Mr. Faust,
>I am definitely certain about what I am asking - and I am equally definitely certain that I want the best answer which is available to me.<
On those points thank you for your assurance. Since I did not think that your question had been any more frivolous than my reply however, you need not have troubled.
>This isn't a question of "semantics" - it is a question of hard science.<
That is an extremely curious assertion. Just what examples of science, hard or soft, could you adduce as illustrations of the investigation or dissemination of empirical or formal hypotheses and conclusions, independent of appropriate, soundly established, semantic conventions? In short, how do you propose to deal with or discuss any aspect of science without knowing and showing what you are talking about? Would it be a misunderstanding on my part to wonder whether you regard “semantics” as referring to “quibbling”? I trust that so far it would, but if not, that you are about to change your mind drastically!
What I attempted to illustrate by way of example, was *not* the nature of life. That had not been the question, after all. The term used had been, not “living” but “immortal”. Semantically this implied in context that the concept of life was taken for granted, and quite properly too, given the difficulty of defining it. Schroedinger’s “local system of negative entropy”, while unexceptionable in its content, it comes perilously close to being content-free. As it stands it might as well refer to a match head, a ripple, or an erect milk bottle. Semantically it amounts to a minimal constraint rather than a definition. Certainly it would be hard to imagine anything living as a local (or for that matter non-local) system of maximal entropy!
No, as I understood the question, you asked whether it would be reasonable to regard certain entities as immortal. In context I made certain semantic assumptions, which apparently were correct, that you had no silly ideas in mind about for example how long the universe would last, or what would happen if someone tried to kill the populations in question, so I avoided such tedious digressions. I did try to illustrate however, that the question did not clarify what definitions (or where no coherent definition was available, what descriptive constraints) should apply to regarding anything as a particular living entity.
Your example of stromatolites for example was unfortunate. As entities, stromatolites were poorly defined at best, and no organism that I ever have seen or been able to imagine could reasonably be described as a son of a stromatolite! Scion of a cell that dwelt in a stromatolite, perhaps, but that is altogether different. You would not say that our ancestors were jungles or a savannahs just because some of our genetic ancestors lived in them, would you? In the last half billion years or more there probably has not been a population of stromatolites of more than a few hundred thousand or a couple of million years old, surviving in adventitious circumstances that repelled grazers and promoted stroma-like accretions. Stromatolites are mainly transient developments where suitable conditions arose at particular times. The famous Shark Bay stromatolite banks seem to be mainly thousands, rather than millions of years old. To speak of them as if they were descendants or continuations of the Archaean stromatolites would make as much sense as talking about the Amazonian rainforest as a descendant of Carboniferous jungle.
This is in sharp contrast to speaking of modern jellyfish as descendants of Ediacaran jellyfish, or Peripatus as descendants of Cambrian Onychophorans. In their case we have strong reason to believe that there has been a genetically continuous line of descent of similar creatures. Whether we regard them as accordingly immortal is a far more semantically fraught matter. Already in this discussion some people have implicitly presented their opinions that a genetic change means that in the examples of interest we are not dealing with immortality but with descent.
Are they right or wrong to assume or assert anything of the type? That is a semantic question. It is not a matter of disagreement over material fact, but over the application of a term. Both sets of concepts are after all, equally reasonable. They do not even conflict. It is a matter of which one has in mind. Whether one nomenclatural criterion or another is the best, is one question, best decided by the greatest usefulness or even democratically or despotically by authorities such as lexicographers. It does not in other ways decide the reasonability of the question. Semantics has to do with the relationship between signs or symbols and their referents. Except in highly artificial cases they can only be settled by convention.
That is hardly worth discussion here. What has to be settled is not “whose term is correct”, but “which (meaningful) concepts apply to which questions, and how is one (meaningfully) to decide on the implications”. *Do* you regard it as meaningful to take a genetic discontinuity as implying the end of a mortal entity? If you do, then: end of discussion, and many would agree with you, for whatever that is worth. Do you regard say, a parthenogenic lizard as immortal because she might produce an egg that is her clone? You are free to do so, but you might find some of the objections to that line of thought difficult to deal with. She might visibly be eaten by a hawk or snake, snatched while fighting her own grown offspring for a basking spot. And her offspring might eventually die of old age, with or without issue. *Someone* there didn’t look very immortal, and *someone* didn’t think she was fighting herself! Here immortality was not well specified; a semantic problem: is the immortality hers or that of her species?
Which of those questions is wrong? Patently neither in itself; not until we can show that one of them does not reasonably match a matter of interest. Standard semantics.
When a cyanobacterium splits, which of the two is the parent? If you cannot answer that, what does your question of immortality mean? If you could ask any of the descendent cells after any number of generations which was the parent, each of them would say: “I was, of course!”
Which of the lizards would say the same?
But if you were to ask: “Does the same genotype still exist as n generations ago?” and conclude “Yes; therefore we have immortality!” then what is immortal? Basically the “germ line” as they called it in Victorian times, not the individual, nor even the species, necessarily.
But then, what if what has survived is the genome with minor changes, possibly progressive changes, as with Washington’s Axe? There is no cogent basis to argue that that is, or is not, immortality. If you were so rash as to disagree, you had better have a short way of dealing with the likes of the Ship of Theseus!
You speak of “What proteins that are gathered in what sequences are able to accurately reproduce that condition?”. Biologically speaking I would love to see you clarify that statement in any way that would make sense in its own terms, let alone philosophical or practical terms. If you did not mean nucleic acids, then it is not clear what you did mean. If you did mean nucleic acids, it is not clear why you see that in terms of immortality in context.
>It all comes back to my principal idea: That life is a local system of negative entropy (Erwin Schroedinger).<
If that is all that you wish to establish, namely that life (whatever that may be) arises from instances of other life (whatever that in turn may be), then your definition of immortality may be invincible, much like Schroedinger’s “definition”, but then only because it is too vague to refute.
As TheLoser points out: “All organisms live to perform a transformation and a food source for others so Life is immortal and then all lifeforms are immortal” That is neither right nor wrong unless you decide what you mean by immortality in context, and when you do, your decision is fairly arbitrary. You must suit yourself and your needs.
All because of insufficient attention to the Semantics.
But it bears the consolation that you are free to define your own answer to your own taste. Only, in that case you had better not care much about the meaning, because then you will have “the best answer which is available to you”. For a more useful answer you first must do the semantic groundwork.
Cheers,
Jon
