There’s something about seeing videos like this that breaks my brain.
Science has learned so much about biology, but whatever knowledge I’ve gained is dwarfed by the sheer awe and wonder I feel when trying to contemplate what it is that I just saw here.
The forces of nature converging to bring forth life from the energy released by the Big Bang billions of years ago.
It boggles the mind - this mind that is somehow conscious of itself and which came into existence by an even more mind bendingly complex process.
For me, that’s at the center of the awe and wonder. To be in sole (or very rare) possession of the biological machinery necessary to achieve the levels of sensory input, information processing and storage, intelligence, etc, all within the subjective experience of consciousness, whatever that is, and to be able to muse about the rather limited perspective of a rock, or to have the capacity to experience awe and wonder, all points back at the awe and wonder.
The rock doesn’t know it’s amazing, but we know the rock is amazing.
I guess you could say the universe is very impressed with itself.
Natural selection! If you're like me, you probably understand the basics of evolution by natural selection, but it still seems to improbable/outlandish that such complex structures could be created just by natural selection, even with billions of years of time.
I highly recommend Steven Pinker's book "How the Mind Works" as it has a great section on how natural selection works (and how it can be confusing even to many scientists), and how it can create complex structures (like the eye) generation-by-generation. I think it helped me understand natural selection as less of a biological "force" than as more of a mathematical outcome due to the statistics of non-perfect replicators.
> but it still seems to improbable/outlandish that such complex structures could be created just by natural selection, even with billions of years of time.
probably thats why Life is not abundant in the universe, as far as we can see even in the Solar system.
1. We know that evolution of life requires a degree of stability for long periods of time, and most likely conditions favorable to having a liquid solvent for chemical reactions to occur (probably water but possibly things like methane). Those conditions are relatively rare, which is why scientists talk about the "habitable zone" of planets around stars.
2. Given the requirements of a habitable zone and long periods of environmental stability, that knocks out pretty much the entire rest of our solar system, with the possible exception of some of the gas giant moons.
3. It hasn't really been proven that life is not abundant in the universe. There is a really good section in How the Mind Works that talks about some faulty assumptions in the Drake Equation (primarily that evolution "drives" towards more complex, intelligent life forms over time), but AFAIK we haven't ruled out the possibility of life in many of the planetary systems we've discovered. On the contrary, we've recently discovered many extra solar planets in the habitable zone of their stars, with signatures of water.
It seems identical to the breakthrough which unlocked the Information Age: the code which executes the data is the same stuff as the data itself. The information which describes the machine can be modified by the machine.
The genetic material which describes life and the organism which executes that code are one and the same.
I've always thought that if some God from another reality peeked into ours and saw two things, you and the Andromeda galaxy, they'd be interested in you. Entire galaxies are boring compared to even the simplest organisms. (As far as we know at least.)
It also has conscious experience: sensation of (probably) colored sight, it can feel pain, fear, etc. Where are these sensations located in the material universe? They are nowhere to be found under a microscope!
We’re all just playing an extremely complex language game and assigning labels to phenomena with increasing granularity as our knowledge and ability to measure things and create accurate world models increases.
But at the bottom of it all, we have no idea what any of it is. The map is not the territory, and primordial existence has no current explanation.
This isn’t synonymous with endorsing untenable metaphysical beliefs, but points to the fact that we still have enormous gaps in our understanding.
Breathtaking... wow. I found myself trying to guess what bit would become what and it never really worked, just endless transformation and re-absorption until poof: salamander. Nature will never cease to amaze me.
Really cool video and I appreciate the deft editing hand on the different zooms and perspectives so we could see the most interesting details. My only critique would be that the sounds (especially the water slosh sounds) were a little distracting. The heartbeat was cool to indicate when the pulsing emerged and I guess the underwater sound was trying to set an atmosphere, but mostly I would have preferred to simply appreciate the video for what it was. Props to the maker regardless!
Not just this but if you look at the journey to microcosmos YouTube channel it has awesome videos of microorganisms that are single cell and you start to wonder what is life. How can one single cell know what to do, there is no cpu or logic with “if” and “then”
The parent comment is just straightforwardly true though. Researchers have even quantified how many bits of information cellular sensory systems can encode. Just because cells are too complicated to fully simulate doesn’t mean they don’t have behavior that could be described as if/then logic
Indeed.
In fact, there is no reason to believe some stochiastic if/then process could ever result in the type of morphogenesis we see in the video.
Whence comes this assumption that life may be reduced to a set of Boolean logic rules?
