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What Is Artificial about Life?

The announcement of “Artificial Life” by the Craig Venter group, and the media stir that arose from the news, provoked thoughts about the current technologies in contemporary science and the cultural tension of such projections on the media. The increasingly blurred boundaries between specialist and...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Giuliani, Alessandro, Licata, Ignazio, Modonesi, Carlo M., Crosignani, Paolo
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: TheScientificWorldJOURNAL 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5720090/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21399859
http://dx.doi.org/10.1100/tsw.2011.73
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author Giuliani, Alessandro
Licata, Ignazio
Modonesi, Carlo M.
Crosignani, Paolo
author_facet Giuliani, Alessandro
Licata, Ignazio
Modonesi, Carlo M.
Crosignani, Paolo
author_sort Giuliani, Alessandro
collection PubMed
description The announcement of “Artificial Life” by the Craig Venter group, and the media stir that arose from the news, provoked thoughts about the current technologies in contemporary science and the cultural tension of such projections on the media. The increasingly blurred boundaries between specialist and generalist media, while promising a wider appreciation of scientific discovery, potentially allow unrealistic, ideological claims to dictate scientific research. This is particularly evident in biology, where the pervading paradigm is still dominated by a physically naïve reductionism in which the only relevant causative layer is the molecular one. The reductionist hypothesis is that everything one observes is the result of an underlying molecular mechanism almost independent of the context in which it operates. Molecular mechanisms are often necessarily studied in isolation and therefore operate in unnatural conditions. The mechanistic view of biological regulation implies that we think of genes as intelligent agents. Here we try to critically analyze the motivations behind the spread of such unrealistic simplifications.
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spelling pubmed-57200902017-12-21 What Is Artificial about Life? Giuliani, Alessandro Licata, Ignazio Modonesi, Carlo M. Crosignani, Paolo ScientificWorldJournal Commentary The announcement of “Artificial Life” by the Craig Venter group, and the media stir that arose from the news, provoked thoughts about the current technologies in contemporary science and the cultural tension of such projections on the media. The increasingly blurred boundaries between specialist and generalist media, while promising a wider appreciation of scientific discovery, potentially allow unrealistic, ideological claims to dictate scientific research. This is particularly evident in biology, where the pervading paradigm is still dominated by a physically naïve reductionism in which the only relevant causative layer is the molecular one. The reductionist hypothesis is that everything one observes is the result of an underlying molecular mechanism almost independent of the context in which it operates. Molecular mechanisms are often necessarily studied in isolation and therefore operate in unnatural conditions. The mechanistic view of biological regulation implies that we think of genes as intelligent agents. Here we try to critically analyze the motivations behind the spread of such unrealistic simplifications. TheScientificWorldJOURNAL 2011-03-07 /pmc/articles/PMC5720090/ /pubmed/21399859 http://dx.doi.org/10.1100/tsw.2011.73 Text en Copyright © 2011 Alessandro Giuliani et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Commentary
Giuliani, Alessandro
Licata, Ignazio
Modonesi, Carlo M.
Crosignani, Paolo
What Is Artificial about Life?
title What Is Artificial about Life?
title_full What Is Artificial about Life?
title_fullStr What Is Artificial about Life?
title_full_unstemmed What Is Artificial about Life?
title_short What Is Artificial about Life?
title_sort what is artificial about life?
topic Commentary
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5720090/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21399859
http://dx.doi.org/10.1100/tsw.2011.73
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