hypotheses and classifications we’ve made therefrom, since. Classification is a tool, not a divining of some fundamental essence of a thing. “Life,” then, might stand a redefinition, but I guess it still serves as a useful classification in the vast majority of cases.

I’ll claim that this link comes at an opportune time, though that’s sort of self-fulfilling. Lots of notes on life to run through these results, which is a phenomenally bland thing to say.