Chlorophyll probably outcompeted retinal [1]. (The stuff in our eyes.)
The reduced form of my claim is that mitochondrial life so freakishly outcompetes its competitors as to be in a class of its own. Which still yields a rare Earth, albeit a first among many.
We don't know the fundamental energy requirements of complex life. The threshold may be 2%. It may be 19.995%. If non-mitochondrial metabolism is common, the Earth would still be rare in that we'd be the "fast" biosphere. The high-octane species. Given how power-intensive intelligence is, that might be material. (Or it might not.)
More fundamentally: we have no plausible alternate chemistries that don't bootstrap on mitochondrial life. (We do for photosynthesis.)
I’m not convinced there’s a reason to think intelligence is inherently power-intensive. Based on our limited samples, it’s certainly energy intensive, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be slowed down. In a world with less power available to life, one would expect speeds of e.g. predators and prey to be slower, allowing a slower intelligence to still provide an advantage.
Sure. But we know it empirically is. Our brains are expensive.
But our brains have mitochondria. As do our prey, and our predators. Is there any reason to suppose that the absence of mitochondria implies less potential for intelligence, instead of the potential for equal but slower intelligence? Mitochondria are about power production, not energy production -- they are a very dense source of ATP, but the reactions they use would provide equal energy even if less concentrated.
100%. The evolutionary pattern of our solar systems formation and earth ending up, temporarily, in just the right spot isn't rare but (was) a matter of time/timing.
Now one could argue that the stellar objects carrying specific components necessary for life did not hit every or many solar systems but every single simulation (in my head) of the big bang's aftermath reveals that it's at least multiple hundreds of thousands, given how much the observable universe has revealed so far in the places that we looked.
What are you basing this on?
But really, and "slightly" varied instance of yourself is the "most" likely to compete for the same, infinite pool of resources.
I say cannibalized, because avoiding eating your own species is a higher brain function that would've came far later, so it came down to eat or be eaten. Still is frankly.
>I say cannibalized, because avoiding eating your own species is a higher brain function that would've came far later,
Species (maybe only [di?]morphic ones) rarely kill other instances of their own species, only maim - usually to the point of socially/reproductive shame/selective behavior; as infra-species violence is usually done for sexual signaling.
Like squirrels neutering each other, giraffes ruffling neck-fights, etc, it is not generally advantageous to actually hurt the opponent more than needed to signal dominance in a social hierarchy - this "gentleman" agreement is similar to all emergent collusion behavior exhibited by "free agents" in a limited pool; even without communication, the self-interested incentive to all follow a convergent rule will eventually emerge. Whether it be price fixing, social norms, or any other system where partially-regulated complex systems compete.
Additionally, for cannibalizing to be a positive-selective-trait, the species would had either adapted to eating the liver - the "resilience/filter" of a system, or had been "lucky" enough to identify/delineate/get repulsed by it.
Eating your own species liver would be nearly self-defeating-ly impossible from an evolutionary point of view and avoiding it but still eating your own species is too "taboo" (evolutionary artifact) of a benefit to ever randomly stumble into, especially against the benefits of 'good-sportsman-ship'.
Anyway, an interesting point about evolution is that things had to have been eating other smaller things long before the brain had enough processing power for "Species Recognition". It would've initially been a simple brain and rod/cone eye neuron and motor neuron in a fish that executed primary the rule of "See movement then execute tail wag, open mouth, close mouth" in that order. It takes like 5 neurons wired in a specific way to accomplish that. The first neurons had to have been that simple. Indeed the chain reaction of "input photon and convert energy into motor neuron charge potential" had to have been the actual chemical process that eventually developed the first neuron to begin with.
It was only after MUCH more evolution that avoidance of eating one's own species would've been possible by visual inspection of the prey. However, it's true it could have been a 'taste' signal where the scales of your own species had a bad enough taste that you spit it out rather than eating it, and that can be accomplished also with a brain of only a few neurons.
I am not a biologist obviously.
