As a tangential of Mark and my creationism debate: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death#Problems_of_definition Determining when death has occurred requires drawing precise conceptual boundaries between life and death. This is problematic because there is little consensus over how to define life. When consciousness ceases, a living organism can be said to have died. One of the notable flaws in this approach, however, is that there are many organisms which are alive but probably not conscious Also note that there are many organisms that do not die from old age, only from external forces. It gets even more confusing to bring in things that are subjectively alive, such as virii, self-replicating RNA, and others. Also fueling the debate is a new virus that can infect other viruses, and the relatively recent discovery of huge viruses that contain as many as 1,181,404 pairs of DNA (some bacteria have only 112,091. Fewer than 165 are necessary for self-reproduction). Oh! And I just found that were discovering more and more bacteria that no longer contain the DNA required to self-reproduce or metabolize, which is quite the conundrum when trying to define life. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidatus_Carsonella_ruddii
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 22:23:00 +0000
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