I guess it depends on your definition again, but they certainly hijack the metabolism of their prey to do the viral thing, rather than the cellular thing. To my mind, that is metabolizing, even if it is stealing the machinery to do it. There is no clear line here. Some of the giant viruses actually do contain genes that control some aspects of metabolism. Are they left over from their cellular stage, or stolen from a victim? Who knows? Any time someone insists that “this is the line between living and not” some critter comes along that straddles it. We talk alot about spectrums here, and I see this as another one. I am alive, I am pretty sure. That rock is not. I am pretty sure? There is a lot in between those poles and it seems to be a pretty smooth continuum. At some point, it becomes just an assertion without meaning.
But they don’t have a soul. And will never be allowed into bacterial heaven.
That’s a very frustrating video
The three stories on offer are stories of the success of the Scientific Method, not its failure. Every single one of these supposed “wins” for pseudoscience was validated, systematised and understood by Science. The only thing getting in the way of the processes were the very human biases of some people working within Science.
It’s very frustrating when the whole philosophy of the Scientific method deals with the very things that the video mentions. Popper talks extensively about the importance of imagination and selecting hypotheses to test that are outside the current scope of the known Science in his “Conjectures and Refuatations” , and on the other side of the Philosophy of Science debate, these stories are already a very Kuhnian take on observations from outside the existing system and paradigm overturning an existingly held view.
And look how the system of Science reacted to these observations- once the findings were there, it eagerly incorporated them into the existing state of the art and used them as a springboard for further knowledge- She dismisses the self correcting nature of the method, later in the video, but this is exactly what happened! It didn’t matter what the source of the hypothesis was, if the results that flowed from it were valid, the Scientific method gleefully picked up the result, incorporated it, and proceeded onwards.
In addition, these stories don’t paint an accurate picture of real, existing Science- The implication that low temperature methods for extracting delicate chemicals from biological samples was an innovation from another “system of knowledge” is far from the truth, as is the idea that there’s a broad dismissal of traditional knowledge- I’ve known researchers who spend all their time out of the office in fieldwork looking for new biological samples that could be the source of new bio-active compounds, and they would love to get any hints about plants that might be medically useful.
Finally, these three isolated stories don’t tell you about the other conjectures that were tested then correctly rejected. It’s like the old quote- “What do you call alternative medicine that has been proved to work- Medicine.” Science can test any number of ideas from other belief systems, but will only systematise and incorporate those that work. And it will often discard the framework of those ideas in order to do so. For instance, the researchers that took on board the traditional Chinese text that mentioned the plant that contained Artemisinin did not incorporate that text’s assertion that mercury was not poisonous. And the power of the Scientific Method lies in its ability to choose which of those claims to propagate and which to reject.
Sure, but not for a very long time… generally speaking these other forms of knowledge were and still are actively dismissed as “wrong”…
Doesn’t that ignore how science can and does get things wrong, and then doubles down on it… We had eugenics departments around until the holocaust. People who use the scientific method are not immune to being wrong, or having bad takes, or propagating bullshit theories.
And she says, she’s not anti-science at all. she is herself a scientist and believes in that means of understanding the world. She’s just arguing along the lines of not assuming that because something is branded science means it’s inherently correct. You’re right that a good scientific methodology will reject what doesn’t work, but we see this kind of shit all the time by stubborn assholes claiming the mantel of science. Think about all those dipshits claiming that there are only two genders, some of them being scientists (though often not in those fields). Meanwhile, people who actually study gender are figuring out that maybe all those societies that understood gender as more fluid and dynamic understood something, based on their lived experiences. These were not people using the scientific method, even as they understood a kind of actual truth in the world. Do we reject that truth because it was not a byproduct of a scientific methodology?
I don’t think pointing out that science that came out of a particular time, place, and tradition (western European thought derived from a particular struggle within a Christian tradition) is not the only way to understand the world we live in. She never at any point says that the scientific method is bad or not worth operating within. She’s saying that it’s not the ONLY way to get at understanding reality, and those seeking to make the ONLY form of truth often have other, more violent and dangerous agendas…
Her previous video expands on this theme, and is worth watching. If it’s not upthread or in another thread, you can find it on her channel.
At some point, us in the west are going to have to start being more open-minded with regards to the rest of humanity, because we are killing ourselves and others with our rigidness. The question shouldn’t be “well did this come out of science/the west/capitalism/“our way” of doing the thing”, then it must be good" but instead the question should be “does this improve everyone’s lives and create a better world for the maximum number of my fellow humans”… I’m for science that does the latter, but not the former.