Because of the "food chain" actually being a pyramid, those organs contain the same "toxins" that are to be avoided, exponentially accumulating in whatever "organ" had the function to add resiliency by storing these toxins.
However, liver eating is a moot point regardless, because evolutionary theory would suggest eating toxins would have a bad taste/smell, so that organ would simply be avoided, while eating the rest. So it has no bearing on whether cannibalism happens or not.
>>> ...for cannibalizing to be a positive-selective-trait, the species would had either adapted to eating the liver - the "resilience/filter" of a system, ...
>I have no idea what you meant by liver. Maybe it's a biology term I'm unaware of. Certainly you didn't mean the organ. lolz.
>writes a very unclear sentence and then blames the reader...to accuse the reader of bad-faith motivations....
Did we both edit our posts....to improve accuracy, increase resiliency, and to compete ideas?
literally mesa-Q.E.D.
neither of us had the incentive to either acknowledge our edits nor call the other out,
nor face the (perceived, social, higher-order) dissonance of being slightly unclear or "wrong" due to our own ego/self-interest (conscious, lower ordered self);
the emergent behavior then (gentleman's agreement) was to preserve our own ego's and not call out each other edits - which most people would never do, because:
our slightly varied ideas compete more fiercely for the same finite pool than other, completely niche-unrelated abstractions.
we are 4 layers deep now, but ill reduce for conciseness (for lurkers fwiw)
dont shit where you eat <- evolved trait to avoid waste-by products
dont hit a man when he's down <- highly effective altruism is still beneficial
morality is cowardice <- ties this all together from highest order (ego) to the id (fear of being replace)
we are now full circle.
A decently display of faith should at least warrant a re-parsing of my (actually perfectly unambiguous) grammatical clarity, of which you implied was less than so.
Warrants the question, why not admit my posit:
That slightly-varied entities competing for the same/similar finite/limited supply pool of resources/demands will tend towards -- as an emergent behavior of both short-term disorderly self-incentivization and the stochastic long-term higher-order unconscious collective collusion -- the tendency to compete until dominance over **reproductive** rights are secured, but no more. The more fiercer the competition, the more selective the sieve, the more the dominant traits propagate: up to a plateaued point. Further complexity/order can than be more efficiently achieved by lessening the furiousity of the competition to a point of cooperation, which then innately lends itself to more hierarchy, efficient use of energy.
Take it from Roko the Replacer:
According to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory, the "fear of being replaced" is most closely linked to the concept of "castration anxiety," particularly within the context of the Oedipus complex, where a young boy fears his father will punish him for desiring his mother by castrating him, essentially rendering him "replaced" in her affections.
Free to continue discussion; but the under the Ego lies the Id, and I'm not well versed in that science yet, still approximating.
>However, liver eating is a moot point regardless, because evolutionary theory would suggest eating toxins would have a bad taste/smell, so that organ would simply be avoided, while eating the rest. So it has no bearing on whether cannibalism happens or not.
We have nothing but confirmation bias and little time to test anything macro.
However, we do have contra-positives and the like; in this case, we (ourselves) avoid Liver in some animals, and notice the M.A.D-avoidance agreement among more socially-complex systems.
You shouldn't eat your young, you should eat your rival tribes young.
Especially because the young hand't accumulated much toxins yet, relative to the adults. And it is easier to bash babies over rocks than grown adults.
(per Carl Sagan)
It is advantageous to beat a rival and take their energy even within a species. That's part of the whole 'survival of the fittest' thing. Preserving them for cooperation or something like slavery happens, but it's a rare strategy specific to intelligent animals like the GP implies.
>reserving them for cooperation or something like slavery happens, but it's a rare strategy specific to intelligent animals
I should had clarified, this is lower, more intuitive behavior. It is not, which is why it arises emergently in lower-complexity/class systems.
>beat a rival and take their energy even within a species
And if done with literal, figurative, social, and complex "CLASS", it is literally sexy too!
National Geographic is entertaining for many dimensions of reasons.
