• davel@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    Just based on the video, it sounds like LUCA was no less “alive” than that which evolved from it. Just because it needed certain ingredients/environment to survive & replicate that archaea & bacteria don’t need didn’t make it not “alive.”

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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      9 days ago

      I agree, the whole view of life being a binary is kind of silly in my opinion. It’s a continuum from inorganic matter that simply reacts to the environment to self organizing living matter. Living things take input energy and then instead of resolving energy gradients directly as basic chemical reactions do, they channel this energy through metabolic pathways which allows maintaining some internal state. So, in a sense, it’s kind of like a battery which facilitates delayed energy gradient resolution.

    • UnequalExchange@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Just because it needed certain ingredients/environment to survive & replicate that archaea & bacteria don’t need didn’t make it not “alive.”

      The double negative is super throwing me off . Can you ELI5 please.

      • davel@lemmy.ml
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        8 days ago

        The descendants of LUCA need certain conditions in order to survive and replicate. LUCA also needed certain conditions in order to survive and replicate, they just happened to be different ones from the conditions that its descendants need. But that difference doesn’t make one any more “alive” or “not alive” than the other.