I’m well aware that the separation between living and non-living things is one without a firm distinction. That said, I have objected above to treating life as if it’s all just genes. Living cells are not DNA in a bag, they have a whole structure to them made of particular molecules created by hundreds of different enzymes – and then even after that they still have to be transported to the right places. And of course all of that has to be powered by something, generally there is a whole thing to create a membrane potential and harness it in the form of ATP (which itself seems to be a remnant of RNA times, incidentally). The mechanisms which exist today are so complicated they all clearly do have a single shared ancestor.
So far as I know no virus has any significant portion of any of this, and I don’t think it helps understand them to overlook the prominent difference. Whether or not you still count them as alive is a separate question, though in my personal opinion reproduction should be of secondary concern for that, knowing many people and animals who are not reproductive.
This is not even arguable. But it does not condemn the method. Scientific method is the single most powerful development in human history, but it is still subject to being manipulated or flat out lied about to serve the interests of powerful men. And it indeed does incorporate the truth from other systems, often at the cost of the other system. No one argues alchemical arcana are true, but the alchemists’ discoveries are still used in science where they are correct. Eugenics, social darwinism, scientific racism, all the other bastardizations that are blamed on “scientific method” are no more related to it than astral projection is to space flight. And the ones who disprove and discredit these assholes are generally scientist applying the scientific method. Piltdown Man is kind of the classic, used to discredit evolutionary theory without bringing up the fact that it was those same scientists who brought the hoax down. And yes, science does get things wrong. In fact, the default assumption is always that we are wrong and need to get it right (or “righter”). And we will be proven wrong again and again, as we get more and more precise in our knowledge, without ever actually getting to “right.” I, for one, am OK with that.
I have always thought that “descent with modification through Darwinian evolution” should be the prime decider on living vs nonliving, and viruses certainly do that. As I said, the various viral groups almost certainly do not share a common ancestry. I also hold the door open for discovery of some “other” life that is not DNA- or RNA-based, or maybe even less recognizable than that. All theoretical and speculation, of course, with no evidence. I lean on “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” though. My suspicion is that back in deep time, when RNA world was developing, there were other possibilities that percolated up out of the slime as well. Did any cling on, or even thrive, until now? It would be hard to know, since our go-to method for discovery currently is environmental DNA sampling. Now, I can’t show any evidence for any of this, because there is none. It is a pure thought experiment. I am a scientist at heart and certainly would not argue any of this is true. It’s just a thought wandering around in my head. Just as I hope that someday we recover some extant Ediacaran survivors (as they may have off New Zealand back in the (?)70’s, but destroyed the DNA in preservatives) I hold hope that we find that we are not the only thing going here. But, yes, all speculation.
Ugh, honestly, I really don’t like that one. For one thing, making life entirely about descent says things like mules and worker ants and post-menopausal women don’t have it – they become the equivalent of beaver dams or egg yolks, things created by life to help it along but no longer a direct part of it. For another, it isn’t hard to make things that replicate and become modified through evolution. There have been experiments doing on computer like Tierra. The results are very cool but I think if you count them as alive, you will just need a different word for the properties that make life in the traditional sense different. I’d rather keep the word “life” for that and have some other word for Darwinian evolvers in general.
That does not apply to individuals, like, ever. Individuals do not evolve. They live, do what they do, then die. If a clade (or grouping of your choice) does not have a means of reproduction, assuming they are not immortal, they are a dead end. In the examples you gave, the non- or post-reproductive society members remain a key part of the survival of the clade. I doubt that we will get to “alive” virtual creatures in my lifetime, but it is not beyond possibility. As I said, there is no line. There is no universally applicable standard. And trying to draw a line if futile. I choose to put viruses on the “life” side of the line, but I have no seriously defensible reason for that. It “intuitively makes sense” to me. Maybe because I have personified them by spending most of my life fighting them? Not sure, but I have no beef with folks who draw a different line, because they are all arbitrary.
Which she does not do. 
I am unsure where people got the notion that saying “other ways of understanding the world can bring valuable understandings, insights, and truths” got to be “science bad.”