Actually dismembering your sexual-rival and literally consuming their poor caloric conversion is pitifully inefficient compared to making them a sub-ling, whether it be via hen-pecking or innate dominance. It made sense before sexual dimorphication (moreso), but less so now.
Ladies like a gentleman, and gentleman's agreements are literally non-colluding emergent behavior to abide by unspoken higher-order rules for one's own explicit conscious self-incentive (lower order, high entropy), but also the implicit collective unconsciousness incentive (higher social order, lower entropy)
Both are reslience traits, which only emerge when selected for.
That does not mean that other lifeforms in different planets require mitochondria or equivalent organelles. As long as they can perform the necessary chemical reactions (which could be different in a different environments) and extract enough energy, they should be good.
How did mitochondria evolve in the first place? Could they have remained as independent organisms and use their massive energy budget to evolve independently?
SFI Complexity podcast has a few great episodes on this
DNA isn't just abstract information, it's also where the first step of protein / enzyme construction occurs. DNA location matters.
That mitochondria are conserved as an independent organelle across almost [1] all eukaryotes, across billions of years of history, suggests this is something the nuclear can’t easily in house.
That could also suggest that any other strategies were just out competed by this one and lost the opportunity to develop further.
Absolutely. It also means--however--that any niche where alternative did exist, when exposed to mitochondrial life, they lost.
Now that I think about it, it would be pretty funny if we're this universe's cheela [1], a freakishly overclocked biosphere that runs faster not because it had to but because it happened to.
It's perfectly possible that mitochondria are the dinosaurs of "cell powerplants" that just haven't encountered the asteroid to let other (ultimately better) solutions develop.
>It is the first eukaryotic genus to be found to completely lack mitochondria, and all hallmark proteins responsible for mitochondrial function. The genus also lacks any other mitochondria related organelles (MROs) such as hydrogenosomes or mitosomes. Data suggests that the absence of mitochondria is not an ancestral feature, but rather due to secondary loss.
True, it's an anaerobic ersatz cnidarian [1] that may be an escaped cancer [2].
wow. we could be surrounded by so many extraordinary organisms and not even know it because there's so much variety just in our own backyards
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/1-458-bac...
Everything exist by " accident", and that means that is the result of random events that happen unexpectedly in unimaginable places, leading to an environent were the outcome of this events causes more random events.
Why universe insist in making life so uncommon if it has the secret to create and replicate?
This presumes that their energy budget was massive to begin with, rather than being selected for over time.
There are independent mitochondrial relative. They are mostly parasites that live inside cells.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion
> The proto-mitochondrion was probably closely related to Rickettsia.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickettsia
> Being obligate intracellular bacteria, rickettsias depend on entry, growth, and replication within the cytoplasm of living eukaryotic host cells (typically endothelial cells).
> Most notably, Rickettsia species are the pathogens responsible for typhus, rickettsialpox, boutonneuse fever, African tick-bite fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Flinders Island spotted fever, and Queensland tick typhus (Australian tick typhus).
Here's a thought, also; maybe once this has happened, it tends to crowd out needing to happen again.
Would love to know the source if you have it.
> The first occurred about 2.2 billion years ago, when an archaea swallowed a bacterium that became the mitochondria.
> The second time happened about 1.6 billion years ago, when some of these more advanced cells absorbed cyanobacteria that could harvest energy from sunlight.
> And now, scientists have discovered that it’s happening again. A species of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii was found to have engulfed a cyanobacterium that lets them do something that algae, and plants in general, can’t normally do – "fixing" nitrogen straight from the air, and combining it with other elements to create more useful compounds.
So, tremendously rare, at least to our knowledge at this time, but not a one-off.
If everything however unlikely is likely because creation is unfathomable, sure.
There is nothing specific about our consciousness that makes it unique to earth.
"Mistaking the map for the territory is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone confuses the semantics of a term with what it represents. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory" and that "the word is not the thing", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse conceptual models of reality with reality itself."
