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121 Comments
- floridiot2, on 04/29/2008, -6/+59something that eats and *****.
- protogenxl, on 04/29/2008, -5/+43But there's no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake. - inactive, on 04/29/2008, -0/+27I would like this definition added to more textbooks
- sockpuppets, on 04/29/2008, -2/+28Never gonna run around
***** I'm always bad at this. - inactive, on 04/29/2008, -1/+25A mule can't reproduce. Does that mean it's not alive?
- SystematicChaos, on 04/29/2008, -1/+24I dunno, go ask GLaDOS
- Nojiko, on 04/29/2008, -2/+18Fail. Plants eat and *****, just photosynthetic.
- chrispeters, on 04/29/2008, -1/+17Bikes don't move on their own. If they did, I'd spend a lot less time walking.
- Foofoofoofoobar, on 04/29/2008, -1/+14A mule comes from a male horse and a female donkey. The offspring mule cannot reproduce with another mule, and thus cannot create another mule.
- DeskFlyer, on 04/29/2008, -4/+17I feel so alive... for the very first time, I can't deny you.
- Kenzan, on 04/29/2008, -4/+17Most 5 year olds I have met know the difference between "alive' and not "alive"
I call Shenanigans. - sockpuppets, on 04/29/2008, -1/+14Real nerds don't die, they just respawn.
- Nojiko, on 04/29/2008, -2/+15And you make a neat gun.
- empath, on 04/29/2008, -1/+13Not just children. This is why people thought that streams and oceans and storms were living things (gods). Until you develop a theory about what causes life, how do you know where to draw the line? If you move and have a will and consciousness, and you see other things move, how do you know there's not a mind behind those other movements? It takes a lot of intellectual development before you get to that point.
- Altotus, on 04/30/2008, -0/+10Biologists don't generally consider viruses alive (I'm a biologist), even though some refer to them as obligate intracellular parasites. In a biological sense, a virus is a loose cog in a machine. Every once in a while it falls into a spot in a running machine and the mechanism dislodges more cogs, ripping the machine apart and flinging the bits out (where they fall into adjacent machines).
- burnstyle, on 04/29/2008, -3/+13for the people who are still alive
- GaryChalmers, on 04/30/2008, -0/+9Is my car alive? It eats fuel and ***** exhaust.
- MacEnvy, on 04/30/2008, -0/+9It's been a while since I've been camping, but I can't say I recall seeing a fire *****. Although I imagine it would be spectacular.
There's a joke here somewhere about Taco Bell but I seem to have misplaced it. - Foofoofoofoobar, on 04/29/2008, -0/+8In order to die, something has to be alive. Your definition is circular.
- floridiot2, on 04/29/2008, -0/+8What does it mean to die?
- inactive, on 04/30/2008, -0/+7I kill certain plants by putting them into boiling water...then I eat them. They never complain about their situation.
- mikes1, on 04/29/2008, -0/+7Define "self control," which seems to imply concious thought. Is a bacterium alive? A robot?
Maybe you should quit the weed. - Elissar, on 04/29/2008, -3/+10And some science gets done.
- jscnet, on 04/30/2008, -0/+6"... even 10-year-olds have difficulty understanding the scope of a living thing." -- seriously?! at 10 years I fully realized what was Alive vs. not. If, in this day and age kids at age 10 cannot discern what is Alive then we have an absolute crisis on our hands.
A simple and basic rule for aliveness could be this:
All living things extract from and excrete into their local environment for their survival. For example: a tree takes water from the ground, sheds a leaf, breathes carbon dioxide, exhales oxygen. Humans inhale oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide. Humans intentionally take from their environment and then intentionally excrete (or give back) into their environment. “Intentionally” is used here do describe the organism’s natural intent to gather and excrete for its survival / existence through its own internal processes.
A rock is not considered alive because it lacks the internal processes, lacks the intent, lacks the survival. It does not take from nor give to its local environment, it exists purely as a result of external forces and it sheds itself by external forces or pressures. A rock doesn’t intentionally extract from its environment for its survival, therefore it cannot (and does not) excrete into its environment for survival. A rock doesn’t possess an internal process or mechanism which could be described or labeled as a “survival mechanism.”
Think of something alive as an organism that gives and takes from its local environment by its own internal processes. It gathers from its environment intentionally (for its existence, its survival), processes, and then excretes back into that environment.
A volcano isn’t alive because it exists solely as the simultaneous result of several external processes, like a rock. External pressures and other external (to itself) dynamics. A volcano doesn’t possess an internal mechanism of survival. A volcano isn’t either the towering cone or its lava. A volcano is a byproduct of external (internal to the Earth) processes and pressures – although a volcano is often described as a thing, it’s a thing because of those required outside forces, in-fact -- it’s an effect, or end result of other external processes.
