Artificial Life?

A story earlier this week reported that scientists could be within three to ten years of creating artificial life.  There are a couple of ironies in this story.

First, there is no such thing as "artificial" life.  Life is life.  No matter how something comes to be, if it's alive there's no further distinction.  It joins the rest of us alive.  The potential drawback of identifying some living creatures as "artificial" are the same as some misconceptions about cloning.  Some are tempted to think that because the way a life is created, it changes the ethical nature of that life.  The scientists are talking about microscopic life, but even if theoretically one day they could create human life artificially, it wouldn't change the nature of the life.  It also doesn't mean it doesn't have a soul.  This is especially critical if human life can ever be created artificially.  A life, no matter how it's created, has the same ethical status and soulish nature as similar life created naturally.

Second, the scientists draw a strange implication from their work.   

[Harvard Medical School scientist Jack Szostak's] idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.  "We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.

So the scientists who can create life, even microscopic, has to let evolution take over for the "hard" part?  Evolution, in this theoretical example, only works with the raw materials the scientists provide.  It's the scientists that would create the life; evolution would only change it. 

The very strange thing here is that Szostak can't see the parallel the scientist plays to the Designer.  He's not relying on evolution to create life; he's the designer, not evolution.  It's scientists who are doing the creative, purposeful work, not relying on blind, random forces.  It's strange how presuppositions can hide what's quite obvious.  Even if Steve Benner could create new genetic bases, part of our DNA code, it would still have to be arranged for it to mean something - for it to produce a living thing, whatever it might be.  There is tons of (supposedly) junk DNA already.  These bases only produce something when they are arranged in the right order.  They have to convey information.  And even artificially-created bases require someone to arrange them for information rather than junk.

The last comment in the article is surprising.  Mark Bedau can't "imagine" how artificially-created life could "run amok."  One of the simplest forms of life is also the most destructive and likely to get out of control:  viruses.  I hope they exercise a bit more imagination if they're successful.

Comments

[doug t]

J.P. Moreland talks a bit about artificial life in BODY and SOUL...and yes, "artifical" should be treated no different than "real" life. He mentions something about a contract that God honors where if a being has the attributes of we humans that God would grant it a soul.

I wish he would expound on this and the tie between DNA and the soul because he's hinting at something he knows on the subject but doesn't expound enough for my tastes. (I was doing research on an artificial life story I'm working on)

[SteveK]

Szostak is conflating evolution with the formation of new life. Evolution is not responsible for forming new life, so we are told by the experts. Natural selection has no power to act on a non-living object.

[will_a]

How does Evolution even play a role in this? I would think neither the principles of natural selection/mutation nor the hypothesis that they create new information (and thus more complex organisms) has anything to do with the genesis of life itself. Especially in this circumstance, where the scientists are arranging everything. This sounds a bit like Frankenstein-esque fiction to me.