But how did anyone verify there is an underlying reality outside consciousness? It's just an assumption right?
It's the stuff which continues existing when we stop believing in it.
We don't. But we know we can't replicate it, have never observed it, don't seem to find half-assed attempts at it in the wild and that there weren't multiple competing chemistries that found themselves co-existing, there was one.
I find it remarkable that chlamydia cells, fully enter host cells and live there stealing of resources.
I would call it evolutions “half-assed attempt” at endosymbiosis. (Disclaimer: evolution has no goal)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0lKliaFllPA&t=910s (timeatamped)
More broadly, it leads me to wonder whether cellular life might eventually/might have at some point specialize towards hosting novel endosymbioses.
Either scenario, assuming what I'm saying isn't just total nonsense, would seem to make the state of mitochondria less of a one-off event and more of the instance of that event we are around at the right time to observe.
Those other membrane bubbles inside out cells don't have any of the machines we expect to be associated with cellular life- but you never actually know!
Also, this is def not a 1-off, and happened many times, including chloroplasts in this new nitroplast we found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitroplast
Or trillions or tens or ones. Depends on what number you put in the exponent. Currently, we don't have useful constraints on that figure.
(A lot of popular astrobiology pulls the "if we could only get 1% of the market we'd be billionaires" schtick.)
There is also secondary endosymbiosis, where the endosymbiont organelles of one eukaryote are engulfed and incorporated into another eukaryotic cell to create a new type of endosymbiont. This has happened at least 8 times.
There are also theories that some other organelles are the product of other endosymbiosis events, many of which also have some of the hallmarks like their own genetic material. These theories are more speculative though.
It's also worth noting that while eukaryotes obviously gained some important capabilities from incorporating these endosymbionts, the endosymbionts they incorporated obviously managed to just evolve to perform those functions directly. Further, while one of eukaryotes' distinguishing features are mitochondria, there are several other major differences, and mitochondria are not believed to be what made eukaryotes better able to evolve complex multicellularity. Prokaryotes have indeed evolved multicellularity dozens of times, and we arbitrarily set our definition of complex multicellularity to distinguish from what prokaryotes have achieved.
Observation of prokaryote/prokaryote endosymbiosis would be real evidence against the rise of eukaryotes being the or one of the main limitations in the number of intelligent species in our galaxy.
There are no known modern prokaryotes capable of phagocytosis. Presumably the extinct prokaryotes who were capable, including those from the same lineage as the eukaryotes but which did not pick up mitochondria, were outcompeted by the eukaryotes who occupied the same niche.
Other changes like the origin of the cell nucleus and many other organelles can be readily explained by other malfunctionings of the phagocytosis process. Basically once you have the ability to pinch off parts of your cell wall into internal structures, you suddenly get a bunch of internal structures made of stuff that look surprisingly like cell wall.
I would argue that the type of event that produced mitochondria is likely not rare at all, but certain pairings will so outcompete others that we should expect only one to survive and dominate.
People have theorized even a 50 base pair segment of RNA might be capable of building exact copies of itself, either by snapping in half and auto-forming the same other half, or by other means. Since there's two sexes, it was perhaps a "halving" at that level, that early on, which led ultimately to TWO sexes, but that's a side point.
We can even predict the probability of any 50 base pair ordering. It's 1/(4^50). That's 30 zeroes in the denominator. Now consider that a single glass of water has 10^23 molecules. That's 7 orders of magnitude difference. So the amount of water you need to cross that magnitude threshold is 7. Turns out that's exactly the size of an Olympic swimming pool. 10 million cups of water.
So statistically, a planet with an ocean volume only as large as a swimming pool has the "Statistical Power" (power of large numbers) to find ANY 50 base pair combination (give or take an order of magnitude or two) Once it finds a replicator, life has started, and so has evolution. And that's guaranteed within the first minute or so, at reasonable temperatures. Now multiply that time by the average age of a planet, and you begin to realize, statistically life is guaranteed, in any chemically diverse scenario with reasonable temperatures.