Such people either have no clue how computers work or no clue how biology works. (Or both.)
“Some proteins act kinda like if/then statements, so therefore the transformation of a single cell into a salamander is basically just a computer program.” You might as well say “My computer has a water-cooled processor, so it’s basically a salamander.”
Your counter to life being machines is just baselessly discrediting those of the opinion. Ad-hominem.
Considering a cell to be a single machine does not make it equivalent to another machine (a computer), and certainly doesn't make that other machine equivalent to the millions of cells we just saw divide. "A is a machine, B is a machine, therefore A is B" - a false equivalence.
Cells are conclusively machines, by the definition that they execute a fixed purpose dictated in whole by the parts it was made of - parts that we can change to modify the operation of the machine, a well studied subject used extensively in e.g. pharma (reprogrammed bacteria is how people get insulin).
That conscious life is poorly understood does not somehow change the fact that the only building block used to make it in nature is a small biomechanical automaton.
While we love to glorify our own existence and capabilities, our recent advances in LLMs also show how simple machines - even if significantly flawed due to practical resource limitations and intentional design limitations - can end projecting a convincing mimicry of our conscious behavior, despite having a simple, phrase-completing nature. It might make you wonder what simple initial purpose might dictate our behavior.
You also clearly misunderstood - I was not implying simplicity, just that a cell is a machine, and at the scale of one cell as the comment referred to it is possible to understand what is going on.
The idea that this should be backed up by simulating a large and complicated multi-cellular organism is a bit ridiculous. Even complete understanding would not imply that something is easy to simulate.
"Principles of Development" Wolpert, Tickle, Arias is a good book if you want to (begin to) understand what we know about this kind of biological self-assembly.
You have a single cell that keeps dividing, and dividing, and in each division it becomes slightly different, and at the end some end up being the hart, some is the leg muscle, some are brain, and some are eye nerve.
Incredible, almost DIVINE..
The terraforming script behind this mechanism, is one of the most complex and most beautiful mechanism that exists in this universe.
Cells in different locations produce different chemical markers. These markers spread out through the tissue and create a sort of gradient. By observing the gradient, a cell can know where it is (or at least what it's supposed to do).
At least that's the explanation as I've understood it.
An amazing video, but too many Alien movies has ruined my brain and so I kept returning to the reflexive need to pull my face away a safe distance instead of amazing even more.
It's very tricky because the way to distinguish them is to call the other ones in the same larger group 'true Salamanders' which already indicates that there was some historical confusion around naming these.
The tree of life has been re-arranged many times already and as more genomes are sequenced we discover more and more non-obvious mistakes. For instance 'Comb jellyfish' have caused a major stir amongst evolutionary biologists.
It's interesting how we needed taxonomy to figure out that there is such a thing as a tree of life and the basis for genomics and then, once we had that we had to go back and do (multiple) fairly major revisions to fix stuff that turned out to be wrong. The interesting thing is that the overall picture is still subject to such major changes.
sharing it on ios is proving hard because even the preview goes full screen preventing copying the url, lol. if anyone else hits this, turn on airplane mode then you can successfully long press to copy/share
On Firefox iOS, it does fullscreen when long pressing the title, but then I can touch X and it goes back to how other links show up when long pressing. And then you can copy the url.
As far as I understand it there are multiple levels to this. One of the mechanisms is that the cells don't necessarily know where to stop or where to fold - but as everything is being done in decentralised manner the cells reach boundaries of other structures and this will then "shape" the structure. It's an extremely efficient data compression where the instructions many times don't include specific measures or counts (e.g. of fingers) but are more about just timing or symmetry breaking. Imagine construction workers being told to just keep making a wall until they can't build anymore because they will hit another wall (and the other wall is being built with similar instructions). The limits can be spatial, chemical, probably bioelectric...
One aspect I've learned about is what I wrote in a different comment:
Cells in different locations produce different chemical markers. These markers spread out through the tissue and create a sort of gradient. By observing the gradient, a cell can know where it is (or at least what it's supposed to do).
At least that's the explanation as I've understood it.
Science has learned so much about biology, but whatever knowledge I’ve gained is dwarfed by the sheer awe and wonder I feel when trying to contemplate what it is that I just saw here.
The forces of nature converging to bring forth life from the energy released by the Big Bang billions of years ago.
It boggles the mind - this mind that is somehow conscious of itself and which came into existence by an even more mind bendingly complex process.
Being alive is unspeakably amazing.