BIOLOGY 103 FALL, 2003 FORUM 4

I think that there is a very valid story behind the clumpiness of life, and that has a lot to do with evolution and reproduction with variation. Because different organisms can evolve from a single organism (or as I learned to phrase it in highschool, they can have a "common ancestor"), the story behind the organism stays the same until these two organisms are "born". For example, I have the same story as my sister, up through the parts about my parents, but when it gets to the part where each of us are born, the stories diverge. It's kind of like those books for grade school kids where you chose what happens next, and that determines the next thing that happens, and so forth. If you chose one option very early on in the book, things will end up a lot different to if you chose another option. There's nowhere that the two stories once again combine. You're on a very different course.

So cats will never be like dogs because they have completely different stories. It's possible that they could evolve some of the same features, but their histories are so different that this would almost definitely be very minimal. The dividing lines will still be there.

I'll have to think more about this ... .

On another note, this web paper is proving to be more difficult then it sounds in theory. "Pinning down a topic" is in fact the difficult part. One thing leads to another and to another and to another exempt from any answers or clear-cut straight forwardness!

Space is kind of a vague word, like time. What do we mean by space? I think of space as having no beginning and no end, but if an explosion of space occurred at one point in time, doesn't that mean that at one point there actually was a beginning and end to space? And the same thing can also be said about time too...When did time begin? We know approximately when time began for the Earth and for humans, but did it exist before that? How would we know? I must stop now, my head is spinning......

What has me utterly confused, though, is how every point in the universe can simultaneously be the starting point of the explosion. Our galaxy is moving in a straight line, right? Because it was thrown out by the explosion? So ignoring other bits getting farther from us, if we're moving away from wherever the explosion first took place, how can our galaxy possibly have been the explosion point? Say there's a piece of shrapnel thrown off by a bomb, and it's moving away from the point of explosion. Even if you can't see where that explosion point is, you know it's not on the moving piece of shrapnel, because the shrapnel is going away from the point. So if our galaxy is being flung away from the point, doesn't that mean the point is someplace else?

Thinking more about it, though, something odd occurred to me. The "pushing outward" motion that possessed the universe after the big bang is, like life itself, limited to a certain scale. Let me explain... For galaxies, solar systems, planets, and suns to have formed at all, particles of matter *must* have reversed direction and moved *toward* one another. Our solar system isn't winging apart in an outward direction; as we speak, the planets are orbiting around the sun---sometimes moving (relatively) towards it, sometimes moving away from it. This leads me to hypothesize that the force behind these motions, gravity itself, actually has a size limit. If the universe is accelerating, gravity obviously doesn't affect the various galaxies that are "pushing outward" from one another at increasingly faster velocities. However, gravity does affect smaller masses: so much so that it pulls galaxies together in the first place, and pulls together solar systems within those galaxies.

But then again, pictures from the Hubble seem to refute this theory. National Geographic had a special on galaxies once, and among the photos included was a spectacular layout of two galaxies *colliding*. Because all things in the universe are moving *away* from one another, they couldn't have simply "run into" one another by accident. So it was probably gravity.

It's a little infuriating. At what point does gravity stop being the driving force in the universe and another, stronger, and as-yet-unexplained force take over?

I read a webcomic once that pictured the universe as wrapping in on itself. The universe depicted was infinite, but only so in the sense that if you keep going in one direction you'll end up back where you started. What sort of force might cause that to happen? As the edge of the universe expands, does it "suck" all physical matter after it and somehow spit it out at the other end? The idea that space itself is expanding suggests that the universe isn't even infinite to begin with. A universe that never allowed its occupants to leave yet at the same time *was* limited enough to accommodate "expansion" *could* be explained by a wraparound universe... but then again, it was a webcomic.

My brain is hurting. I think I'm going to bed.

The problem with A.I. machines is that they cannot simulate common sense. Although wonderfully capable of mathematical logic, there is little room, it seems, in Biology, for representing the world with a handful of equations.
The "Bottom Up" school is a biology based approach to A.I., where machines learn from scratch, the way biological organisms like babies do. The model is based on structures in Biology and physics: DNA, evolution, neurons + neural networks, etc. This approach suggests that the goal is to build a machine that can LEARN-- forget logic and pre-programming.
On the other hand, with Quantum Physics unlocking the keys to the brain, quantum physicist John Hopfield suggests it may just be possible for intelligence to rise from the quantum theory of mindless atoms, therefor an A.I system wouldn't have any sort of programs installed in it, but a complicated organization of spinning atoms....
What's interesting about A.I is the subject of consciousness, because we are not that far away from the day when robots will "feel" an array of emotions. Although there are a million different definitions of consciousness, I think it begs to ask the question, "Are you AWARE of what you are?" The lowest level is the ability of an organism to monitor its body and its environment (like a thermostat); Plants are aware of shifts in nature and react in sophisticated ways; machines with vision are similarly programmed to recognize patterns in their environment; animals (even when sleeping) are constantly scanning for patterns of danger, etc. in nature.
Survival and reproduction are a middle level of consiousness, and the ability to set goals is the highest level of consciousness. Robots that are "self-aware" would set their own goals. Could robots potentially take over the world?
The element of fear detected in this statement is because once machines acquire an intelligence superior to our own, will the 4 billion year old evolutionary process of children superseding parents, threaten us like Hal in "2001?"
In conclusion, there's a book called "Mind Children" by Hans Moravec which explores the possibility of human eternity through the transfer of counsciousness from human bodies to robots, piece by piece via duplication of neural clumps to electronic neurons. In the end, the indestructible robot body of steel houses all the memories and thought patterns of the human, living eternally... Scary huh? If anyone's interested in more of these "visions" read Michio Kaku's book of the same name.


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