You can wave big numbers around but none of that makes a convincing argument; it's not hard to construct any number of scenarios where self replicators are started but don't lead to true life.
Also you're comparing a gram of water to a bunch of bases; H2O is not DNA.
Insofar as your H20 vs DNA comparison, I merely used water as a way to show relative "scale". That is, HOW MUCH fluid volume (relative to the order of magnitude of size of atoms) would it take to contain the requisite number of RNA. Because when it comes to probabilities of finding astronomically unlikely combinations, astronomically large numbers is key. I think in a mole of random Rubicks cubes, hundreds will be "accidentally solved" (I forgot those numbers, so check my math, on that one)
The reason I threw in the "give or take 2 orders of magnitude" caveat was precisely because I knew someone like you would accuse me of relating H20 to RNA in a way in which I didn't. Other planets will have different atoms, not necessary water-based life, but planets even the size of a swimming pool have the "numbers game" power to create life.
For example, if you ask most people how many randomly occurring Rubiks Cubes will just be accidentally solved even with Avogrdro's number of them, their answer is usually zero; and unsurprisingly they're the same ones claiming there had to be a God to create even the initial replicator.
Those RNA molecules are also going to be ~two orders of magnitude larger than a water molecule, so you're going to need a bigger pool...
To actually replicate, some loose ingredient molecules must also be present, and in reasonable quantities to be at hand in any given place in the pool.
The argument you are actually making is that a vessel that is filled with randomly assembled chunks of RNA not shorter than 50 base pairs each, the quantity of which equal the number of molecules of water in an Olympic pool, would contain life with probability ~1.
Now, the ocean is large, and a billion years is a long time, but I'm a long way from convinced that the chance of life is 100% on any given suitable planet.
Especially when you multiply by the number of swimming pools of all ocean water (10^14) by the number of minutes of the history of Earth (10^15), and consider that the probability of the accidental 50 base pair replicator forming needs to have those 29 extra zeroes, in the numerator (not the denominator). So the likelihood, now that I add more info, has just gone up 29 orders of magnitude. lol. (BTW. the 1 minute assumption will be temperature dependent, and is a guess at how long it takes reactions to take place).
The whole thing is a rough approximation like the Drake Equation is, and each number is an estimate. If you want to attack the Thought Experiment, at it's weakest point, just question the initial assumption, which is the biggest guess of all, that some unique 50 base pair RNA can replicate itself.
I don't think it is a very persuasive argument, because it is possible that modern microbiology has defenses because it has mitochondria. I know almost nothing about cells from a few billions years ago, but it seems plausible to me that they were ambivalent towards intrusions of other cells, it can be beneficial or disadvantageous depending on an intruder. Moreover beneficial intruders could give a lot of evolutionary advantage, not like today, when all important things (like mitohondria) are already here. In theory, bacteria could benefit a lot, but there are no ecological niches for a bacteria with mitochondria, all are claimed by some eucaryotes, which are highly adapted.
It is a very common thing in evolution. For example, there are bats, but they cannot evolve and replace birds, because there are birds. Bats have their niche, but they cannot outcompete birds at being more birds than birds. If they were given a chance, then maybe they could try to catch up with birds, but they didn't have a chance and they will have it only if some cataclysm will wipe out birds and leave bats.
In Earth’s history, mitochondrial endosymbiosis occurred once. Without that you don’t have the energy budget for complex life. Moreover, there may be a narrow window where it can happen: modern microbiology has defences and selection pressures that it make inhospitable to the hobbling chimeræ the first mitochondrial cells would have been.
Until mitochondria, the emergence of life from nothing is plausible. With mitochondria, its progression to complex, multicellular and intelligent life makes sense. Both processes in small steps can be replicated, more or less, in the lab. But that one moment is not and has not been. As a result, I think the universe has lots of living slop but very few plants and animals.
(Aside, look at ATP go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrEewYLIQg&t=939s)