This is a basic, mechanistic description of what is alive vs. not alive. There are of course many other factors, however, when it comes to the simple question of “is something alive or not” – where do we start.
We start with its interaction with its local environment. We determine if it gives and takes through its own internal processes to that local environment and then we figure out if it does this for its survival (is it intentional.) - Buddhist, on 04/30/2008, -0/+6ahaha, POD...I haven't heard them in so long.
- mali1, on 04/30/2008, -0/+6That's a great analogy.
- lead2thehead, on 04/29/2008, -1/+6So is a computer virus alive?
- moocow1452, on 04/29/2008, -0/+5Nah, you need to factor out the universe and everything else.
- mparker7410, on 04/29/2008, -3/+8I expected this article to actually be interesting.
- Butros, on 04/29/2008, -0/+5is fire alive?
- WhatsUpWithJack, on 04/29/2008, -0/+4I think; therefore I digg.
- mikes1, on 04/29/2008, -0/+4So, you think that fire is alive?
- jozb, on 04/30/2008, -1/+5Cars? They take in gasoline, ***** tons of carbon dioxide.
How about a virus, they don't eat / *****, but they are considered to be alive. - Elissar, on 04/29/2008, -6/+10Finally, an explanation for my therapist about why I killed all those small animals.
- silvershadow21, on 04/29/2008, -2/+6I feel so alive for the very first time, and I think I can fly.
- frsrblch, on 04/29/2008, -0/+4Yeah, that or a very stupid sample of 10-year-olds.
- SteeleJK, on 04/30/2008, -0/+4Are viruses alive, are we limiting this to cellular organisms? What about self-replicating RNA, cancer cells? What about artificial life.. that moves, thinks, adapts.
- DubBucket, on 04/29/2008, -2/+6You could have...
...left out the....
white space. - chrisbosh123, on 04/29/2008, -2/+6The answer is.....
42 - TrevorBradley, on 04/29/2008, -0/+4Dawkins definition from "The Ancestor's Tale" is best, IMHO... For a thing to be alive it not only needs to reproduce, but it needs to have heredity. That is to say the child has to have attributes carried down from the parent that aren't lost in the act of making a child. (For example, fire spreads, but has no heredity. Simple genetic replicators would also not be considered "alive".
- aemreunal, on 04/30/2008, -0/+4but the song isn't
- silvershadow21, on 04/30/2008, -0/+3Same here, surprised to see them on digg!
- chrisduser, on 04/30/2008, -0/+3What it means to be alive depends on the context. In a broad context, everything is alive. From an uranium atom to the planets and the solar systems and galaxies. In a narrow context, only organisms are alive.
- fkr3, on 04/30/2008, -2/+5I'm sure I saw a video one time where one was reproducing with some German chick....
- EarlOfLade, on 04/30/2008, -0/+3I don't think this has anything to do with language.
In Norwegian, there is one word that is used to describe 'alive" both for plants and animals, it's "levende". I have never met anyone, child or adult, who has a problem with "alive" based on language. There must be other reasons.
Oh, the same is true for Danish and Swedish too. - eatrains, on 04/30/2008, -0/+3Is Data alive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pKJfBlkwA0
- inactive, on 04/30/2008, -2/+4Its not living until you get cheated on a few times, work at a dead end job and pay bills/put up with ***** from you're spouse, now thats living
- Altotus, on 04/30/2008, -0/+2One of the first biology courses I had as a biology undergraduate, perhaps the first, began with the professor asking the assembly for a definition of "life". He was a fantastic lecturer (Edward Yeargers, GA Tech). For each definition, he'd extrapolate the logical conclusion of the definition to something that everyone agreed wasn't alive. The point was to demonstrate how difficult it is to define, and to further underscore that in a few thousand years of life science, there was still no commonly agreed upon or canonical definition of what "life" was -- but everyone felt pretty sure they knew what it was when they saw it. Which, of course, is one of many good reasons that why we still study it.
Many years later, I still think back about that discussion, and I'd probably define life in fairly abstract terms based mostly on information theory and graph theory. Modern systems biology describes an abstract system with properties that, adding some fairly mundane physical constraints, presents a convincing summary definition of life -- even if it's hard to transcribe into a snappy glossary definition for a freshman biology quiz. - AsianChopsticks, on 04/30/2008, -0/+2I'm pretty sure that when Garciat said "reproduce" he meant sexually, not cellularly.
- Kurono, on 04/30/2008, -0/+2Unfortunately, thinking isn't the case for every digger.
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