But we have this problem with the attitude towards the humanities, with (some) people in scientific fields spending years AGREEING that we should spend less on history, literature, and the arts at colleges and university (as they are fuzzy fields of knowledge production that aren’t “scientific” and hence not worth spending time and effort on), and then having the fucking gall to act surprised when actual pseudoscience advocates demand we gut all those scientific institutions that have very much improved the world. But if you have a good grasp of history, for one, you know how messy the actual history of science is and the very real awful roads gone down (thinking of things like experiment on enslaved women to work out the basics of gynecology or how testing atom bombs wrecked the ecology of entire islands, etc), we can understand some scientists are complicity in many crimes and atrocities through out modern history and that there are many dead ends in science, as much as victories that benefit us all. We have a real problem with understanding how science actually works, in part because we have a real problem understanding how history actually unfolds (which is, not an inevitable march towards progress, but a stop/start process full of developments that saved lives, and those that took them).
And to go back to the original post objecting to this video…
After first rejecting them. And also, I think I object to them being called pseudoscience. Her examples are based on older, pre-science fields of knowledge. Pseudoscience are from the modern era of science, which use a scientific language to support non-scientific claims. Indigenous agriculture wasn’t trying to be what science is, instead it was a set of practices that were worked out over hundreds, possibly thousands of years. The goal was not to prove a scientific thesis, it was to produce the necessary items for daily life for people. I think calling it “pseudoscience” when it existed prior to our modern scientific method is pretty inaccurate. After all, many of these practices were rejected out of hand by modern science and industry for a very long time, until people who grew up with these forms of knowledge joined the ranks of science fields and brought that knowledge with them in order for them to be tested in a scientifically rigorous manner.
Right, but so does the egg yolk or beaver dam, which to me are still fundamentally different from non-reproductive individuals. If you want another example though I can offer plasmids or even individual genes. It absolutely makes sense to talk about them evolving, but I don’t think it makes sense to treat them as living entities rather than pieces of living things. If you do you’ll end up with a definition very much at odds with how the word is used. English usually applies “alive” to individuals not clades.
It’s the only endeavor that is self-correcting – but it may take years to millennia to do so.
Some things are so ludicrous to be correctly ignored by science – homeopathy for one. Why waste time on it? The argument that it is false is out there. Convincing idiots is a different thing, and alas that takes a lot of time and effort.
Honestly, examples like this mostly show that individuals are very capable of misapplying or misusing science. Lots of people either forget or purposefully ignore the fact that the real world is messy and full of continuums, and when a theory comes into contention with exceptions or outright failures, it is in no way scientific to just ignore them and act like they don’t exist. Finding and attempting to understand things that a theory is wrong about is one of the best ways science advances.
(For clarity, I’m mostly using the layman’s definition of “theory” there. A lot of those kinds of ideas don’t really rise to the level of a scientific theory, but the general point applies even for the stronger ones)
Docosc, I love you, but I gotta correct you: chocolate is the single most powerful development in human history.
Or maybe bicycles?
Carry on!
Bacteriophages utilize energy-storage compounds to inject their genetic material into host bacteria, so technically metabolism is occurring inside the phage. But it’s not consuming and synthesizing those compounds; they are pre-loaded into the phage when it’s being built by the host cell.
I stand corrected. But would put caffeine up there as well.
Conveniently, chocolate provides some of that as well!
Sure, and I would certainly agree that’s more pseudoscience (or maybe scientism) than actual science… but it’s hard to argue that the doctor who used the bodies of enslaved women for actual scientific advancement was doing that. We gained a lot from the violence committed against those women. If science is a rigorous methodology for proving or disproving claims, we have to understand that there are certainly cases where that was used in very violent and anti-human way.
And again, I’m not arguing against science, as i keep being misunderstood here. I think there is a kneejerk reaction that some have when you criticize the science establishment that we should maybe set aside and instead maybe listen to some of the very real and necessary criticisms of how people have carried out scientific experimentation in the past. It’s not a story of just straight progress, and that shouldn’t be seen as undermining the very real gains we got from science. But there is a reluctance, I think to abandon the idea of teleology and inevitable progress that that worldview confers, because it just easier to grok.
So it seems like part of the problem here is that what science means is kind of nebulous. For instance, is history a science? I’m guessing most people would say no, and Mindy even mentions it being contrasted with science. And yet many of the things that make science a useful way of knowing apply to it too – questioning what has been said, seeing what kind of evidence there is to support or deny it, and generally always trying to improve our understanding of the events in question.
It’s true that history isn’t amenable to the same kind of experimentation as say physics, meaning some things are stuck beyond its reach, but then neither are observational sciences like paleontology or astronomy. I think it’s fair to say that the best approach for understanding a subject depends on what it is. For some we call the results science, for others we don’t…but then once upon a time most sciences were called “natural history”.
For the record, if I could live at any point in human history, the development that would affect my choice more than any other is antibiotics.